Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by prostoalex 3189 days ago
"In recent years, the proportion of workers employed in private-sector health services has exceeded 11 percent." says BLS in 2009 https://www.bls.gov/spotlight/2009/health_care/
1 comments

Thanks for supporting my point, in that 89% of the working population is "usually not employed in healthcare".
So back to the grandparent conclusion, employing 11+% of the workforce is not beneficial to the US economy?
It's not beneficial if the same or better output could be had with half of the inputs. I'm mostly comparing cost of healthcare in other first-world nations with universal healthcare here with the industry as a whole (as opposed to just the workforce). If you know the efficiency can be higher and you choose to operate less efficiently it's some form of the broken window fallacy - maybe the drafty window fallacy? You're basically paying people to move dirt from one place to another - with the excess of insurance claim/billing transactions as the new digital dirt.

Now if you're worried about the more immediate effects on the people displaced by moving to a possibly higher efficiency way of doing things - we'll that's a bigger general problem we have to solve as the displacement rate is seemingly already moving higher than the re-employment rate, and it threatens to accelerate for more areas than just better healthcare practices...