K
Kickin' Ass and Takin' Names
Guest
For the first four years after the dot-com bust in 2001, a weak
economy in most sectors was masked by an explosion in real estate
sales, rocketing home values and a surge of consumer spending as
people taking advantage of super-low interest rates and easy credit
grabbed chunks of equity out of their newly high-priced digs and went
shopping.
In the summer of 2005, the New York Times reported that the real
estate biz -- "everything from land surveyors to general contractors
to loan officers" -- had added 700,000 jobs to the American economy
during the previous four years, while the rest of the work force had
lost 400,000 jobs over the same period. Technically the economy was in
"recovery," when in fact most of it remained soft.
A few economists sounded a warning about having all our eggs in one
economic basket. People like Yale's Robert Shiller and Dean Baker at
the Center for Economic Policy and Research pointed out that home
values weren't syncing up with the fundamentals of the market, and
that we were headed for an "adjustment" -- either a real estate crash
leading to a recession or, in the best case scenario, a "soft
landing."
But while there were some voices of caution, other economists told us
that everything was going gangbusters. This was the New Economy in
action: American manufacturing may have been gutted during the
previous few decades, but the service sector is where more "value" is
added anyway -- where the big profits are -- and Americans would be
just fine selling each other houses, insurance and the occasional
cheeseburger until the Next Big Thing came along.
It was a hot debate, but something else was going on at the same time
that got less attention: There was the emergence of what could be
called the healthcare economy. As Michael Mandel wrote in Businessweek
last September, "Without [the health sector], the nation's labor
market would be in a deep coma." Between 2001 and 2006, 1.7 million
new jobs were added in the healthcare sector. Meanwhile, the rest of
the private sector added exactly zero new jobs (net) during that
period.
(The conventional wisdom is that the economy needs to add about
150,000 jobs per month to keep up with the growth of the working-age
population.)
If current trends continue, 30 percent to 40 percent of all new jobs
created in the United States over the next 25 years will be in the
healthcare business. Mandel argued that this trend is partly
responsible for the United States' low overall unemployment rate.
"Take away healthcare hiring in the U.S.," he wrote, "and quicker than
you can say cardiac bypass, the U.S. unemployment rate would be 1 to 2
percentage points higher."
One could argue that this is precisely how a vibrant economy should
work. A dynamic industry takes off and compensates for weaknesses in
other sectors. When it cools, another field will explode, perhaps one
we can't even conceive of today.
What's more, healthcare jobs have increased at the same time as we've
shed millions of relatively high-paying manufacturing jobs. Wages in
the health sector vary widely, but the average is slightly higher than
the average income in the private sector as a whole. Healthcare is
labor-intensive, so a lot of the more than $2 trillion we'll spend
this year in the Unites States will end up in healthcare workers'
pockets. It's also an industry in which offshoring and outsourcing are
uncommon; you might be able to schedule your colonoscopy with a guy at
a call center in Mumbai, but ultimately your ass has to be in the same
country as the personnel who do it.
So, is a healthcare economy a bad thing?
It is, and for three reasons in particular. The most obvious is that
these jobs are coming at a cost that the United States can't continue
to pay without facing severe consequences (especially as the baby
boomers get into their Golden Years). According to government data
(PDF), healthcare costs exploded between 2000 and 2005 -- increasing
by a whopping 47 percent. Over a longer period, from 1995 to 2005, per
capita healthcare spending increased by 77 percent. That's slowed a
bit, but not by much; total costs are projected to reach $2.25
trillion dollars this year, up 14 percent just since 2005.
That kind of growth outpaces the overall growth in the economy by a
mile -- the share of America's total economic output being sucked into
healthcare has increased from just under 14 percent in 2000 to over 16
percent this year, and is expected to equal one fifth of the total
economy in 10 years.
