Tuesday Morning Links

This and that for your Tuesday reading.

- Amy Remeikis reports on new research showing how educational inequality translates into an even wider economic gap.

- Hannah Johnston and Chris Land-Kazlauskas examine (PDF) the gig economy and the need for workers to be able to organize around it. But Rebecca Moss discusses another of Donald Trump's moves to undermine workers even more, this time by trashing panels working on workplace safety and whistleblower protections.

- Juliet Eilperin and Brady Dennis report on Trump's concurrent move to nix emission standards for vehicles. Ben Parfitt exposes the B.C. Libs' suppression of facts about the dangers of fracking based on their belief that the public shouldn't have accurate information about environmental risks before going to the polls. And James Wilt takes note of the Trudeau Libs' move to scrap any environmental assessment for major oil sands projects.

- Meanwhile, Jonathan Watts reports on yet another study showing that the effects of climate change are already more severe than assumed, this time resulting in far more underwater ice melting than anticipated.

- Finally, Andrew Boozary and David Naylor weigh in on the need for a stronger health care system - including stronger connections to the social programs which can improve public health:

Achieving wider insurance coverage and fairer prices for drugs would be important steps toward a better system. But that won’t ensure the right drug gets prescribed for the right reasons — especially if a condition might be better treated with, say, cognitive behavioural therapy by a psychologist, or by a course of physiotherapy.

Here’s the upshot. For over 30 years, there’s been good evidence about the reforms needed to modernize our health system. The key is integration of services and budgets, allowing savings to be realized when evidence-informed investments are made in new, cost-effective services and technologies.

If that happened, prescription drugs could be covered and managed as part of the same budget as professional services, hospital stays, and home care. Shared care would mean shared budgets — not more volume-driven stovepipes with new sets of professionals publicly insured on a fee-for-service basis.

Governments and providers would also have incentives to promote stronger linkages between health and social services, thereby helping build healthier communities from the bottom up.