I hate how the powers-that-be seem to think that the only way something can be built and funded is to make it an investment vehicle. I don’t want decisions about my healthcare/internet access/civil rights/immigration policies/etc to be based on whether investors think they can get a return off of it.
I’m going to blame this complaint on Capitalism which may or may not be accurate. {shrug} beat on me if you must.
I’m not against UBI, I’m for it. However, you are greatly exaggerating the number of administrative staff in the health insurance market. It does not support or require a UBI in itself.
Criminy, when will people get over this idea that the “baby boomer” generation is some huge demographic anomaly? It’s a 3% bump. It’s not enough to shift healthcare provider economics, especially in the face of the even stronger trend of people living longer, healthier lives.
Looks like somebody at Mercatus has got some splainin’ to do.
Canada and Australia both have most of the same issues though.
Canada has some of those issues, but not to the same degree. For example the largest cities in Canada are all higher density than their equivalents in the US and there is no equivalent to the Ottawa or Golden Horseshoe greenbelts in the largest cities. You see similar pattern in the food subsidy side. Canada has low tariffs on imported sugar but the US provides direct price support to sugar processors. You can see this reflected in notably higher daily caloric intake in the US. People in the US consume a couple hundred calories a day above what Canadians consume.
What’s your source for this? I mean, your assertion doesn’t seem to fit the actual facts so you’ll have to excuse me when I discount your position out of hand based on the fact that we actually can look at the data rather than attempt a pointless argument of fact. Here is what the Bureau of Labor Statistics says about sectors experiencing job growth that are not service or health related. Also, what’s wrong with service and health sector jobs anyway. Are we too good to provide a service or to give care to other people?
Anyway, these numbers differ from your narrative.
Solar photovoltaic installers projected growth 105%
Wind turbine service technicians projected growth 96%
Statisticians 33%
Software developers, applications 30%
Mathematicians 29%
Now, if you have a source that says something other than what the BLS published, share it. Otherwise I really have no choice but to view your argument as fallacious.
Almost forget to address this gem. Do you suppose that providing universal medical care to every American would result in a decline in healthcare jobs? Would you like to reconsider that assertion?
Ooooooohkay, I’m talking about the unemployment of many millions of Americans - you just listed some very, very small segments of the workforce. How are millions of truck drivers going to become statisticians? How many solar and wind technicians do you think America needs?
And FROM YOUR LINKED SOURCE:
About 9 out of 10 new jobs are projected to be added in the service-providing sector from
2016 to 2026, resulting in more than 10.5 million new jobs, or 0.8 percent annual growth.
The goods-producing sector is expected to increase by 219,000 jobs, growing at a rate of
0.1 percent per year over the projections decade.
Employment in the health care and social assistance sector is projected to add nearly 4.0
million jobs by 2026, about one-third of all new jobs. The share of health care and social
assistance employment is projected to increase from 12.2 percent in 2016 to 13.8 percent in
2026, becoming the largest major sector in 2026.
Good job, you’re like the Koch think tank of arguing about labor trends - making my case for me when you think you’re defeating it. I’d be a little nicer, but you’re being pretty fucking abrasive and condescending for someone that doesn’t seem to know that much about the issue at hand.
Oh, and we DO have universal healthcare in this country because of EMTALA, it’s just really shitty healthcare delivered in the ER, and it’s ungodly expensive. Fixing it WILL shed jobs, because it just removes all the ridiculous inefficiencies to delivering care kind of like we do now, but much better and cheaper and at a doctor’s office instead of the ER, where it only takes like 3 people (a receptionist/biller, a CNA or RN to do intake stuff, and your doctor) instead of like 50 (seriously, ERs are super labor intensive) to see you. For example.
Sorry, but Canada has all your same patterns of obesity, inactivity, smoking, the works. I don’t think we’re healthier because of lifestyle or cultural differences.
From the BLS stats that another user kindly linked:
Healthcare support occupations (23.6 percent) and healthcare practitioners and technical
occupations (15.3 percent) are projected to be among the fastest growing occupational
groups during the 2016–26 projections decade. These two occupational groups–which account
for 13 of the 30 fastest growing occupations from 2016 to 2026–are projected to contribute
about one-fifth of all new jobs by 2026. Factors such as the aging baby-boom population,
longer life expectancies, and growing rates of chronic conditions will drive continued
demand for healthcare services.
