The Engine of US Jobs 324
eberta writes, "BusinessWeek has an interesting take on the US job situation, What's Really Propping Up The Economy. I think many of us have felt the US tech job market was stagnant and this article has insights into why this economy is so hot, yet not from our perspective. The spoiler is the business of health care — which will come as no surprise to anybody who has looked through the help wanted section lately. BusinessWeek has some opinions on how IT should play a bigger role in the health care industry."
"hot" economy (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Invisible Job Benefits (Score:1, Insightful)
Riiiiiight. The average worker is making less in real wages and paying more out of his own pocket for health care, yet he should be happy to know about this invisible benefit. Not. Also, increased employer contributions to health insurance don't come close to offsetting the real losses in income experienced by most.
This boom in health care employment will primarily employ foreigners in the country on work visas. And outright illegal aliens, of course. The real wages of Americans will continue to fall to third world levels.
Broken window fallacy again (Score:5, Insightful)
Further:
Despite the splashy success of companies such as Google (GOOG ) and Yahoo! (YHOO ), businesses at the core of the information economy -- software, semiconductors, telecom, and the whole gamut of Web companies -- have lost more than 1.1 million jobs in the past five years.
Isn't this a good thing generally? These people are being displaced to do other, more important work. Information technology should, in general, not be a boom industry anymore. The tools are becoming good enough to displace human labor. Let more software and computers do work that people in IT used to do, and let them go work in the health care industry where mechanization has less benefit or opportunity.
One phrase: Jobless Recovery (Score:2, Insightful)
the non-existence of the signs of a good economy - but all the signs of one being dismantled with no workable revitalization plan for the displaced.
(To preempt some people - this excludes Honda, Toyota, and the other "Foreign Manufactured, US Assembled" manufacturers if you're going to talk about them contributing anything useful)
everyone had a job in the stone age (Score:3, Insightful)
I think it is flawed to concentrate on jobs in the first place. By far the more meaningful data to compare countries by is standard of living. After all, everyone had a job in the stone age!
Of course standard of living is a subjective thing, practically only measurable through composition of a set of factors including such things as working hours per week, life expectancy, crime rate and even family size. Naturally, the weighing of factors would bias results in favor of one country or the other. Still it would perhaps give less absurd results than these statistics: I mean they make the US, where a single mom of average education is practically forced to take two jobs, look better than Germany, where some unemployed people still go on holiday twice a year!
Re:What if... (Score:2, Insightful)
--
What US dcctors have pay for malpractice insurance alone is enough to pay for multiple doctors in other countries.
Not to mention that their hospitals don't have to pay for a legal department etc.
Re:What if... (Score:2, Insightful)
I live in the UK. Here we have a system of publically funded healthcare (the NHS) which a high proportion of the population uses. Sometimes treatments are developed - particularly expensive drugs - then not approved for NHS use because the benefits are not felt to justify the cost.
Now of course as an individual who would benefit from such a drug you have the option in some cases to "go private" and receive the treatment. Obviously this is only really an option if you can afford the cost, which means that what we have here is a lot like the scenario you describe. (And I imagine something similar happens in the US but I don't know enough about the arcane complexities of your healthcare systems to work out the details.)
Lucky me... (Score:4, Insightful)
Desperation, maybe? (Score:5, Insightful)
Pick your prefered cause of death.
Re:But healthcare doesn't make value..... (Score:2, Insightful)
No, a really strong economy is both self-sufficient and self-sustaining. In other words, in order to have a really strong economy, you must depend on neither exports nor imports. If you depend on foreign trade, your economy could collapse because of events in foreign lands, which you can't control (I'm assuming that those are sovereign countries, not US free trade partners).
Nothing has been made because Aunty Tilly got a massage or haircut either. Healthcare is a service industry, and if selling services is a valid business model, then healthcare is a valid business model.
Re:Time For All the Baby-Boomers to Stand Up! (Score:4, Insightful)
This is an important point (although a tangent to the article). The abusive policy of allowing illegal workers into the US without providing them the basic protections and education that citizens get is absolutely disgusting. The solution to a complicated and difficult immigration system is not to just let people through the boarders. Every time someone mentions immigration reform people for immigrant rights go crazy and demand the preservation of the status quo. I don't get it. I think immigrants should be placed in a much better position than they are today. Some argue the price of fruit and building costs would skyrocket, but I'm not convinced. Besides it's not like they could skyrocket worse than the housing market.
I think it would make sense to figure out what it usually costs for someone to illegally cross over (I've heard it's as expensive as $300). Just charge a bit less than that for a fast track work visa. take fingerprints and random DNA samples, photographs, etc. Give the work visa a 1 year expiration and hope that a vast majority of people go back to their country of origin once a year for christmas or easter or whatever. A valid non-expired work visa would enable a person to demand minimum wage and recieve basic services. To renew your visa you just go through the fast track again, it should be like going to the DMV. and the fast track ought to be a for-profit entity, the more effeciently you run it the greater your department profits. (give employees bonuses).
Obviously this will never happen because the government is incapable of doing anything constructive.
Re:Invisible Job Benefits (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:But healthcare doesn't make value..... (Score:3, Insightful)
I think Canada will be surprised to learn that they gave up their sovereignty when they joined NAFTA.
I think what you saying would be better said this way: economic dependence on politically or socially unstable countries (e.g. Saudi Arabia, or China) is a source of economic insecurity.
Re:What if... (Score:3, Insightful)
These sort of what-if scenarios don't really advance the debate :
It's called progress. My impression is that if your fictionnal scenario came up, it would not necessarily take a long time for the cost to come down dramatically, and as evidence I offer pretty much every treatment or diagnostic method ever designed. Pretty much no matter where you stand in the wealth scale or where you live, access to health care has improved. Hopefully this trend will continue in the future.
