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The Engine of US Jobs
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."
Quit your griping about smoking, lack of exercise and junk food! It's us wheezing lard butts that are keeping America working.
Public subsidies through the Pentagon system.
It's been pointed out before that while wages may be stagnant in many industries, invisible benefits such as health care (from employer insurance) have been increasing in value. This boom in health care employment is the visible part of that economic fact.
A truly excellent pizza parlor is a delight unto the heavens. Treasure the sauce and the toppings!
While were on the subject of jobs, I was wondering if anyone was looking or is working for a company currently hiring a Software Engineer or Programming in the Pittsburgh area.
I am a recent college grad, with about a years worth of development experience, in C++. Additionally my honors thesis covers Java and Object Oriented programming.
Thanks in advance for your help.
As they touch on in the article, as more and more money is spent in the healthcare sector, the cost of insurance will continue to rise, and thus put even greater stress on what little social healthcare provision there is. As the people working in healthcare rises, the salary bill rises, and somebody has to pay it; and it'll either be government funding (research funding etc) and higher charges for the users.
Speaking as a non-american, it's already one of the great ironies of the 'great american economy' - increasing numbers of people will end up working in the healthcare industry, but won't be able to afford to use it for themselves or their families. Yet giving everyone affordable access to healthcare, increasing productivity, is decried as socialist, while letting people be crippled by the financial burden of a major illness is true-blue American. Lovely.
Remember kids, it's all fun and games until someone commits wholesale galactic genocide.
From the start I'm inclined to believe the article is flawed from a statistical perspecitve. Where they quote the relevant unemployment rates of Germany and France in comparison to the US they do so without mention that the European countries use a measure which would see the US figure at over 12% (They count the underemployed as unemployed, so if you're a coder working a few hours flipping burgers you show up as unemployed).
That said with an aging population health care will continue to be a growing employer at all levels.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur
The economy may be "hot" with jobs, the problem is that it's not hot with *well paying jobs*. Between the IT bubble bursting, offshoring, the decline of unions, and stagnant minimum wage, it's not exactly the garden of opportunity in the U.S. And before I get some elitist comment like "there are good jobs out there, you just have to get off your lazy butt and look", yes I know there are good jobs, there just aren't many to go around, no matter how good a worker you are.
FTFA: One solution would be to make health care less labor-intensive by investing a lot more in information technology. "Low productivity in health is mostly a product of low investment," says Harvard University economist Dale Jorgenson.
:p
Well the only way I can think of making health care less labor-intensive is to use robots. Lots of 'em. Or some kind of super robot that can do everything like cleaning bedpans, checking blood pressure, bathing patients, flirting with the X-ray machines etc. We could call it Super Robot, or maybe Frank. I think I prefer Frank.
It's another case of the broken window economic fallacy. If more people receiving health care is what's helping keep the economy afloat, that's not a good thing. The money wasted on $100 boxes of Kleenex and $2000 short ambulance rides (don't laugh, it's the truth!) is money that couldn't have been spent elsewhere on better things.
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.
- Sergey Brin & Larry Page
Having read the article and checked out the site, it seems like a genuine attempt by google at CORPORATE RESPONSIBILITY. First corp to do so? It's certainly positive
Why waste tons of money fixing a primitive health care system that makes the existing healthcare/drug manufacturing complex wealthy when what we need to do, is to use exsiting and future computer science to develop nanotech tools (diagnostic, assembler nanobots etc.) to repair our aging cells and make all the rich (techno and others) yuppies young again. (plus everyone else who is now young and will soon be older (25, 30 years from now..think about that!)).
After all, you can't take it with you and who wants to be the last person to die of old age as soon as a workable nanotech regnerative therapy is developed? After all, we just spent an easy 500 billion in afganistan and iraq and what did that get us? (more taxes, crappy economy, and a lot more ignorant, screaming terrorists).
If we had started developing advanced nanotech 20 years ago (using the 1.5 trillions spent on the 80's/90's war machine), we could have had a descent cheap anti-aging/age-reversal pill/treatment by now, and NOW we have to wait 10, 15, 20 years to get that far!!
... we reach a point where the health care services the population reasonably wants exceed the ability of the population as a whole to pay? What if this is happening now? The article hints at this--it is pointed out that the US trade deficit might be viewed as us borrowing foreign money to fund our collective health care. Perhaps some of this spending is currently just due to low efficiency of the health care system, but it's quite possible we could fix that, and, in 10 years, increases in costs would put us back where we are now.
Factors contributing to rising demand for health care:
1) Aging population. Even in the US, which has one of the highest birth rates of any western country, the population as a whole is getting older. With the baby boomers about to retire, this is going to hit us hard and fast.
2) Obesity and other dietary/behavioral risk factors. There's been a bit of evidence that the negative consequences of obesity were overblown, but it's still bad news.
3) The most subtle and nefarious of all: advances in medicine. There's not really any demand for drugs that haven't been discovered yet, or surgeries that can't yet be performed successfully.
This last point is the scariest of all. Suppose we developed a way to give people an extra 10 years of life, but it cost a million dollar per person. We simply couldn't afford to provide it for everyone. What do we do? The American solution is to offer the procedure to anyone who can pay for it. The Canadian way would be to have a 90-year wait list so most people died before they could get the procedure. Other countries would perhaps find other ways of rationing health care, but the point is that the inevitable consequence would be rationed health care. Maybe the market would do the rationing, maybe the government would, maybe the Grim Reaper would, but rationing there would be.
So, what do people think? Obviously, we should try to make health care more efficient, but, if it's too expensive to give everyone full access, how do we sort things out?
That all but explains what's keeping things going, with supposedly good numbers. Add the gutting of the Middle-class, the creation of an area that has become low-income, low opportunity for the majority - where populist measures(read: universally non-competitive admissions/fully paid financing to any university in exchange for globalization) may end up being quite necessary to fix a major problem. That problem being
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)
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Health Care doesn't "prop up the economy". It provides one range of services that people want, but that's all. You can't all be doctors and nurses for one another. You need to either produce everything else you need OR produce enough of things that other people want so that you can pay for everything else you need. At the moment that isn't happening.
Healthcare does not really build value. Nothing has been made because Aunty Tilly got a $20,000 bypass instead of a $5 bottle of asprin.
