[HN Gopher] Longest sustained rise in people too sick to work si...
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Longest sustained rise in people too sick to work since 1990s, says
thinktank
Author : webmaven
Score : 32 points
Date : 2024-03-23 13:54 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theguardian.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theguardian.com)
| SirMaster wrote:
| In my opinion, not enough people are exercising or eating
| healthy.
|
| How do you get more people do both?
| throwaway5959 wrote:
| In the US, stop requiring them to work for health insurance so
| they can take a few months off between jobs to recharge.
| chomp wrote:
| I'm pretty sure that would only help the mid-upper classes
| that can afford the nest egg to take a sabbatical like that.
|
| Exercise and eating healthy (read: cooking) in our modern
| society requires leisure time, which has mostly been
| eradicated for the lower classes.
| loa_in_ wrote:
| Which, coincidentally, is part of the problem
| klyrs wrote:
| I'd be pretty happy if restaurant employees were incentivized
| to stay home while infectuous, rather than risk getting
| fired.
| nradov wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway5959 wrote:
| It would help if people could use it to change their diet
| and exercise habits. A lot of people stress eat.
| morkalork wrote:
| 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.
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| That is rarely going to cause disability.
| aerostable_slug wrote:
| It would be interesting to see how they attempt to correct for
| malingering (or if they do at all).
| faeriechangling wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factitious_disorder_imposed_on...
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| 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.
| faeriechangling wrote:
| 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.
| livingdisabled wrote:
| 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.
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| 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.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| 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"
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(page generated 2024-03-23 23:02 UTC)