I can make just about anything I want faster, cheaper and with far less drama than food delivery or a drive-through trip (and a hell of a lot cheaper). I find your comment confusing.
I'm all for decoupling health insurance coverage from employment, but there is no evidence that taking extended time off work results in better health outcomes.
People aren't batteries, recharging isn't really a thing. Except for LinkedIn influencers, people don't come back from time off, whether a week or 3 months, with great vigor and propensity to work hard. Inertia kicks in, it takes time to ramp back up.
That seems irrelevant to the discussion. The question[0] was about how to get people to exercise and eat healthy, not how to get people to provide more value to their employers.
You're not going to get much traction with advertising the benefits and education oriented campaigns. Most of the time, if someone doesn't already have a habit of exercising, you're probably not going to be successful at getting them to start. They're busy with the rest of their lives.
What you've gotta do is trick them into it. Just sneak a little exercise into their daily routines without them noticing. You do that by making them live in walkable cities.
Stop subsidizing corn production. Invest in making fruits and vegetables cheaper. Encourage development that includes high walkable and bikable aspects while minimizing driving aspects.
I find it fascinating how fixated people are on the demand side of this issue.
If everybody made "healthy choices" tomorrow, they would starve because there aren't even enough healthy foods on the shelves. I don't get how a country can criminalise drugs but subsidise HFCS. HFCS has to kill around the same amount of people as fentanyl does.
I have a different take. This article is talking about the rise of those on disability benefits. Parents are incentivised to portray their children as disabled for benefits, and schools are incentivised to do the same for extra funding and lower standards being applied to them. I think most people apply for benefits likely believe they're genuinely sick and disabled, since being on benefits is not a pleasant life by design.
Oh yeah, and with rising obesity and paternal/maternal age generally getting later and later I would be unsurprised if there was an increasing rate of actual disability.
But the parents/schools get the benefit from things which simply impair, especially things without a definitive test for their existence. A bunch of brain function issues come to mind. I'm sure such things are overdiagnosed, both amongst the poor (for the benefits) and the rich (for the aid in getting into elite colleges.) However, such overdiagnosis will not keep them out of the labor pool.
A person and the people around them being told over and over about how they struggle more than most people and being held to lower standards creates a self-fulfilling prophecy, especially if this occurs in childhood during the key developmental period. The stigma can also have real consequences on employment even if the diagnosis is fictitious.
I 100% agree. I know someone that works in a school with children that have special education needs. I was talking with them several months ago and they said majority have genuine issues but they suspect some children have just been ruined by their parents. Their opinion was the children are very capable and as able as any normal child but have self-labelled as having 'special needs' because their parents have told them that from a young age. It didn't make sense to me until I then was told that by doing so the parents could claim various benefits, be a stay at home 'carer' etc.
Such wasted potential.
It it "malingering" when someone disabled to the degree that they cannot sustain themselves live longer than expected?
The article is light on details - and misses a link to the primary source discussed - but emphasizes the degree to which the UK diverges from other countries studied in terms of labor-market participation post-COVID.
Missing is any discussion of how the UK's life (and quality-of-life) expectations and rates of disease and disability differ from other countries. The UK has notably high rates of obesity, poor diet, and low rates of physical activity compared to other (non-US) G7 nations. It's also got a National Health System that delivers above-average access to care and pretty good outcomes (but which is struggling with labor and demographic pressures.)
Forget malingering, I want to know if the problem here is just that people in the UK are less healthy than in other countries studied, and to what degree this may be offset with better access to care that inflates the share of the population out of the labor market. That might be a prelude to a more honest conversation about society's priorities than a "malingering" framing that blames the disabled.
It feels to me that what they're saying is that there is a pool of people who are unable to work (the percentage of people being disabled by Covid is a decent percentage of the total prior disability rate) but are currently on unemployment benefits rather than disability benefits because the latter requires a lot of jumping through hoops.
Cracking down on "malingering" will drive these people to jump through the hoops for disability rather than actually pushing them into the workforce.
We see a related issue in the US--conservative obsession with pushing them into the labor force. Hint: most of those people are either taking care of someone else (and pushing them into the labor force will dump that other person into the state system, costing the state more), or are those who are marginally functional physically but fully there mentally--whose time is much better spent in school learning some sort of knowledge skill rather than minimally productive physical labor.
there was a public talk by a (well-paid, sixty'ish) Longshoreman in California today, where the Longshoreman was injured by an electrical shock. The assigned Doctor said "I have made a thorough study of your xrays and I see no problems" .. yet that man had fused-vertebrae from a motorcycle accident previous to employment. The Doctor made no mention of the fused vertebrae until the Longshoreman brought it up. The direct implication is that the Doctor was told that it was a soft-tissue injury privately, and proceeded to begin the path to deny benefits.