In the way economists measure things, the Exxon-Valdez disaster was a huge economic success.
One thing that really drives up the GDP is esculating housing costs. When a $100k house's value increases to $300k this is seen as a $200k increase in the economy.... but this is just bullshit, no value has been created. Sure it can stimulate the economy because Aunt Tilly can now take a $20k loan against her house and get a bypass and this trickles into the economy. Or Joe Sixpack might buy a new Chevvy... However, you should really see this as what it is: hyper inflation in housing prices.
If the "value" of a loaf of bread increases from $1 to $5, then that is seen as inflation, not growth. When a house goes from $100k to $300k this should be seen as inflation too.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Well, doubly so if you live in the Midwest, or triply so if you live in Michigan, Ohio, West Virginia, Kentucky, Pennsylvania or about anywhere similar until first-class education is a given even at the university level.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
The only thing I'd do with that is to make sure I last long enough so that I get to experience the first vestiges of economic prosperity 100-200 years later that finally comes to the present day Rust Belt. The second would be to make sure no transition ever interferes with that prosperity for the longest possible time.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
http://www.ideosphere.com/fx-bin/Claim?claim=ITJOB S
The above link is a futures exchange (where you bet only your reputation) on the future of ITJOBS in the US. You can compare articles like this to the consensus in that market. The market above includes a measure of whether or not the jobs we will still have in the future are well paying jobs or not. The current market consensus opinion is pretty rosy.
From the start I'm inclined to believe the article is flawed from a statistical perspecitve.
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!
blow your mind already
>The spoiler is the business of health care --
Anyone interested in this point should read "The end of Medicine", reviewed on Slashdot recently.
I found it a sad read. In between the author explaining why he is a realli smart, cool guy, he takes you on a tour of the tech companies working in the US health care area. There is *big* money in detecting and dealing with the symptoms of bad life style. And a lot of the money is going on tech.
(The sad bit is how little is going on prevention - life style changes, proper food, exercise. Ah well)
Open Source Drum Kit, LPLC deve board - mjhdesigns.com
Easy. Why do you think the US is one of the proponents of IP and copyright? Because that's all that's left in its industry: Content.
Agriculture is heavily subsidized. As in many/almost all "western" countries. In other words, a lossy business for the state. It's kept running to remain at least in a moderate way able to sustain itself, just in case the world starts treating them like, say, Cuba and shuts down international trade (or in case some country/ies decide it's fun to sink ships going for US harbors). It's a war insurance, if you want. And many other countries do exactly the same.
Productive industry is pretty much in the same boat. From cars to consumer products, everything is manufactured abroad. The only hardware still going strong is military hardware, and there the government is even the main (and often only) customer, not something where they would EARN money. They're spending.
So what remains as the generator of tax is service and content. Now, service is pretty hard to export. You can only export it by getting people from abroad to your country. While it is a generator of tax, it largely only creates domestic tax. Tourists from outside the US become fewer and fewer (and, honestly, I can't blame anyone who doesn't want to dare going to the US).
So what remains as the bringer of foreign money (besides the biggest bringer, the ability to "tax" internationally by having the foreign trade currency at your pressing fingertips, the USD) and balances the foreign trade at least to some degree is content, patents and copyright.
Health care is certainly a big tax bringer of the future, but this most certainly only creates domestic tax and does not generate a single cent of foreign money pouring into the country.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
This is nothing short of a pyramid scheme. The best that health provision can do is keep money moving through the economy, whether that be a publicly funded health service paid for by taxes, or a private scheme paid for by insurance premiums or a combination of the two.
Other than the exporting of drugs (intellectual property or physical manufacture and export) the health system cannot generate wealth. On a global scale there is no wealth to be generated, only transferred.
On a small scale, a health system can help increase the wealth creation of other parts of the economy by eliminating trivial diseases, mending injuries without permanent disablement etc, which enables a non health worker to continue generating wealth in the economy but western economies are well past that point (although it's possible this isn't the case for the poorest US Americans) and, even with the rationned systems of Europe, we will spend money on intervention that far surpasses any possible wealth that the patient could possibly generate in the rest of their life. (I'm not saying this is a bad thing, merely that it is an economic cost of health provision)
Tim.
God said, "div D = rho, div B = 0, curl E = -@B/@t, curl H = J + @D/@t," and there was light.
That and the fact that 40M Americans do not have health insurance. It is very easy to combine those two facts. It means that rich are super-obscessed with their health, while producing almost zero children, while the poorest are struggling without any health care providing the majority of kids.
Net result: next generation less healthier than the previous one.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Over here (UK) I read time and time again that the US economy is currently being built on in unsustainable ways and that it could crash and burn any time. Add in that all the overseas oil is purchased by creating debt (effectively printing a bunch of money to buy it) and that said debt is being bought up by ther Chinese by the ton that we now have the position that China could effectively pull the rug on the US at any time but obviously, its not currently in their interests to do so. It does give them some leverage though. Lots of inetresting stuff to be found in magazines like The Economist etc.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
There is really no mystery here. More old people means larger government spending on health care. More spending means more jobs in the health care industry.
There are 2 other factors that have increased health-care spending. First is the millions of illegal aliens who have no insurance. They usually go straight to the emergency room, where physicians do not refuse service (even to people without insurance). The services are not paid by the illegal aliens but are paid by the government.
Illegal aliens do become sick. They often work at grueling, backbreaking work. There is no incentive for American businesses (that employ illegal labor) to improve the working conditions because they can always find another desperate laborer if the current laborer becomes too sick to work. After all, the USA has an open-border policy with Mexico and the rest of South/Central America.
The other factor that has increased health-care spending is the excessive hours which Americans are forced to work. "60 Minutes", the renowned CBS program, recentedly reported that the average American now works more hours than even the average Japanese. These additional hours of work take a severe toll on workers' health. For example, 60+ hours of computer work per week leads to cardiovascular problems due to lack of exercise. The excessive hours also strain family relations, leading to the need for counseling or psychotherapy. In Silion Valley, the divorce rate is about 30% higher than the national rate.
It seems that the economic engine that is the health care industry is already having its fuel siphoned to India. Employers are enrolling their staff in healthcare plans that will send patients overseas for medical procedures that can be scheduled in advance.