Those costs put the squeeze on millions of American families. A study
by the Commonwealth fund found that families' out-of-pocket expenses
(and premium copayments) rose in direct proportion to overall
healthcare spending. With wages stagnating, that's leading to real
pain; almost half of those declaring bankruptcy in 2001 cited
healthcare costs as a "major contributor." An ABC News/USA Today Poll
found that one in four Americans questioned said that their family had
had a problem paying for medical care during the past year, up 7
percentage points over the past nine years.
It may also have an indirect impact on wages, which have remained
stagnant for most of the working population since 2001. Right-wing
economists like Greg Mankiw, the former chairman of Bush's Council of
Economic Advisors, who infamously suggested that assembling
cheeseburgers at a Stuckies should count as a manufacturing job, argue
that looking at wages isn't an honest measure of how workers are
doing, because their overall compensation -- including medical and
other benefits -- has risen faster than inflation, while wages
haven't. Allan Hubbard, another Bush economic advisor, told the Wall
Street Journal that "employers are spending more money on healthcare,
and that's robbing people of wage increases." The claim is
controversial -- corporate profits and executive pay have both
increased at the same time, and fewer than half of all American
workers get coverage from their employer -- but it is a simple fact
that the gap between the cash working Americans are pocketing and the
money their employers pay for an hour of their time has been growing.
According to a study by the Kaiser Foundation (PDF), workers' pay rose
by 18 percent between 2000 and 2006 -- not quite keeping up with the
20 percent total inflation -- but employers' healthcare premiums rose
by almost 90 percent.
That last number gets to the heart of the second problem, one that Big
Business is becoming increasingly aware of: Those costs are much
higher than in other countries and, unlike every other advanced
economy in the world, much of the burden is born by U.S. companies
instead of being spread across society through a progressive tax
system. That puts them at a distinct disadvantage in terms of labor
costs, and encourages U.S. firms to offshore and outsource as many
jobs as possible. So while the healthcare industry is adding jobs, the
spiraling costs create a powerful incentive for other sectors to shed
them.
Lastly, and most importantly, we're talking about investing an
enormous chunk of our national income into a healthcare system that
offers the lowest imaginable value for the dollar. In 2004, we spent
$6,102 per American on healthcare. Not only did that figure lead the
world, it did so by a huge margin -- No. 2, Switzerland, came in at
just over $4,000 per person, two grand less than the United States.
For that money, we rank between 15th to 37th out of 153 countries
studied by the American Society of Integrative Medicine in every
single measure of health outcomes. The authors note that "almost every
major study of America's healthcare system has concluded that we could
hardly do worse in terms of how much well-being is yielded for the
resources currently expended." We're paying for a Ferrari, and we're
driving a Pinto.
There are many reasons these costs are so bloated, and some are
subject to fierce debate. But what is arguably the biggest problem is
also one of the least discussed: The fact that the whole system is set
up with perverse and essentially self-defeating incentives. America's
healthcare economy is actually a sickness economy, where all the
emphasis is on treating people once they've gotten sick, instead of
keeping people healthy in the first place. It is reactive rather than
proactive, despite a large body of research that proves the old adage
that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Studies show
that a dollar spent on preventive health will save up to four dollars
by the fourth year that the data are tracked ($$). But while public
health experts preach prevention, only about one percent -- a penny on
the American healthcare dollar -- goes to actual prevention programs
(depending on how you add it up, that figure may be as high as ten
percent, which is still far below what other advanced countries spend
on prevention).
And we're also paying a steep penalty -- all of us -- for our system's
lack of universality. Studies show that people without coverage often
put off medical care until the symptoms are so bad that they end up in
an emergency room, where they ran up about $65 billion in charges in
2005. According to a study by the advocacy group FamiliesUSA, they pay
a bit more than a third of the costs out-of-pocket, the government
picks up a third of the remainder and the rest is paid by people with
health coverage through higher premiums. According to the FamiliesUSA
study, that adds up to almost $1,000 per fully insured family.
