Add another win in the win column for “the greatest health care system in the world”!
Wahoo! A new study by Gallup shows that 86% of full-time employed Americans are missing 450 million days at work due to being either fat, or for having chronic health problems or both (not even including the days workers feel ill and don’t take time off). The cost? $153 billion in annual “lost productivity” dollars. With this knowledge, business folks can stand up and take notice and stop hiring fat and sick people, if it didn’t include, well, basically everybody.
The $153 billion in annual lost productivity costs linked to unhealthy workers in the United States is more than four times the cost found in another sickly, fading obesity-racked empire, the pasty, United Kingdom. Even with their weak and beleaguered constitutions, their autosomal recessive bloodlines and Haemochromatosis, their fried codfishes and chips and socialist deathcare panels, the UK has far fewer unhealthy workers. Only 14% of full-time U.S. workers are of a normal weight and have no chronic illness, compared with 20% in the U.K. But those complacent feather-bedded layabouts get guaranteed paid vacation/leave, etc/ while we Americatards get a smattering of random Mondays off to sit on the couch and watch The Price is Right and eat loose sandwich meats.
The upshot is, the high percentages of full-time U.S. workers who have crap health are a significant drain on productivity for U.S. businesses. Presumably, the employees and employers could increase productivity by addressing the health issues plaguing the workplace. By making it a national priority to have affordable healthcare available to all? By banning Hot Pockets from the office microwave? Or by firing their current employees and hiring healthy people from India? Or better yet, IN India?
You know, they’ve been squeezing uncompensated-for “productivity” out of us for decades, and now they’re complaining that we’re too fat and sick from lack of time and healthcare to squeeze even more work out of us? Are we supposed to feel bad? I mean, I’m no LeeAnn Rimes (sp?) , and I sometimes get a headache, and I could sure use a day off. But do I really have to be sick and fat to get one?