The appeal is obvious: Heart surgeries and hip replacements in such countries as India, Thailand and Mexico can be had for less than one-third the cost in the USA.
At the same time, medical costs in the USA are rising rapidly, with no end in sight.
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
What if you're in a country that has mandatory health care, unemployment insurance, retirement insurance and so on? Where is my increasing value! (*cry, rant*)
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
You can get a kidney there for a price you can afford. Or you can't get any over here. You can maybe die from AIDS over there, or you can die for sure here.
Pick your prefered cause of death.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Fundamentally, the artical missed many points. For example, aging population and abusive/careless lifestyle (leading to obesity and others) are valid issues for human societies. It will cost more money, effort, and resources gradually. In other countries, the same thing is happening as well.
In order to make a judgement on whether the economy is heathy or not, it is necessary to understand that the market sectors grow in turns! It is not possible for all sectors to grow simultaneously. Moreover, to downplay a fast healthcare growth in recent years is similar to claim a fast housing growth is pure bad. It neglects the fact that the housing market did help to land the US economy after IT bubble.
IMHO, the fast growth in the health care may trigger another round of growth in IT, manufacture, as well as other market sectors. A couple of reasons are :
1) We still know very little on ourselves;
2) There are many barriers waiting for being broken. For example, MS started to penetrating the health care software industry this summer.
I feel quite excited for the new opportunities actually. Please feel free to drop me a message for any m/billion dollar business idea. If I am your partner, there will be no disappointment. :-)
^(oo)^pig~
The U.S. economy probably is less healthy than it appears to be on the surface. We have a huge federal budget deficit as well as a huge trade deficit. A large percentage of our tax dollars goes towards paying the interest on what we have already borrowed. The majority of the federal budget deficit is being financed by money borrowed from Asian companies such as China. My knowledge about economics is somewhat limited, but my non-expert understanding is that in a strange sort of way the federal budget deficit helps make the trade deficit possible. Money needs to circulate between the two counties for trade to occur so China needs to send the dollars they they accumlate back here, somehow, to keep the price of the dollar from totally collapsing. So they buy T-bills from the U.S. Treasury to help us finance our deficit and the war in Iraq. That keeps the value of the dollar high enough for us to be able to buy goods from China at Wallmart and elsewhere. Correct me if my understanding of the economics is wrong, but doesn't the huge federal budget deficit help to make the huge trade deficit and loss of American jobs possible.
There are other problems as well such as a possible housing bubble in which many people have purchased homes with zero-interest loans or no down payments. If there is a bubble and it collapses then many of them could be in serious trouble. There is also high consumer debt levels and GM and Ford also seem to be in trouble.
So apparently, the overpriced health care that most of us can barely afford is now one of the main engines of the U.S. economy. There is that and housing (at least for the moment). The U.S. still dominates in making music and movies which Hollywood has been trying to protect with all the DRM and RIAA stuff they have been trying to push on all of us and the rest of the world. So the $500 per month that I pay for medical insurance is apparently going to support one of the few growing industries that the U.S. has heft.
Oh and lets not forget that all the baby boomers will soon be retiring and demanding Social Security and Medicare payments. Baby boomers have had smaller families which means that each retired baby boomer will eventually be supported by only two tax-payers. Younger people can plan on doing that while paying off the federal deficit at the same time while working in a job market in which in which many of the best jobs have gone overseas. Am I wrong in thinking that all this is not a sustainable plan for a long term healthy economy? Would someone please explain to me why politicians, the press and voters have not been more concerned about decades of large scale deficit spending. The combination of the war in Iraq and the tax cuts have made the deficit spending worse than ever. It is almost like we are trying to burn ourselves out econonomically. Would someone who has more knowledge about macro-economics please explain why I should not be worried about any of this! It everything really OK?
US unemployment statistics don't count those who have given up looking for work.
I'm sure Halliburton agree! The war on terror was a business move by that war criminal George W. Bin Laden and his friends, just look at who financed Nazi Germany. The rich get richer from staging wars, they profit from knocking it down and then they profit from rebuilding it.
And if you run around town throwing bricks through windows, you will also greatly contribute to the economy by providing many jobs for glassworkers.
Yes he can be a difficult old coot, but trying to help where I can has also provided a few lessons about what to be aware of when its my turn to face the same descendant-free zone, two of which are relevant here:
1. At the top of the food chain, the doctors need to spend less time treating the information on their (admittedly low tech) clipboards and more time taking a broader interest in the totality of the patient's condition. Any dividend from IT there is going to be negative in terms of health outcomes for however many years it takes to start getting some real AI into the loop.
2. Computers and the net had been my friend's lifeline for years before the two he has now mostly spent in hospital, but it is currently beyond the wit of the system to recognise the mental health benefits that could be provided to even a portion of geriatric patients by encouraging them to (continue to) communicate via the net while physically restricted from other activities. They provide it in kids' ward, but it is beyond their imaginations that it might be even more important to the elderly where the dividend from increased IT could be huge.
-- Our systemic servants do not good masters make.
I run a small IT consulting business (it's just me) and two of my clients are in health care. Business is good, and these clients are growing like gangbusters.
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.
Petro-Dollars!!
Yeeee-Haaaww!!
eek -- just replying to kill my mod ("redundant" instead of "interesting") -- apparently the new beta discussion system mods instantly, so i can no longer click randomly and scroll down the list to the correct mod! i don't like that at all...
Nothing has been made because Aunty Tilly got a $20,000 bypass instead of a $5 bottle of asprin.
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.
Support a few technologists in Washington.
...someone who lost a manufacturing job with good benefits and wage in exchange for a service job with no benefits at half the previous wage as employed. Someone who has a part time job is employed, even if it is just a few hours a week. Making burgers is now a manufacturing job.
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.
Government "borrows" money, which creates dollars to be paid to government contractors who pay their suppliers, shareholders and employees.
The reason US inflation hasn't skyrocketed in the past in response is oil. The producers are paid in US dollars which means the rest of the world has to buy these new dollars to pay for their oil, essentially what's happening is that inflation is being exported from the US to the rest of the oil consuming world, or rather, the US economy is heavily subsidised by the oil consuming world. With the falling dollar though and corresponding reduction in the value of their dollar holdings, some are switching those dollar holdings to alternative currencies so less of that inflation is being exported and the falling dollar accelerates. Prices appear to increase correspondingly.