That's where we are: With $600 billion per year picked up by the
government, our healthcare system, while a rip-off by any reasonable
measure -- is becoming a fabulously expensive jobs program. The idea
of the government shelling out big bucks to stimulate growth in the
number of decent jobs is pass
economy in most sectors was masked by an explosion in real estate
sales, rocketing home values and a surge of consumer spending as
people taking advantage of super-low interest rates and easy credit
grabbed chunks of equity out of their newly high-priced digs and went
shopping.
In the summer of 2005, the New York Times reported that the real
estate biz -- "everything from land surveyors to general contractors
to loan officers" -- had added 700,000 jobs to the American economy
during the previous four years, while the rest of the work force had
lost 400,000 jobs over the same period. Technically the economy was in
"recovery," when in fact most of it remained soft.
A few economists sounded a warning about having all our eggs in one
economic basket. People like Yale's Robert Shiller and Dean Baker at
the Center for Economic Policy and Research pointed out that home
values weren't syncing up with the fundamentals of the market, and
that we were headed for an "adjustment" -- either a real estate crash
leading to a recession or, in the best case scenario, a "soft
landing."
But while there were some voices of caution, other economists told us
that everything was going gangbusters. This was the New Economy in
action: American manufacturing may have been gutted during the
previous few decades, but the service sector is where more "value" is
added anyway -- where the big profits are -- and Americans would be
just fine selling each other houses, insurance and the occasional
cheeseburger until the Next Big Thing came along.
It was a hot debate, but something else was going on at the same time
that got less attention: There was the emergence of what could be
called the healthcare economy. As Michael Mandel wrote in Businessweek
last September, "Without [the health sector], the nation's labor
market would be in a deep coma." Between 2001 and 2006, 1.7 million
new jobs were added in the healthcare sector. Meanwhile, the rest of
the private sector added exactly zero new jobs (net) during that
period.
(The conventional wisdom is that the economy needs to add about
150,000 jobs per month to keep up with the growth of the working-age
population.)
If current trends continue, 30 percent to 40 percent of all new jobs
created in the United States over the next 25 years will be in the
healthcare business. Mandel argued that this trend is partly
responsible for the United States' low overall unemployment rate.
"Take away healthcare hiring in the U.S.," he wrote, "and quicker than
you can say cardiac bypass, the U.S. unemployment rate would be 1 to 2
percentage points higher."
One could argue that this is precisely how a vibrant economy should
work. A dynamic industry takes off and compensates for weaknesses in
other sectors. When it cools, another field will explode, perhaps one
we can't even conceive of today.
What's more, healthcare jobs have increased at the same time as we've
shed millions of relatively high-paying manufacturing jobs. Wages in
the health sector vary widely, but the average is slightly higher than
the average income in the private sector as a whole. Healthcare is
labor-intensive, so a lot of the more than $2 trillion we'll spend
this year in the Unites States will end up in healthcare workers'
pockets. It's also an industry in which offshoring and outsourcing are
uncommon; you might be able to schedule your colonoscopy with a guy at
a call center in Mumbai, but ultimately your ass has to be in the same
country as the personnel who do it.
So, is a healthcare economy a bad thing?
It is, and for three reasons in particular. The most obvious is that
these jobs are coming at a cost that the United States can't continue
to pay without facing severe consequences (especially as the baby
boomers get into their Golden Years). According to government data
(PDF), healthcare costs exploded between 2000 and 2005 -- increasing
by a whopping 47 percent. Over a longer period, from 1995 to 2005, per
capita healthcare spending increased by 77 percent. That's slowed a
bit, but not by much; total costs are projected to reach $2.25
trillion dollars this year, up 14 percent just since 2005.
That kind of growth outpaces the overall growth in the economy by a
mile -- the share of America's total economic output being sucked into
healthcare has increased from just under 14 percent in 2000 to over 16
percent this year, and is expected to equal one fifth of the total
economy in 10 years.
Those costs put the squeeze on millions of American families. A study
by the Commonwealth fund found that families' out-of-pocket expenses
(and premium copayments) rose in direct proportion to overall
healthcare spending. With wages stagnating, that's leading to real
pain; almost half of those declaring bankruptcy in 2001 cited
healthcare costs as a "major contributor." An ABC News/USA Today Poll
found that one in four Americans questioned said that their family had
had a problem paying for medical care during the past year, up 7
percentage points over the past nine years.
