4 ms·
So if healthcare costs are benefits, some portion of the compensation is growing just because healthcare costs are growing. But that doesn't really provide any
by dv_dt 9y ago
So if healthcare costs are benefits, some portion of the compensation is growing just because healthcare costs are growing. But that doesn't really provide any net gain in positive economic effects (such as through added disposable income).
- prostoalex 9y agoUnless one is employed in healthcare.
- YeOakAye 9y agoOne is usually not employed in healthcare......
- prostoalex 9y ago"In recent years, the proportion of workers employed in private-sector health services has exceeded 11 percent." says BLS in 2009 https://www.bls.gov/spotlight/2009/health_care/ https://www.bls.gov/spotlight/2009/health_care/
- YeOakAye 9y agoThanks for supporting my point, in that 89% of the working population is "usually not employed in healthcare".
- prostoalex 9y agoSo back to the grandparent conclusion, employing 11+% of the workforce is not beneficial to the US economy?
- dv_dt 9y agoIt's not beneficial if the same or better output could be had with half of the inputs. I'm mostly comparing cost of healthcare in other first-world nations with universal healthcare here with the industry as a whole (as opposed to just the workforce). If you know the efficiency can be higher and you choose to operate less efficiently it's some form of the broken window fallacy - maybe the drafty window fallacy? You're basically paying people to move dirt from one place to another - with the excess of insurance claim/billing transactions as the new digital dirt. Now if you're worried about the more immediate effects on the people displaced by moving to a possibly higher efficiency way of doing things - we'll that's a bigger general problem we have to solve as the displacement rate is seemingly already moving higher than the re-employment rate, and it threatens to accelerate for more areas than just better healthcare practices...
- Clubber 9y agoHealthcare is flush with cash with so many middlemen it's almost inconceivable. It is also recession proof.
- JustSomeNobody 9y agoUhh no. Those costs are transfered (at least in part) to the employee every year when they reup.
- gertef 9y agoThis is one of the problems with GDP/econometrics in general: It tries to measure value but actually measures prices. If I lower my prices (maybe as a charitable act, or due to competition), I haven't decreased my value, but econometrics thinks I did. If you and I pay each other to waste fuel, pollution and time to drive to each other's homes to do the laundry, that's consider "better" than if we stayed home and did our own, according to econometrics.