Those “healthcare support operations” are nursing assistants and paper pushers. Lots of easy-to-be-retrained-into stuff that’s been sucking up jobs lost elsewhere. Total healthcare employment in America is ~20 million. However, this doesn’t even come close to capturing the secondary markets that are reliant on healthcare; the finance/insurance jobs that are dependent on a non-single-payer system are classified under the finance/insurance sector, and it’s very hard to tell how many of the ~5-6 million jobs would be lost or have wage drops if suddenly we didn’t need healthcare… But it’s certainly an appreciable number.
If healthcare gets fixed, some non-trivial number of people gets dumped into the labor market without anything to absorb them. And we have to plan for that, because we’d be stupid not to.
There has to be a plan, I agree with that. But that plan should be dominated by shifting those jobs to the new system. For example, if the approach for true universal healthcare is Medicare For All, then almost every single one of those people will be needed to do the Medicare coding.
There will be non-trivial carryover of private health insurance even with MFA. Germany, for instance, with its comprehensive public healthcare system, still has 11% of the population opt for private health insurance. There is also supplemental insurance that some people will choose to enroll in. The health insurance industry will not go away, it will change. If there is more than 10% decrease in employment, I would be very surprised.
Maybe. It has less impact on healthcare economics than you might imagine, A very large fraction of healthcare expense is incurred in the final year of life, and everyone dies eventually, no matter how healthful their lifestyle. (Arguably, the people who lead less healthful may even save the system money, by dying sooner and more suddenly: heart attacks and strokes are much cheaper to the system than an extended bout of Alzheimer’s, for instance.)
There’s also quite an odour of victim-blaming when the first argument is lifestyle issues. For centuries, we blamed most infectious disease on lifestyle - after all, those people fell victim more often. Then we learnt to cure some of those diseases, and suddenly didn’t need to make them moral issues any more.
But they aren’t the same. Canada’s obesity rate is almost 4% lower. http://www.who.int/gho/ncd/risk_factors/overweight/en/ Rates of inactivity among the adult population are about 6% different. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/07/45-countries-that-are-more-sedentary-than-the-united-states/259989/ Smoking is very similar. I’m not saying that the savings wouldn’t be massive but there are substantial existing disparities that make dropping all the way to Canadian spending unlikely.
How many people will the Gov need to employ to take Medicare (for old folks) to MEDICARE for everyone else?
Actually, that’s an interesting question - what percentage of a relatively comparable country with socialized medicine is employed in healthcare?
Looking at the UK, I’m seeing 4.262 million employed in human health and social work, out of a total employment 32.277 million, or about 13% of employed people.
In the US, we have about 20 million employed in healthcare (with an unknown number in supportive insurance/finance industries) out of a total 130 million, or about 15%, but really you have to add on probably another percent to account for the lost insurance jobs (there’s a lot fewer jobs for opt-in, if it’s only ~11% of the pop instead of 100% of non-managed-Medicare jobs), so let’s just say there’s a difference of about 3% of the working population lost to inefficiency.
3% of the working adult population in America is about 4 million people, so about double your guess (although I’m certainly willing to use that as a lower bound estimate, because there’s a ton of variance in the geography / population density of the US and UK, which will have a massive impact on how many doctors or hospitals we need in the US).
Why would truck drivers be put out of a job by implementing universal healthcare?
I’m still struggling to uncover what your case actually is. The issue in question is what will happen to all those people working for insurance companies if universal healthcare in enacted. My response to this worry is that we will have several trillion extra dollars each year to help retrain and re-educate those people. Additionally, we will most likely see an increase in demand for healthcare workers which includes administrative and bureaucratic functionaries…
That’s not healthcare my friend. That’s body repair. There is a huge difference. Also, I suspect you may not be factoring in how many people simply dont make use of any medical services due to their income.
Your also seem to be presenting a very skewed and false binary choice between ER and GP medical care. This leaves out entire fields of medicine that people will be availing themselves of such as radiology, surgery, etc etc . A surgery alone requires multiple teams of specialized and general care medical staff far beyond the oversimplified picture you are painting.
But what happens if we take your side because we fear that people who work in insurance will be out of a job and somehow the trillions in savings wont be enough to provide assistance and training. We continue to have the most expensive healthcare in the world with terrible outcomes and huge swathes of the population suffering without the care they need all so we can protect a very small segment of our population from loosing jobs. That’s your plan? That’s what you think we need to do? Nothing?