It may also have an indirect impact on wages, which have remained
stagnant for most of the working population since 2001. Right-wing
economists like Greg Mankiw, the former chairman of Bush's Council of
Economic Advisors, who infamously suggested that assembling
cheeseburgers at a Stuckies should count as a manufacturing job, argue
that looking at wages isn't an honest measure of how workers are
doing, because their overall compensation -- including medical and
other benefits -- has risen faster than inflation, while wages
haven't. Allan Hubbard, another Bush economic advisor, told the Wall
Street Journal that "employers are spending more money on healthcare,
and that's robbing people of wage increases." The claim is
controversial -- corporate profits and executive pay have both
increased at the same time, and fewer than half of all American
workers get coverage from their employer -- but it is a simple fact
that the gap between the cash working Americans are pocketing and the
money their employers pay for an hour of their time has been growing.
According to a study by the Kaiser Foundation (PDF), workers' pay rose
by 18 percent between 2000 and 2006 -- not quite keeping up with the
20 percent total inflation -- but employers' healthcare premiums rose
by almost 90 percent.
That last number gets to the heart of the second problem, one that Big
Business is becoming increasingly aware of: Those costs are much
higher than in other countries and, unlike every other advanced
economy in the world, much of the burden is born by U.S. companies
instead of being spread across society through a progressive tax
system. That puts them at a distinct disadvantage in terms of labor
costs, and encourages U.S. firms to offshore and outsource as many
jobs as possible. So while the healthcare industry is adding jobs, the
spiraling costs create a powerful incentive for other sectors to shed
them.
Lastly, and most importantly, we're talking about investing an
enormous chunk of our national income into a healthcare system that
offers the lowest imaginable value for the dollar. In 2004, we spent
$6,102 per American on healthcare. Not only did that figure lead the
world, it did so by a huge margin -- No. 2, Switzerland, came in at
just over $4,000 per person, two grand less than the United States.
For that money, we rank between 15th to 37th out of 153 countries
studied by the American Society of Integrative Medicine in every
single measure of health outcomes. The authors note that "almost every
major study of America's healthcare system has concluded that we could
hardly do worse in terms of how much well-being is yielded for the
resources currently expended." We're paying for a Ferrari, and we're
driving a Pinto.
There are many reasons these costs are so bloated, and some are
subject to fierce debate. But what is arguably the biggest problem is
also one of the least discussed: The fact that the whole system is set
up with perverse and essentially self-defeating incentives. America's
healthcare economy is actually a sickness economy, where all the
emphasis is on treating people once they've gotten sick, instead of
keeping people healthy in the first place. It is reactive rather than
proactive, despite a large body of research that proves the old adage
that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Studies show
that a dollar spent on preventive health will save up to four dollars
by the fourth year that the data are tracked ($$). But while public
health experts preach prevention, only about one percent -- a penny on
the American healthcare dollar -- goes to actual prevention programs
(depending on how you add it up, that figure may be as high as ten
percent, which is still far below what other advanced countries spend
on prevention).
And we're also paying a steep penalty -- all of us -- for our system's
lack of universality. Studies show that people without coverage often
put off medical care until the symptoms are so bad that they end up in
an emergency room, where they ran up about $65 billion in charges in
2005. According to a study by the advocacy group FamiliesUSA, they pay
a bit more than a third of the costs out-of-pocket, the government
picks up a third of the remainder and the rest is paid by people with
health coverage through higher premiums. According to the FamiliesUSA
study, that adds up to almost $1,000 per fully insured family.
That's where we are: With $600 billion per year picked up by the
government, our healthcare system, while a rip-off by any reasonable
measure -- is becoming a fabulously expensive jobs program. The idea
of the government shelling out big bucks to stimulate growth in the
number of decent jobs is pass