> You know what might change this? I gave a talk on this to Stanford alumni and afterward a lawyer came up to me and said there are going to be lawsuits. This

> You know what might change this? I gave a talk on this to Stanford alumni and afterward a lawyer came up to me and said there are going to be lawsuits. This won't happen as long as the worst offenders can push individual arbitration agreements. The Supreme Court heard arguments about them recently, and a decision on whether they are legal is expected soon. On the other hand, electronic health records should make it easy to show with statistics if a workplace causes chronic disease, relative its peers. We just need to add employer information to the standard information that hospitals collect. Certainly a group of university hospitals would be interested in seeing this data, and could organize an initiative to collect it. Edit: Actually, a way to link massive amounts of healthcare data to patients' employers might already be available. Medical records often store insurance information, which can be used to figure out a patient's employer if they are the subscriber.