Sunday, March 16, 2008

Health Care Growth: Wasteful Bloat, Jobs Program, or Better Care?


This graphic shows that health care accounts for nearly half the increase in private sector jobs from March 01 to December 07. Questions: Does this increase translate into better health care or more bureaucratic bloat? Is wasteful health care the new jobs program?

3 comments:

Robert D Feinman said...

There is nothing wrong with designing a deliberately labor intensive system. Communist China and the USSR did it as a way to keep people employed.

Japan uses protectionism to keep marginal rice farmers employed.

The problem arises when there isn't a consensus about doing this. Which would you rather have, the present make-work militarism or an over staffed health system? This assumes you believe in some sort of Keynesian stimulative effect.

As we are forced to move towards a society which depends less upon making physical "stuff" we will need many kinds of make-work to keep people off the streets. Everyone can't be a hedge fund manager...

degustibus said...

"Health care" covers a wide range of jobs, and I suspect most health care jobs are minimum-wage caretaking jobs in nursing homes and old age warehouses. The rise in health care workers does not necessarily mean increased services for those who are not elderly. Nor does it mean that such marginal employment is wasteful.

Anonymous said...

Dear Blog Owner,

My name is Jeff, and I work with the website Real Hospital Jobs:

http://www.realhospitaljobs.com

I recently found your site and am very interested in exchanging links.

As you know the linking benefits both of us and will also add value to your blog as we have many Hospital Jobs posted.

Please post a link to my site as follows:

Title: Hospital Jobs
URL:http://www.realhospitaljobs.com
Description: A Health care Job board focused on Hospital employment.

Once you've posted the link, let me know the URL of the page that it's on, and I will post it on our site.

Thank you very much,

Jeff
realhospitaljobs@gmail.com