Shannon’s Window: The cost of another man’s bad habits
Image of Shannon Nickinson - Editor, Progress + Promise —Shannon Nickinson - Editor, Progress + Promise —
This ought to be enough to make you drop the Big Mac.
Smoking, obesity and being overweight cost Escambia and Santa Rosa employers $800 million this year.
That is from David Sjoberg, who heads the Partnership for a Healthy Community. The Partnership has assessed the health of the Escambia-Santa Rosa area four times in the last 18 years.
In 18 years, the picture has never improved. Not once.
We rank 55th out of 67 counties in the state in terms of our health outcomes. And we do a lot of it to ourselves.
We outpace our peers counties in high rates of sexually transmitted diseases, indicators related to acts of violence, sexual assault offenses, theft, obesity, smoking and alcohol-related injuries. We go to the emergency room more frequently for things that aren’t really emergencies, driving up the cost of care to the system, taxpayers and individuals. Many of the diseases that are highly prevalent here -- such as heart disease, diabetes and high blood pressure -- are things that we have the power to reduce through our behavior. We don’t.
We are at risk of being viewed the way Dean Wormer warned Flounder about going through life -- eating and drinking too much and not living up to our educational potential.
Don’t think you pay for it when someone else chose fast-food over a salad? Think one man’s Coca-Cola is no skin off your wallet? Think again, brothers and sisters.
The new hangar and facilities outlined for ST Aerospace at Pensacola International Airport is slated to cost $37.34 million, for about 300 jobs. We could have 21 ST Aerospaces for the $800 million our poor health cost us this year, with enough left over for a couple of trips to Hamburg to find out why the German education and workforce development system is more integrated, responsive and functional than ours.
Put that in your iced tea and stir it.
Sjoberg says that until the Partnership’s cause is embraced by the community at large, we can essentially expect to keep throwing good money after bad when it comes to the toll our habits and lifestyle take on our bottom line.“If it is the health care organizations trying to do something about it, that is fine, but if this doesn’t become a communitywide effort, nothing is going is change,” he says.
To that end, the Partnership this year is going to focus its efforts on healthy weight, smoking and access to health care through the Live Well Northwest Florida program. Already 60 companies have signed up to get information, resources and guidance about how they can help their employees live healthier, which in turn reduces healthcare costs for them. (Learn about the effort here: www.pfahc.org)
In early 2014, Sjoberg says the Partnership will work with the local Health Departments on a childhood obesity campaign as well, an important effort in a county where 19 percent of the students are overweight and another 16 percent are at risk of being so.
Another boon for 2014 will be the services of Jan O’Neill from the University of Wisconsin. O’Neill will be our “community coach” thanks to a grant the Partnership received Dec. 26 from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Sjoberg says O’Neill will be able to share “best practices” of what has improved public health in other communities across the country from which we may draw inspiration.
“We want to make sure that we are looking at the right things when we suggest interventions for employers, that we are fully exposed to things that have worked well in other parts of the country,” Sjoberg says.
“We will pretty much start from scratch when she gets here.”
With such a long way to go, even small steps ought to yield visible results.
Blue Wahoos doing their share. LOLhttp://bluewahoosblog.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/voorhees.jpg
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