The New York Times reported today on a study commissioned by the Kaiser Family Foundation.  According to their research, a 1% rise in the nation’s unemployment rate could lead to more than 1 million new Americans losing their health insurance.  The possibility of this is very real, given the current, tenuous state of the economy.   The study also noted that the number of uninsured Americans has continued to grow over the past decade, with 47 million American currently lacking healthcare, a full 16 percent of the population. One reason for the decline in those with health insurance may be the ongoing erosion of middle class manufacturing jobs that previously supported millions of families.  More than 3.5 million manufacturing workers have lost their jobs since 2000, and unfortunately, few of them have been able to find new factory jobs offering the same pay and benefits as their previous work.  If one multiplies that 3.5 million times three or four family members dependent on a job’s healthcare benefits, we begin to see just one of the many problems that spin off of a wholesale reduction in America’s manufacturing workforce. It’s often suggested that Americans are moving beyond manufacturing though, migrating to a purely “information services” economy.  While such a concept remains rather abstract in practice, it’s questionable whether these projected information industry jobs could avoid the same outsourcing fate that previously claimed manufacturing’s lunchbox. Therefore it seems logical not to wantonly risk the livelihoods of millions of hardworking Americans.  A better approach might be the mature view that good-paying manufacturing work offers tangible benefits for the nation as a whole.  Employed factory workers mean families with healthcare.  Thus, the price tag of the “Made in USA” goods these people produce carries with it the self-reinforcing costs of their health insurance.   But when these people are out of work, they no longer pay into local and state tax rolls.  At the same time, however, city and state agencies must find additional resources to help these uninsured Americans.  Possibly the most troubling consequence of the increasing uninsured is the Kaiser study’s projection that 60% of them will be children.  There’s something poorly conceived in any economic planning that fails to account for the next generation of America’s working taxpayers. It would be nice if these worrying scenarios were not looming so close on the horizon.  And so, a pragmatic approach would be to try to stem the loss of valuable factory jobs and rebuild our more prosperous manufacturing sector.  To do so, however, requires the vision to revise current U.S. trade policy.  Until we staunch the bleeding and begin to retain these jobs, we’ll see an accelerating pattern of all the ingredients for a bad economic storm: laid-off workers, declining tax rolls, greater demand for social services from cash-strapped civic services.  If only our elected representatives demonstrated sufficient foresight and adopted en masse a plan to save American manufacturing.