Sacrificing longevity to gain jobs?

Merrill Goozner at Gooznews has a great post titled: As Longevity Declines in Poor Areas. The subtitle is States Raid Tobacco Settlement Money.

He shares a map of the US that graphically displays the changing trends for longevity. It's fascinating if you live in the dark green areas (areas where life expectancy grew faster than the national trends). It's alarming, embittering, if you live in the white to red areas where your life expectance declined with increasing speed as you moved towards dark red.

And as you might expect, the areas in dark red are also the areas marked by:

stagnant wages and rising income inequality, with the hardest hit areas being those left behind what has generally been considered a period of rising prosperity

And then he links to the recent news that Ohio is the first state to seek to undermine its own trust fund established to manage the use of funds received in the Tobacco settlement case. Those funds have been used exclusively for smoking prevention programs.

Why's the governor of Ohio seeking to change the use of those tobacco-settlement funds? To attract jobs.

Mr. Goozner sums up the quandary quite nicely:

So here's what it has come to in the good old U.S.A.: a declining state (sort of like Pennsylvania, where primary voters will be voting today), desperate to attract jobs, takes money away from citizens who are trying to reverse the effects of having no jobs in the first place.

I can't argue with his conclusion. Trying to be a data-based decision-maker, it's hard to ignore the data. It's also hard to understand how a Governor hopes to attract business and jobs to his state with an overall workforce whose life expectancy is declining faster than those workers in other parts of the country. That would translate into higher labor costs either directly if the new jobs offer health insurance as a paid benefit (unlikely, they usually don't) or as a result from loss productivity from workers with a greater number of health-related issues and the associated time off needed. Or is it a perfect match for the employer with state incentives (at the expense of the workers' health) and a depressed economy where wage competition will be minimal.

I don't know. What do you think?