You will have noticed inflation and interest rates increasing.
Deleted
$600 billion is the outlay for Health and Human Services, which provides a lot of things besides health care (the "Human Services" part). By comparison, military spending has been around 500 billion and interest on the national debt 400 billion.
The problem is that fewer can afford "going private" -- after paying much higher taxes to pay for everyone else's health care.
(But the US health care system seems even more dysfunctional than my local Swedish one. That is another discussion.)
Karma: Excellent (My Karma? I wish...:-( )
Healthcare just doesn't seem to be satisfying as a driver of the economy. I think that a lot of us don't want healthcare to be the driving force in the economy because it doesn't represent something that we want (or want to think about). We want to stay healthy - we don't want to think about having more surgery, seeing more doctors, or taking more medications. And we certainly don't want to pay more for it. But, ignoring it certainly won't change the economics of health care.
There was an essay in the New York Times a few weeks ago arguing that health care is the new driving force behind the US economy. Furthermore, it argued that it is just fine should that be the case. One, they suggest that there are many more (and better) treatments available now than ever before, so we should expect to pay more for this improved standard of living. Two, that stagnant or falling prices across the board for other non-energy products (food, electronics, etc) mean that people have more disposable income - why not spend it on healthcare? I thought both arguments were flawed.
We should be trying to improve the standard of living. If prices fall, or are stagnant, against wages, that should be a good thing. People should be able to afford more of what they want. But, if prices of one particular sector rise to cover that gap, it just shifts wealth from one sector to another. If healthcare prices rise just because people can afford to pay more, it shifts money from fields where prices are stagnant (eg. farming) to fields where prices can afford to rise (healthcare). There's not necessarily an improvement in the quality of life; you just write a bigger check to your doctor, and a smaller check at the grocery store.
There are, of course, medical breakthroughs - and medical breakthroughs cost money. But it's not obvious that improvements in medicine should necessarily always increase the cost of care. Compared to twenty years ago, the electronics industry now makes a computer that's hundreds of times more powerful at a tenth of the cost. DVD players or VCRs are dirt cheap. The price of food has been relatively flat, compared to inflation. Improvements don't necessarily need to be expensive. So, why has healthcare become so much more expensive - and when are price increases going to level off? Part of this is that healthcare in the US is incredibly inefficient. Compare the price of a surgical procedure and hospital stay in the US (if you can actually understand the bill) with the price in the UK or Canada. Not just the price that the patient pays - the total price paid by the private or government-subsidized insurance company. I don't know if anyone's rigorously studied this, but numbers I've seen quoted in articles tends to be around a factor of 3 difference. A $6000 procedure in the UK costs $18000 in the US. Why? Privatized healthcare _should_ be more efficient, shouldn't it? There _should_ be competition among hospitals to minimize cost, make billing straightforward, and eliminate errors. But, there isn't. Why not? And don't even get started on the difficulty of getting an itemized bill (the subject of another recent NYT article), or on the difference between what insurance pays for healthcare vs. what an uninsured individual pays for healthcare.
If all this spending on healthcare means there will be a cure for cancer/aging/posting on slashdot by the time I'm 65, then maybe it'll be worth it. But it has the feeling of being wasted money in an inefficient system. Noone benefits from that.
Lies, damn lies and statistics.
This sig is intentionally left blank
"let them go work in the health care industry where mechanization has less benefit or opportunity.
I spent a couple years of my life in college as a Radiological Technologies major. I loved the hard science, but hated the application. My advisor was urging me to finish up and specialize in radiation therapy. This was mostly because I am not really a people person and "radiating" people "near" to death to possibly kill cancer would not have phased me. Least not while I was hiding behind a lead wall. *wink* I was scheduling a class to learn how to draw blood when I finally made the choice to change direction. So I changed majors to Computer Science, struggled my way thru the advanced math courses. I am not bad at math. I had to learn everything from basic algrebra thru second level calculus. I graduated about two years after the bubble burst. I now have a fairly descent job as a systems admin and I know I am happier than I would have been "nuking" people. But I know I am not suited for the Health Care service industry. And many other people are not suited for it either. Is the idea of varied jobs for a widely diversified labor force just a pipe dream? Speaking of pipe dreams... If I had only wanted money, I should have been a plumber... It is amazing what those guys charge!
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
"Since 2001, 1.7 million new jobs have been added in the health-care sector, which includes related industries such as pharmaceuticals and health insurance. Meanwhile, the number of private-sector jobs outside of health care is no higher than it was five years ago."
We had 283M people in 2001 and have over 297M now, 14M more people. But only 1.7M more jobs. 88% of the growth is jobless.
The medical industry just isn't meeting the challenge. We can't blame Bush for that, because he's maiming as many people in Iraq and Afghanistan as he can (numbers higher in secret CIA prisons).
--
make install -not war
... really, I am. I realized early on that the health-care industry was going to be all about geriatric care. Well, that, and also being a cog in the insurance machine. I just wasn't ready to commit to that level of constant pathos.
Instead, I write software in Python. Definitely the better choice.
There is only one Earth. That means there is only one economy. Much of the economic strife in the world today is the result of the slow and horribly uneven break down of the natural and artifical barriers that make it look like there are local and foreign economies. Natural barriers boil down to distance and the proportional cost of transportation. Artificial barriers include such things as tariffs and even the concept of the nation state itself.
We all need to take step back and look at the forest and not the individual trees. The world economy must be self sufficient and self sustaining. No one region must achieve that result by itself.
Stonewolf
P.S.
This point of view comes from a fellow whose last full time job was moved to India along with the rest of the company when the decided that the US wasn't a viable market for their products. I and many many others have been hurt by all these changes. But, they have to happen.
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. Those businesses employ fewer Americans today than they did in 1998, when the Internet frenzy kicked into high gear.
"That Guy" got replaced by a small shell script. This industry is one of the few that has the ability to do more with less.
