Welmer

Health care is a noble profession, or at least it used to be before people started fiddling with the Hippocratic oath, but it isn’t a productive endeavor, nor is it something we should necessarily want to be a growth industry. In a better society we would need fewer rather than more doctors and health care workers, for obvious reasons.

However, it remains one of the only sectors in our economy that continues to grow despite the recession. Some doctors are beginning to get a little nervous about this, and see that health care has started to grow uncontrollably and become an unsustainable monster. George Lundberg, the blogger from the previous link, writes that health care costs are staggering, and do not reflect the true value of health care in the US:

“Health Care in the USA uses (consumes) some 17% of the Domestic National Product, something like $ 2 600 000 000 000 per year. Its growth has been at 2-5 X the rate of inflation almost every year for as long as I have watched it (some 30 years).”

Health care is projected to grow not only because it subsists largely on public money, but because the numbers of elderly, who have a far greater need for it, will swell greatly over coming years. From a purely rational perspective (that is, not taking humanity into account), it would seem that spending such an enormous amount of GDP on maintaining non-productive members of society will ultimately have a draining effect on our economy. If we are using a such a huge amount of our national income and energy taking care of old folks, then just what kind of economy will we have?

Of course, one hardly wants to see old people abandoned and left to die, so nobody is suggesting cutting them off, but it strikes me as dangerous that this is seen as the primary growth area in our economy, and may turn out to cause an imbalance in society in general, whereby younger, productive Americans pay a significant amount of taxes and insurance to pay for a bloated geriatric care industry.

Furthermore, health care is dominated by females. They comprise 75% of health care workers, which has been a major factor in the gender imbalance in unemployment in the recession. This brings up the question of where the money will ultimately come from to pay for the health care industry. If it becomes a large enough part of our national expenditures, it seems that it might begin to eat everything else up until there is little left, at which point it will have no choice but to cannibalize itself.

I am extremely skeptical of the idea that we can run a country on nursing homes and hospitals, but this appears to be the best plan according to a number of investors. Unfortunately, it cannot last. Plenty of people will make a lot of money, just as they have been doing with the incessant bubbles of the last decade, but the nation as a whole will suffer for this new scheme.