Business is good - just get healthcare clients (Score:4, Insightful)
Long term I worry though, as healthcare isn't fundamentally 'productive' in any sense. It's not making anything new, it's just chewing up a larger and larger percentage of our paychecks in the form of social security, medicare and insurance payments.
Re:But healthcare doesn't make value..... (Score:2, Insightful)
I am not convinced... It is OK if healthcare is being used to "maintain" people (whose workforce is being used then to add value). Currently, it's more about "fixing" people, so it's in the land of the "broken window" fallacy.
Ignoring quality of life issues... (Score:4, Insightful)
If a bottle of asprin results in her passing away but the bypass gives her 20 years more life, then (adjusting for inflation, etc) she merely has to generate $1,000 more wealth each year than she consumes for the operation to be "worth it". And, consider this: she has some dollar value of training and experience, valuable both during her hours working and her other hours contributing to the community. It could be that buying her a bypass would be like fixing the alternator in your car; sure it doesn't result in anything "new" but it is a small repair on a valuable item. You wouldn't throw away your car with a bad alternator; don't throw away (valuable) Aunty Tilly because she's got a bad valve.
Obviously, at some point people get old enough that society will never regain its financial investment in that elderly person (or lifetime-disabled person). S'OK. We're human beings; we take care of each other because we sympathize and empathize. It's part of the human condition, and it's a good thing.
they count... (Score:2, Insightful)
It's nuts really, word rearrangement and spin to make things look better than what they are. As soon as the fed reserve note loses international lustre (and it is sliding that way now) the party is over. The globalists have had three decades now to prove their point that their magic theories work, and we have record deficits, record lack of savings, record budget shortfalls, pensions dropping all over, etc as the result. They can rearrange it all they want, it is still a failure unless you are in the tippy top income brackets. They tout real estate there, but what is it really? A mass of people who own *debt*, but not very much true home ownership, they own inflated mortgages, now at 30 years, or even worse, the "interest only" type mortgages, people who only own the hope that sometime some sucker will buy their property or way more than what it is really worth so they can pay off that huge mortgage and maybe show some true equity. Nuts.
Re:Time For All the Baby-Boomers to Stand Up! (Score:2, Insightful)
1. It smacks of amnesty so the "they're taking our jeeeeerrrrrrbbbbssss" nativists will never stand for it.
2. No, they won't go home for xmas even if they have a one year visa.
3. No matter how bad you think immigrants have it here its still better than where they came from, thats why they came here in the first place. Besides the first generation of immigrants are basically sacrificing themselves to ensure that successive generations of their families are in a better place, i.e. America so any pain they go thru is more than worth the bargain.
Re:But healthcare doesn't make value..... (Score:5, Insightful)
Many people think the GDP or GNP is a bogus, crude measure of economic health. There are a number of other measures which address the G?P's shortcomings. (The UN's "Human Development Index" (HDI) is probably the best known.)
As Robert Kennedy said in 1968:
Our gross national product -- if we should judge America by that -- counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for those who break them. It counts the destruction of our redwoods and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and the cost of a nuclear warhead, and armored cars for police who fight riots in our streets. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it tells us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.
Re:Who pays the bills? (Score:2, Insightful)
Or dying because they can't afford "health care".
The problem is that health care does not conform to the usual supply/demand model and is not effected by market forces - in fact, it's already rather socialist. Everybody buys "coverage" for thousands per year, while many fortunate people have minimal needs (but buy coverage "just in case", and wisely so) and thus support the cost to treat those who have chronic/costly problems.
In my neck of the woods, it'll cost you in excess of $100 to see a doctor for a "brief visit" if you're paying out of pocket ($115.00 to be exact). I don't care what kind of justification is offered, there is no way it's "worth" $500/hr to have your blood pressure checked and have them listen to your lungs.
The biggest problem in health care today is that providers think the insurance companies are their customers and the patients are just a means to get another check from the insurance company. The opposite is true - the insurance co is simply a conduit to transfer wealth from the patient to the doctors office.
An outgrowth of all this is the snotty, imperious attitude prevalent among the staff at most doctors offices.
Al
Re:But healthcare doesn't make value..... (Score:3, Insightful)
We shouldn't. Anyone who does has purposeful blinders on. The GDP and GNP are not for that. Nice bed of straw, though.
Re:Time For All the Baby-Boomers to Stand Up! (Score:3, Insightful)
how the government spins the stats (Score:3, Insightful)
US Trade Deficit: When the Sausage comes home to Roost [bitsofnews.com] has some good discussion on the coming consequences of the trade deficit, and how we got here. Particularly pertinent is the section at the end about the 1987 book The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, and how the U.S. has definitively entered the "fall" stage of the power cycle.
But as you seem to indicate, few people seem to know that the federal reserve system is at the root of our poor nation's economic struggle. See the 1983 book The Misdirection Conspiracy: Or Who Really Killed the American Dream [amazon.com] for a good history behind how the banking class (not your friendly neighborhood banker, but the Rockerfellers/Morgans/other globalist shysters) are sucking the lifeblood from the working class.
Also worth mentioning that Michael Mandeville, author of The Coming Economic Collapse Of 2006 [michaelmandeville.com] (2003) says that the predicted collapse is well underway. The current trouble at Ford [thetruthaboutcars.com] and General Motors [thetruthaboutcars.com] marks an acceleration of the decline.
The present economic calamity was, of course, set in stone as soon as Nixon closed the gold window back in 1971, removing all incumbrances to out-of-control monetary growth (monetary inflation), or perhaps even as early as the establishment of the Federal Reserve system in 1913... See 1970's, redux [slashdot.org] for more on how globalization & the federal reserve bleeds america dry.
Re:But healthcare doesn't make value..... (Score:3, Insightful)