So what's the salient driving difference here?
Health care cost.
Not quality, cost.
We have added 600,000 "health care" jobs over the last 12 months yet the non-institutional civilian population -- a decent proxy for the change in population as a whole -- has risen by 5.1 million. In other words you're expecting me to believe that we need one health care worker for every 8.5 people in America.
Quite-clearly: No we don't; even if you see a doctor once a month, and there is a nurse or NP involved too, and you get a full hour out of eight (of course today you're lucky to get 10 minutes!) with 20 working days in a month then you consume 2 man-hours per month per person and there are 320 man-hours of labor between said doctor and nurse in four work-weeks time, thus 1 doctor or nurse per 160 people is sufficient.
Of course most people do not see a doctor once a month. A few people see a doctor more-often, but most see a doctor once or twice a year until they get into older ages and develop serious morbid conditions. Thus that the "average" is once a month is preposterous.
And yes, there is overhead in any enterprise but not that much overhead.
We're supposed to accept an overhead factor of 20 - that is, 2,000% - as reasonable - and the assumption that every American sees the doctor once a month and gets one full hour of his or her time?
Our entire cost structure problem with employment and with government debt is right here.
I could go into a dozen different reasons why this has occurred but the simple fact is that it all has to stop, right now.
And right now is the time, because stopping it will produce a massive dislocation in the economy, capital markets and real estate both in the commercial and residential realms -- and a nasty recession.
But out the other side of that we will have a flood of both innovation and the repatriation of jobs and manufacturing formerly sent over our borders to foreign nations.
So how, given that it has to be able to be done by Executive Action within the Administration because Congress has refused to pass a law such as this for quite-literally three decades no matter which party is in power?⁷....
.....Prices will drop for health care like a stone; 80% is what I expect, but it will absolutely be half or more and it will begin in one day. This will wildly accelerate re-shoring of jobs as now the US will be the less-expensive option among developed nations; a literal 15% will come off the cost of employment across the economy among those employers who provide health care -- which is nearly-all full-time positions.
Equally important if not more-so no future Administration can rapidly, if at all, go back to the former cost structure because it will have been destroyed so employers will bring the jobs back here as they will be reasonably-certain that 15% reduction will stick on a permanent basis.
What else will happen, however, is a serious set of layoffs of all those extra people who provide no care at all nor do they mop the floors -- their job is to extract money and hide the cost so that the total amount goes up.
Thus you must do Mr. President -- and you must do it now because the dislocation, returning to a 5% of GDP health care world from the 20% we are in today, will be quite disruptive.