A problem in these situations is that all sides cheat, in reality. And once the finger pointing starts, the communication is damaged, and real problems are put into buckets along with "malingering"
The issue seems to be that the doctor didn’t even check the x-ray, otherwise they would have commented on an unmentioned fused vertebrae. I’m not sure how you didn’t gather that from the OP.
My question was motivated by the OP. The longshoreman was arguing for some sort of compensation for an injury from an electric shock.
Unless there are relevant symptoms or electric shock is known to have effects on bones, why would the doctor look at x-rays? He probably also didn't look at stool samples or test for TB.
It also could be because people masked up all the time and stayed home for long periods of time. New viruses came out and they were never exposed to it.
Now, many are getting exposed to lots of new viruses all at the same time now that covid is over and the symptoms are much worse.
The number of working-age adults economically inactive due to ill health rose from 2.1 million in July 2019 to a peak of 2.8 million by October 2023, before falling slightly to 2.7 million in December 2023, the foundation reported.
so a rise of 600,000 people too ill to work. maybe covid has something to do with that figure.
The real reason for the scary "WARNINGS".
Labour and the Conservatives have promised a tough stance on benefit claimants. Earlier this month the shadow work and pensions secretary, Liz Kendall, said there would be “no option of a life on benefits” under a future Labour government as she outlined plans to support young people to find work or training.
according to the ONS. The Office Of National Statistics.
Economic inactivity is:
People not in employment who have not been seeking work within the last 4 weeks and/or are unable to start work within the next 2 weeks.
nothing new here:
Same old bullying of the ill and the unemployed.
33 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 80.3 ms ] threadHow do you get more people do both?
Exercise and eating healthy (read: cooking) in our modern society requires leisure time, which has mostly been eradicated for the lower classes.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39801885
What you've gotta do is trick them into it. Just sneak a little exercise into their daily routines without them noticing. You do that by making them live in walkable cities.
If everybody made "healthy choices" tomorrow, they would starve because there aren't even enough healthy foods on the shelves. I don't get how a country can criminalise drugs but subsidise HFCS. HFCS has to kill around the same amount of people as fentanyl does.
Oh yeah, and with rising obesity and paternal/maternal age generally getting later and later I would be unsurprised if there was an increasing rate of actual disability.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factitious_disorder_imposed_on...
The article is light on details - and misses a link to the primary source discussed - but emphasizes the degree to which the UK diverges from other countries studied in terms of labor-market participation post-COVID.
Missing is any discussion of how the UK's life (and quality-of-life) expectations and rates of disease and disability differ from other countries. The UK has notably high rates of obesity, poor diet, and low rates of physical activity compared to other (non-US) G7 nations. It's also got a National Health System that delivers above-average access to care and pretty good outcomes (but which is struggling with labor and demographic pressures.)
Forget malingering, I want to know if the problem here is just that people in the UK are less healthy than in other countries studied, and to what degree this may be offset with better access to care that inflates the share of the population out of the labor market. That might be a prelude to a more honest conversation about society's priorities than a "malingering" framing that blames the disabled.
Cracking down on "malingering" will drive these people to jump through the hoops for disability rather than actually pushing them into the workforce.
We see a related issue in the US--conservative obsession with pushing them into the labor force. Hint: most of those people are either taking care of someone else (and pushing them into the labor force will dump that other person into the state system, costing the state more), or are those who are marginally functional physically but fully there mentally--whose time is much better spent in school learning some sort of knowledge skill rather than minimally productive physical labor.
A problem in these situations is that all sides cheat, in reality. And once the finger pointing starts, the communication is damaged, and real problems are put into buckets along with "malingering"
The issue seems to be that the doctor didn’t even check the x-ray, otherwise they would have commented on an unmentioned fused vertebrae. I’m not sure how you didn’t gather that from the OP.
Unless there are relevant symptoms or electric shock is known to have effects on bones, why would the doctor look at x-rays? He probably also didn't look at stool samples or test for TB.
Now, many are getting exposed to lots of new viruses all at the same time now that covid is over and the symptoms are much worse.
The number of working-age adults economically inactive due to ill health rose from 2.1 million in July 2019 to a peak of 2.8 million by October 2023, before falling slightly to 2.7 million in December 2023, the foundation reported.
so a rise of 600,000 people too ill to work. maybe covid has something to do with that figure.
The real reason for the scary "WARNINGS".
Labour and the Conservatives have promised a tough stance on benefit claimants. Earlier this month the shadow work and pensions secretary, Liz Kendall, said there would be “no option of a life on benefits” under a future Labour government as she outlined plans to support young people to find work or training.
according to the ONS. The Office Of National Statistics.
Economic inactivity is:
People not in employment who have not been seeking work within the last 4 weeks and/or are unable to start work within the next 2 weeks.
nothing new here: Same old bullying of the ill and the unemployed.