--fatboy
Well the only way I can think of making health care less labor-intensive is to use robots. Lots of 'em. Or some kind of super robot that can do everything like cleaning bedpans, checking blood pressure, bathing patients, flirting with the X-ray machines etc. We could call it Super Robot, or maybe Frank. I think I prefer Frank.
Or, on the women's wards, Consuela.
[Why do you think that The Powers That Be import them by the millions every year?]
Over a third of young people dont buy health insurance. The health system would cost less if more of the population would participate. Then when un-insured get seriously injured or ill they declare bankruptcy or have their relatives pay.
The ongoing incorporation of nanotech may lead to a lot more need for health care. It should create more jobs in the legal industry, too. Database integration between health and legal could be a profitable IT venture.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
My first reaction when I hear about an industry hiring so many people, is "how can I get those people fired so that the industry's product won't be so expensive?"
I don't think I've ever heard of anyone comparison shopping for healthcare here in USA. And now that I think of it, I don't know how I would. It's not like prices are published somewhere, or that I can go get a copy of Consumer Reports that shows who gives the most value.
Insurance is the reason. A lot of people think of insurance as healthcare, rather than "catastophic oops" hedging. If, when you consider going to a clinic or hospital, you're not thinking, "oh shit, how much will this cost?" then you're not going to exert a market force.
If the patient doesn't exert a market force, then the provider will not be subject to market forces.
And every once in a while, some politician runs on a platform of further removing market forces, to make healthcare even more expensive. At least insurance users have a little say over costs, by shopping around for insurance plans (though it's horribly indirect). Politicians get the bright idea of having involuntary taxes pay for healthcare, so that nobody will have any incentive at all to reduce cost. It's not like someone will say, "Well, I don't want to spend as much on healthcare, so I've decided to pay less, and the only way to do that is to pay less income tax, and the way to do that is to have less income. Therefore, I'm leaving IBM to accept McDonald's offer." ;-)
I think if we can remove the indirections and somehow increase the information flow, we could get people to start thinking about cost/value, and create incentive for advancing the tech. I won't be happy until all the doctors and their support staff are unemployed, because we all have medi-droids taking care of us. You don't want a medi-droid? Ok, fine, hire expensive humans. But I sure want one. And if I can't have a robot, then let me hire someone who makes $10k/year, tele-operates from New Delhi, and prescribes 20-year-old no-longer-patented drugs. I might not live as long as you, but while I'm alive, I'll have a lot more beer money. :-)
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
After reading the article, I didn't get the idea it was trying to unravel a mystery, so much as point out that we're running a risk of becoming economically lopsided. The healthcare industry needs to take a closer look at achieving efficiency, rather than "scaling up" labor as the only solution.
Many folks actually working in hospitals and doctor's offices would be quick to tell you that nearly half of all the labor going on there revolves around paperwork and meeting legal requirements. I do some computer consulting and support work for a very small doctor's office, and they recently had to move to a larger office simply because they used up all of their floor space with file cabinets full of old patient records!
Being that we run a job bank, I am not seeing that the industry is stagnant. What I am seeing is that though many jobs are getting offshored, new ones are being created back here. Companies are recognizing that having a strong IT staff helps optimize their businesses. What I am also seeing that I don't like is that though companies tend to be making a nice proffit, they are not passing this onto their employees. Salaries have somewhat stagnated in general and are not keeping up with inflation. Just my watchful view. The job bank at http://www.jobbank.com/
JohnE
jobbank.com - Search jobs, post resume,
You know, some of us don't have the compassion for others, natural calling and a clean enough background check to consider a switch from IT to a Healthcare Career! Another case of "Sorry buddy, you're screwed! Shoulda thought about it when times were good!"
While at my previous job, a big drug company introduced into the market a drug to fight sepsis, infections in the blood stream. And if you think about it, that is one tough disease to fight, because it is spread all through the body. This big drug company created the drug, one that is definitely a benefit to people suffering from sepsis, after twenty years and at the cost of nearly one billion dollars. A lot of very intelligent, very educated people were involved in developing this drug: chemists, doctors, pharmacists, doctors, nurses, their IT and corporate support staff, etc etc etc. Those people are highly trained, highly educated, and are exactly the kind of people you want to be happy and well-compensated. (Remember, the USSR paid its doctors like it paid its factory workers, and the stories of communist state healthcare were horrific.)
Now, surely an organization that spends that type of money and other resources to develop something that is very useful for society deserves to try to make money on it, right? I myself have no problem with it. I will grant you that the medicine to fight sepsis is expensive, but if not for all that effort, it wouldn't exist. And as I told my father, "If you think a drug is too expensive, consider the price you'd pay if you went without it."
Back in "the good old days", we are told, healthcare wasn't as expensive. This is not quite true. First, a lot of it was company-sponsored and was a HUGE drag on American corporations' bottom line as time progressed. The costs were there, but they were well-hidden. And even then, a lot of people went broke on health-related costs. For another thing, healthcare wasn't as effective back then and people died younger. Injuries that, at one time, might have required amputation or even resulted in death can now be treated to allow people to return to productive lives, or even to practice law. One example: I had a knee injury about 20 years ago, and I was told there was a >>50% chance I'd never walk again. Today that same injury can almost be treated with outpatient surgery. So the cost to repair the injury, when the effectiveness of the process is taken into account, is probably less.
The biggest cost in private healthcare in America is, surprise, insurance, which is caused by, surprise, lawsuit-happy Americans. Overall, the biggest cause of the rising cost is increasing government involvement. A friend's wife is a lawyer for one the big hospitals here in town. One night we were talking shop and she mentioned that the hospital makes maybe $3 on every $100 ... and that it was dropping. That is not a good EBITA. I asked her why and she said that it was medicare and medicaid. If a procedure happens and there is a problem between patient, hospital, and insurance company, it can usually get resolved within a month, maybe two. Not always, but usually, and we never notice this 99% of the time. It's not a perfect system, granted, but what is?
Now, when the issue involves the government, the government will question everything, delay, demand, and often have to be taken to court to settle the most routine of issues. And as more and more people have gotten onto government healthcare, their administrative costs have skyrocketed. I can well believe it; when I was a youngster, my doctor's nurse also functioned as receptionist and did his paperwork. Have you seen how many people are doing paperwork today for each actual healthcare person? Most of that is government-related. Think about it: insurance companies have a good incentive to decrease paperwork, because it means more profit, while government agencies have a good incentive to increase paperwork, because it means they can get more t
The Independent: Reverend Spooner Arrested in Friar Tuck Incident - ISIHAC, Historical Headlines
Wrong boyo!
