I’m glad that Justin Fox is taking note of the growth in the number of health care jobs at Bloomberg:
Of the 263,000 nonfarm payroll jobs that the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates were created in April, 27,000 were in health care.
This is not really news: Since the beginning of 2015, the average monthly gain in health-care jobs has been 28,959. Since 2010, it’s been 23,893; since 2000, it’s been 24,041; since 1990, it’s been 23,709. Only four of the 351 months since January 1990 have seen declines in health-care employment.
but I’m a bit disappointed that he doesn’t point out what the real problem with that is:
All this good news for health-care workers is not necessarily good news for the U.S. economy, though. Health care is a low-productivity-growth sector that, over time, has arguably been a drag on other U.S. industries. Plus, its share of employment can’t keep growing forever, right? A 27,000-job gain doesn’t mean as much when employment is at 16 million as when it’s at 8 million, so the percentage increases in health-care employment are smaller now than in the 1990s and 2000s. But they’ve still been higher in most recent months (not April, when the two were pretty much even) than the gains for total nonfarm payroll employment. The end of the health-care boom is not yet in sight.
Let me try to explain. Health care is heavily subsidized. At least sixty cents of every dollar spent on health care comes from tax dollars.
There is no such thing as perpetual motion. It never works. We cannot build a healthy economy based on a sector that’s funded by tax dollars at that level. The greater the number of people employed in health care the worse the situation will be.
We have an aging population and a number of drug epidemics, so an expansion of the health care system is inevitable. It is pointless to complain about it. Perhaps death squads and panels are more efficient, but they’re not happening any time soon. Maybe if the Hildebeast runs and wins.
People complain about waste and fraud and how they must be eliminated to reduce costs, but waste and fraud are the entropy or organizations. There must be a Second Law of Organizations that says that waste and fraud cannot decrease, they can only stay constant or increase.
I remember walking out of my office building many years ago, My companion was complaining about bureaucratic complications and how slow the bureaucrats were. What she did not consider was that bureaucracies exist to eliminate the arbitrariness of autocrats, and that bureaucratic red tape was the price of attempting fair and even treatment for all.
“There must be a Second Law of Organizations that says that waste and fraud cannot decrease…”
Organizational behavior is not like physics. It changes with incentives. Public and private organization incentives are generally very different. That’s the real check and balance.