Truck drivers: if you read the comments that you’re replying to, you’d know I was talking about an ADDITIONAL, UNRELATED wave of unemployment that’s going to hit another massive employment sector in America: the transport industry. There are no sectors right now to soak them up, even the massive mathematician sector.
My case: that the transport industry is going to shed a ton of jobs very soon. Healthcare is bloated and has been soaking up a lot of jobs lost in other industries. If we fix it, and we should, then we have to plan for losing a significant number of jobs from there very soon, probably at least 2-4 million on top of the losses from transportation. And those are on top of the ongoing losses from automation/AI/etc. from many other sectors.
I’m saying that the “service” economy, mostly comprised of low-wage, low-security gig jobs, is a bullshit statistic that is falsely making our unemployment numbers look low. If you pick up a couple Uber driving jobs that average under minimum wage, you’re “employed” right now, even though you wouldn’t think of yourself as such, but you have taxable wages, so there you go.
I’m saying that planning to dump a bunch of jobs from healthcare, one of the few industries that’s had continued growth (because it’s a badly-designed system that’s very inefficient), and one of the only ones that provides any degree of security, we need to know what industry people will even be going into if we want to train them to go into that industry.
Seriously, you haven’t answered what sector can absorb millions of jobs over just a couple years, the amount of time in which we’ll see all those transport and healthcare unemployed dumped onto the market, and I’m addressing them at the same time because it’ll probably happen around the same time, 5-10 years out. That’s so, so many people to worry about employing in a short time, especially if you don’t want them just driving Uber Eats.
Yeah, don’t build roads because it will put too many horse cart makers out of business is what we call regressive. I found nothing compelling in your argument of unrelated wave of speculative layoffs so I didn’t bother to consider it. We should not make plans about the care of our people based on speculation of future layoffs especially when they are not related in any way to those plans.
Your 2-4 million number is interesting since only 2.4 mil work in the insurance industry and only about 25% of those in healthcare insurance.
This argument is beyond silly. If you expect me to believe that when every single American will have access to the complete healthcare system, we will have to lay off healthcare workers you are going to have to try again. It’s a ridiculous argument on its face and makes me think you are arguing in bad faith here.
That number will be closer to 625,000 because the only people we will be displacing from their jobs will be healthcare insurance workers. The problems in the trucking industry have nothing to do with this conversation and healthcare workers will not be loosing their jobs when the demand for healthcare increases.
I have to decline further discussion on this topic with you. I simply can’t be bothered trying to talk sense when confronted with wild speculation and unrelated red herrings propped up as argument.
I’m pretty sure I said, many many times, that we definitely should fix healthcare, because the system is unsustainable. But you’re saying that the horses will just find new jobs so fuck 'em, let’s just assume they’ll feed themselves and think no more about the problem, because thinking ahead is for idiots.
Compare US healthcare jobs, as a percentage of the employed population, to socialized medicine countries. Lots fewer jobs in those countries. Not hard to extrapolate. And if people get their chronic conditions managed at the doctor’s office like they should, that preventative care reduces the load on the healthcare sector in the future, which means less care needed, which means FEWER JOBS. Again, an overall positive outcome, but one we need to PLAN AROUND.
Nope. There’s so many more billing-related-to-private-insurance jobs on the back end of healthcare than you realize, and just as many that are related to contracted billing matters, actuarial stuff, and a whole universe of regulatory and legal tomfuckery than I’d care to get into. A lot of this is specialized, pretty-well-paying stuff, too. And that’s just the first-order losses. As above, if we do a better job of taking care of people, which is a GOOD THING, we’ll need fewer doctors and nurses and CNAs and doctor’s offices and dentists and various long-term treatment centers like skilled nursing and (non-drug) rehab facilities, almost all of which are packed with patients that have a whole host of preventable-if-treated-better-long-ago chronic illnesses that extend their stays by, oh, between 10% and 500% per person.
Just taking better care of people will reduce the need for direct-care personnel, which again, is a moral good and should be pursued - but we need to think in terms of what that reduced employment means for policy.
And again, what were the sectors that will soak up these jobs? Kinda important. Your argument hinges on the wholly-unsupported assertion that an incredible change in how healthcare is delivered and administered in this country will have no appreciable effect on employment, which seems a little irresponsible for a project of this magnitude.
By analogy, if you’re going to tear out huge chunks of a building and replace them with totally different materials in a completely different architectural configuration, maybe you should not just assume that there will be no changes in load-bearing capacity, or that the foundation can take the weight shift, without researching it. Because the cost of failure is really, really high.
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