It's the rest of having to pay to treat all of you wheezing, lard-butt, diabetic, couch potatoes that is putting such a drag on our economy. Year after year the cost of providing health insurance to employees goes up. This year 3%, last year 25%, the year before 12%... In 2001 our company had a great year. We all got bonuses and raises. In 2004, and 2005 we had equally good years except now healthcare costs ate up all the extra money. No bonuses, no raises. In fact since 2001 we've only given 2 paltry "cost of living" increases that have covered less than half of the actual incresed cost of living.
So in a very real way diabetic, smoking, lard-butts (DSLB) are the reason that my standard of living is actually going down each year. Before you cry "troll!!" It is not entirely the fault of the DSLBs. The libertarian in me says the obesity epidemic is caused by DSLB's individual choices on a daily basis. The anarchist in me says that corporate capitalism has learned how to exploit our own biology to sell us more profitable food. Diet soda's actually stimulate hunger and are frequently packaged with greasy potato chips. Carbohydrates, sugars, fats, all cause pleasurable chemical reactions in you that encourage you to go out and buy more carbs, sugar, and fat, which in turn makes you sick.
So is our sucky ecomony (which they keep telling me is so strong) the fault of bad personal decisions or evil corporate greed? Yes.
-- QED
Myths debunked, one at a time:
When you go see a doctor for any old cold, bruise, cracked rib
I agree that the vast majority of the time, it is in fact a wasted visit. However, because of the design of American medical care, there isn't an alternative to seeing a doctor. Maybe the ideal here is a first-level practitioner who is not a doctor, but can weed out the common cold cases? Again, the medical system is NOT set up like that.
Since those on insurance or socialized healthcare don't have to pay the doctor much if anything
I agree that medical care is like freeways, there is infinite demand for consumption. To extend/abuse the analogy, freeways aren't stuffed with cars 24/7. Neither are public health systems. No public health care system is perfect. But some offer a great deal more services than others AND reduce the social cost of sickness in a country.
you increase the demand for a doctor's service
Temporarily. You conveniently forget the temporary spike in demand while medical colleges pump out more doctors to satisfy demand. But, in the U.S. the system is not designed like this. Maybe you get more doctors, but the system is designed to support -only- doctors dispensing medical care. So there is no way to innovate/automate care.
Healthcare is not a right, it's an industry
I agree that health care is not a -right- per se, but more of an expectation that the wealthiest country in the world should provide health insurance as kind of a basic service like sewage and electricity. Sadly we provide it to less than 50% of it's population. That's without even approaching the issue of what passes for "health insurance." And yet, we manage to provide electricity reliably through a very regulated industry. Hmmm. So -maybe- regulated markets work sometimes?
To provide healthcare, you need:
Yes to the first item, no to the rest. How is innovation lowering my health care costs? It hasn't.
attachment to good health
As a barometer of the relative prosperity of a nation, health statistics are an important way to compare and contrast. Pretending it's not important is just being foolish.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Lets outsource the baby boomers. Send them to nursing homes in India
Though you are joking, I believe this is almost guaranteed to occur.
That, and long-term prison inmates. Both extremely expensive human intensive operations that can be done much cheaper outside of the US.
Since when does technological progress replace wage increases ? This is a right wingnut idea, that since 200 inch plasma tvs and 500 channels of high def x rated tv cost less, you don't deserve a wage increase, while the very wealthy do
a very pernicious idea, on par with the 19th cent notion that labor unions were illegal because they intefered with a property owners right to use his property (look it up)
Back in the bust of 2000-2001 my brother ditched IT in favor of going back to school to become a radiation therapist (cancer treatment). It took him about 4 years to complete this transformation and today is he starting his new job! I am quite proud of him.
I considered doing something similar by becoming a clinical neurophysiologist. You assist surgeons to prevent damage to nerves during proceedures. It would have yielded a MS. I declined to do that in favor of going back to IT one last time, at a "Telcom Giant", and earn my MBA instead.
Now before you scoff at my choice let me explain my rationale. I knew that healthcare would be booming for some time to come. I also knew that tech related work in the healthcare sector would also fall to global outsourcing. See radiology, etc... You can imagine that all manner of people will be rushing into this new bonanza much like the 90s internet craze.
The best bet you have IMHO is to create unique skills that facilitate entrepreneurial activities effectively. You can bet that the companies you work for will keep an eye on lowering costs(You!). You need to be your own boss to have any type of control over your future. Think of how many bosses you worked for that you actually though were better at that than you?
I'm not saying an MBA is necessary. I destroyed two start ups before going to business school. I hope that trend does not continue. What I am saying is that you absolutely have to invest in yourself now more than ever before. There are plenty of hungry workers overseas that are now closer to you...
This healthcare story is very depressing. By and large, government and healthcare are both cost centers IMHO. Keep raising your costs and see how well you compete in the global economy.
Work hard, learn hard, squeeze the maximum yield from life.
This article is informative and all, but it doesn't give us techies much insight on the companies that are providing the IT behind these major healthcare organizations. There are a handful of major vendors out there, and a lot of smaller ones. These vendors not only create jobs in their cities, but require the facilities that use the software to hire teams of tech savvy individuals. Only a small percentage of hospitals are using Electronic Medical Records (EMR) and the process for health care organizations to convert from paper charts can sometimes take years. These roll outs give a lot of jobs to consultants too. I'm really surprised the article didn't mention that. I was trying to think of some good links I could give you all that would list some major vendors, but I can't think of what would be fair since I work for a vendor that supplied a software to a number of the healthcare organizations mentioned in the article.
Here's a link to HIS talk though, it's a forum for those of us in the healthcare IT industry.
http://histalk.blog-city.com/
If you read it you'll see a lot of company names repeated, in alphabetical order here are a few of the big ones that come to mind (difinitely not a comprehensive list): Cerner, Epic Systems Corp., GE Healthcare, McKesson,
> 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 U.S. tech job market is not stagnant. It's been outsourced. That's why there are no tech jobs anymore and there won't be any again. The lost of I.T. except for sys admins / helpdesk hasn't hurt the U.S. economy because upper management makes even more money now that they are pay Apoo to program.
