re: 50 employees fired after refusing flu shot

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then explain to me why expenditures are higher yet life expectancy is now going down.

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You’re replying to one of at least three healthcare professionals in this very thread alone.

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Not relevant to this conversation.

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So you make the claim but I have to provide evidence? Not how it works, bud.

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Good. If you're going to put patients at risk you don't deserve to work in healthcare

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Are all the patients and patient’s family members required to get a flu shot before they walk into that healthcare facility?

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B/c people are a lot unhealthier now.

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One of the most striking health-related trends in the United States over the past 50 years has been the rise of obesity. As can be seen in Figure 3-1, in 1960–1962 only 10.7 percent of adult males and 15.8 percent of adult females in the country were obese. By 2007-2008, those numbers had risen to 32.2 and 35.5 percent, respectively. For both sexes, the growth in obesity was relatively slow in the 1960s and 1970s, increased sharply in the 1980s and 1990s, and then slowed in recent years.

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The same pattern has played out in most other high-income countries, including those studied here, but it has generally been less pronounced than in the United States.

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Numerous studies have documented the ways in which being overweight or obese damages health. The most common effects include diabetes; high blood pressure; heart disease; gallstones; and certain cancers, such as colorectal cancer, breast cancer in women, endometrial cancer, and cancers of the kidney, pancreas, liver, and gallbladder (Hu, 2008). Type 2 diabetes is particularly sensitive to body weight. It is very rare in people of normal weight, and the risk for developing it increases rapidly with increasing BMI. The risks of developing high blood pressure, coronary heart disease, and gallstones also grow as BMI increases, as do the risks for the various obesity-related cancers, but none of these conditions is as sensitive to BMI as diabetes (Hu, 2008).

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Alley and colleagues surveyed the body of research on weight and mortality and drew some general conclusions (Alley et al., 2010). First, in the general population, Class 1 obesity is correlated with a small increase in overall mortality, and the higher the BMI, the greater is the elevation. Generally speaking, falling in the overweight category (BMI between 25 and 30) does not increase one's chances of dying from all causes, although being overweight is associated with a slightly increased risk of dying from coronary heart disease. Again, the higher the BMI, the greater is the mortality risk. According to one international study, each increase of 5 units in BMI results in a 30 percent increase in overall mortality (Prospective Studies Collaboration, 2009). In short, the authors concluded, obesity does increase mortality risk; the increase is relatively modest for Class 1 obesity (BMI between 30 and 35) but is significantly greater for those with a BMI above 40. The authors also found that the relationship between BMI and mortality risk changes with age. BMI has its largest effect on the risk of mortality for adults under 50, and the correlation between BMI and mortality decreases beyond that age. The older adults at greatest risk of dying are those at the extreme ends of the BMI spectrum—either extremely underweight or extremely overweight. Thus at older ages, the curve relating mortality risk to BMI changes in shape from a J to a U.

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Since life expectancy at age 50 in the United States would increase significantly more than in other countries through the hypothetical elimination of obesity, the U.S. longevity shortfall would be reduced and in some cases eliminated. U.S. life expectancy for women is 1.37 years lower than the mean in 12 other countries with higher life expectancies. Based on the PSC risk factors, U.S. female life expectancy would be an estimated 0.80 years lower than this mean without obesity, so that obesity would account for an average of 41 percent of the gap. For men, the equivalent percentage of the difference in life expectancy accounted for by obesity, relative to 10 countries with higher life expectancies, is 67 percent.

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Even using the sets of lower obesity risks, however, it appears that differences in obesity account for a fifth to a third of the shortfall in life expectancy in the United States relative to other countries. Obesity appears to be an important part of the explanation of the current U.S. shortfall in life expectancy, but uncertainty remains as to its role in explaining the divergence.

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