A greater rich-poor gap doesn't hurt the economy overall because the rich are the ones who measure the economy.
What happens in 25-30 years when all the baby-boomers are dying? Sure, right now all the WWII vets are dying...and unfortunately they are the ones that gave birth to the baby-boomers...which means they are only 25-30 years behind.
What happens to a country as it becomes more apparent they they have a severely overbuilt industry with no demand anymore? Not to mention the eternal hope that one day, going to the doctor will actually cure you instead of send you back every 2 weeks for treatment.
I am afraid of what will happen when I am older, and the health care industry is again in the news, but now for vast layoffs like the current auto industry. Will all the good doctors get paid more money to leave than work and retire early? Will this leave all the losers that amputate the wrong leg....
I wonder about the economy then. I am very afraid that it may tank, and along with our wonderful global stain...that the Good old US of A is not going to be so good anymore. I am actually a bit concerned that there might be some sort of revolt and the country will break up or reorganize. Seriously. I wonder.
Who is this that even the wind and the waves obey Him? Surely this computer must submit also!
Problem is... even if you directly bear the cost... you're going to be thinking "oh shit, I don't want to die. Damn the cost."
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Ummm, which economist said that the Exxon-Valdez disaster was a huge economic success?
You are right in that individuals rarely exert market pressure on healthcare providers now. However, medical insurance companies and HMOs most definitely do. Having patients given expensive treatments costs their insurance companies significant money, so they try to steer their patients towards cheaper sources (aka "primary care physicians" and the like). So there is still significant market pressure to keep costs down. The real problem is that patients have little choice in their insurance providers, since that is usually determined by their employer, so individuals have little power in this system, and the quality of care can decline as a result of the insurance companies seeking lower-cost medicine.
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".
Except for the fact that, more often than not, bypass surgery kills the patient. I clipped an article about a newspaper guy who died three weeks after his bypass surgery. One medical researcher says that bypass surgery belongs in the medical archives. Bypass surgery is so common not because it's effective, but because it's flashy (a real power trip to hold someone's beating heart in your hands), financially rewarding for the surgeon, and the patient doesn't have to pick up the tab (uninsured people don't have bypass surgery).
We're human beings; we take care of each other because we sympathize and empathize.
When my grandmother had cancer, I helped take care of her... Which included regular visits to the clinic for "treatment". By that time, my 87-year old Grandmother had lived her life, and was simply "going through the motions", pretending that she was trying to get better for the sake of her husband and children. Of course, Grandma didn't care what her treatment cost because Medicare and her supplemental insurance were paying for it. Mayo Clinic didn't care what their services cost either, because the federal government was picking up most of the tab.
Grandma's stint with conventional (pharmaceutical) cancer treatment lasted six months, exactly the time that her doctor said she would survive without his therapies. Perhaps the treatment gave her a few extra months, perhaps it killed her off even quicker (by destroying her immune system). Since I was around so much, I know she was miserable for most that time. Never heard a final figure, but it was probably between $50k and $100k - quite a bill for no benefit whatsoever.
Medicare picking up the tab was not compassionate, sympathetic, or empathetic. These are personal qualities, of families caring for each other. I argue that, because Medicare pays for high-tech medicine, and not "proper nutrition", the suffering of my grandmother was increased. (Grandma's doctor sent her to a nutritionist at the outset. "She wanted me to eat five servings of vegetables a day. She's CRAZY!").
My grandfather's in a similar situation: had a seizure/"heart attack" of some sort three years ago. Doctors decided he'd benefit from a defibrillator. His bill for that episode totaled around $100k... Three years later he's still alive, but now that Grandma's gone he's just waiting to die. His heart would've given out, if not for the artificial pacemaking functionality. He's anxiously waiting for the day that the defibrillator's battery is depleted.
Compassion is caring for your own familiy member when they're sick, or volunteering at a charity hospital for the poor. Charity took care of the poor's medical needs before the government stepped to the plate with Medicaid, otherwise known as "wellfare for doctors and medical equipment manufacturers" (an MRI machine costs $1-4 million).
Medicare is cruel to old people, and has made medical services for the rest of us exhorbitantly expensive. The high prices won't last forever, the healthcare system will collapse soon enough of its own accord, and we will return to a system that is affordable for most. Robert Zieve, M.D., has written some books on this coming transition to effective, affordable care.
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
So there is no way to innovate/automate care. It's not patient care that is responsible for the bloat in Healthcare job creation, it's all of the backend BS that our current system requires to keep those care providers paid. Billing, Scheduling, Payment posting and follow-up...all the things that need to happen to keep a doctors door open, and which require increasing numbers of employees to manage. There are a lot of various, standard industry tools which can be used to automate these data entry type jobs. Healthcare has an overabundance of "seat fillers". People who have been performing repetitive data entry tasks for 20+ years, and who could easily be replaced by a script. One analyst with interfacing and scripting skills can replace 20 blue-haired cubicle jockies.
No battles to the death are recalled. Mumpsman can hit to attack and cause brainsmashing.
You won't hear about this in the U.S.: you'd need to read European or Canadian newspapers
<infinite calmness mode>
Canada has massive forests on its west coast, and lower lumber prices there than in the U.S. or elsewhere in Canada.
The U.S. has placed a very large tariff on west-coast lumber, whose effect is to bring its price up to the U.S. norm, thus protecting the U.S. industry.
However, NAFTA was supposed to make the U.S. and Canada compete with each other, and lower tariff and non-tariff barriers to competition. And sure enough, all the NAFTA tribunals have ruled in favor of Canada.
Nevertheless, the U.S. applies a new tariff as each previous one is ruled illegal. The current (Conservative, meaning vaguely republican) Canadian government has now officially given up, and states it will no longer fight for free trade in at least softwood lumber.
</infinite calmness mode>
This is seriously oversimplified, but the situation is really really unpleasant, with the government threatening to apply extra tariffs to companies which don't consent to letting the government give up...
davecb@spamcop.net
See Shadow Statistics for more on how the government cooks the economic reports.
US Trade Deficit: When the Sausage comes home to Roost 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 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 (2003) says that the predicted collapse is well underway. The current trouble at Ford and General Motors 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 for more on how globalization & the federal reserve bleeds america dry.
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
However, if two doctors offer two different prices for the same operation, you are going to go with the cheaper one.
It's not patient care that is responsible for the bloat in Healthcare job creation, it's all of the backend BS that our current system requires to keep those care providers paid.
I would argue the one major bottleneck is at the doctor level. But you bring up another good point because that backend BS is all proprietary and sorely in need of standardization.
There are a lot of various, standard industry tools which can be used to automate these data entry type jobs.
This is where you are wrong. Every insurance entity has a different and intentionally very complex billing system that burdens the entire system. And then, ask a doctor how far out his Insurance Co. Accounts Recievables have become over the last 10 years.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Another point - like it or not we nearly all have to have health care at some point in our lives. And like it or not, we all have to pay for it. Arguably, the problem is that we are paying way too much for it. Why the cost is so high another complex question that's probably beyond the scope of this thread (but I do have my own opinions on that).
What if the Hokey Pokey really is what it's all about?
And, another thing, sometimes (possibly even most), IT gets shortchanged, due to the complexities of the multiple parties who have a financial interest in maintaining or decreasing the status quo.
If the quality is the same, sure. But, if we were talking Tacos, I'm gonna go with the highest quality if its the same price. Your example doesn't say anything about quality of care, just availability of procedure and price.
Healthcare or no, it's looking like the US's economy is moving to be solely based on intellectual property - patents, copyrights, licensing. Actual manufacturing and construction of anything will mostly occur abroad.
So, uh, how do we expect to maintain such a in the global economy? Seems like law enforcement and force are the only way. Not really sure what kind of national policy supports that. But Scary that.
..I know I am still bullish, even at today's prices. Gold, silver, steel, lead and brass, all useful in their own ways....Oh ya, this is slashdot,so I'll throw in copper, which actually did quite nice this year.
The federal reserve is...neither!
What is the case is that there are a number of ways you can partitiion all employment areas into two sets, such that the net job increase of one set is zero. One of those ways is to let one set be all areas of health care and the other set be everything else. When you do this, you're cancelling out other high-job-growth fields with shrinking fields, and making health care stand out like a gangrenous thumb.
The increase in the health care sector is extraordinary, yes. But to portray the facts the way TFA does is just deceptive.
"But all your emitter and collector are belong to me!"
I find it amusing how everything is the patient's fault until real science is actually applied to the problem and then we often find that the old rules were just work-ethic quakery. Just a few years ago doctors claimed that gastric ulcers were caused by the patient's stressful lifestyle and until someone discovered the bacteria that actually caused it.
now if all of you would need a spleen transplant,
just think how many more jobs we'd have...
seriously!
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.
And if we do provide it, it greatly increases the incentives to sneak across the border, exasperating the problem.
If you really care, Fix Mexico! Form grass-root campaigns, etc.
Table-ized A.I.
...is um, well.....um, it's, well it's um.....I think it's maybe, um...
Table-ized A.I.
the health-care industry has added 1.7 million jobs. The rest of the private sector? None
But, but, but, what about all the Slashdot people who said "there's plenty of jobs out there!'
Oh, they were WRONG!?!?
Big surprise.
I know. Too much truth in one reply. Mod it down. [voice="nelson"]ha ha[/voice]
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
Congratulations on completely missing my point...
No. I, and most anyone else, would spend as much money as necessary, to get the operation done by the surgeon with the lowest mortality rate. That's assuming this is a major operation, of course.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
What fraction of doctor visits are "oh shit, I'm dying" scenarios?
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Define value.
As for helthcare building none (allowing for your implicated hazy concept of value) a heltier person is in a better position to produce goods and services. A sick person is an economic sink. And here we enter all the intangibles that the economists don;t quantify. Will all the relatives of Aunty Tilly be more productie from now on because they don't need to take as much care of her now that she can sign for the Olympics thanks to her repaired arteries?
And as for the Exxon Valdez, you must be joking. The cost of paid insurance and the impact in the balance sheets of insurance companies most liekely evens out any cleaning efforst you are thinking about as a positive economic input in the economy. And of course, intangibles unnacounted for again, the economic impact of the environmental damaged is not easy to quantify, so the economists shrugg it off not because there is no impact, but because it is too difficult to measure.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
You make it sound like if economics was based all in cold scietific facts.
If there is an area of human endeavour influenced by irrational decisions that is economics.
So emotion has its rightful place in economic planning, and frankly I don't wan to be let to die when I am 90 just beacuse some idiotic thirty something thought it makes great economic sense.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
-Ban advertisement of unhealty food and tax it accordingly. Too much fat? Tax it. Too much sugar? Tax it. Too much salt? Tax it.
-Tobacco should become a target in the "war on drugs". OR at least tax it more. Higher. Even higher!
-Preventive medicine: yearly checkups. BMI > 25? Tax the fat bastard.
I hope you get my drift. Do this and most people that reach old age will do it in a state that demands less care and less drain in resources....
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
And that is making the activity they do completely lawful, or what is the same, to have complete free movement between Mexico and the US.
If the US goverment (of any colour) cared about improving their country, they would look at Europe and see how successful that policy can be, even between countries with very different economies (when Spain, Portugal and Greece joined the EU, the typical racists claimored the rich countries were going to be swamped. Well, it did not happen).
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
If that was the case, executions would stop wherever they are used, people would be that scared of commiting any crime, but that is never the case (because no decent country uses them).
Here I am implying that the US should stand and look the fine company their are with (China, Saudi Arabia) when it comes to executions.
Executions are the tool of the despot, not of an enlightened democrat, it is a most puzzling anomaly of the US society that a democratic, mostly christian country, decides to use barbaric medieval methods to deal with criminals (which are disproportonately black, quelle surprise).
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Elderly who DO have descendants (possibly several generations) would benefit too. One of the things I've realised being on the other side of the globe from my family is how valuable the net can be (IM, Flickr, blogs) in staying connected to absent relatives updated. Wouldn't surprise me if that has a measurable effect on wellbeing of a convalescent.
you had me at #!