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posted by martyb on Wednesday June 28 2017, @11:43PM   Printer-friendly
from the are-you-a-net-gain-or-a-net-drain? dept.

Many jobs have spillover effects on the rest of society. For instance, the value of new treatments discovered by biomedical researchers is far greater than what they or their employers get paid, so they have positive spillovers. Other jobs have negative spillovers, such as those that generate pollution.

A forthcoming paper, by economists at UPenn and Yale,1 reports a survey of the economic literature on these spillover benefits for the 11 highest-earning professions.

There's very little literature, so all these estimates are very, very uncertain, and should be not be taken literally. But it's interesting reading.

Here are the bottom lines – see more detail on the estimates below. (Note that we already discussed an older version of this paper, but the estimates have been updated since then.)

(Emphasis in original retained.)

At the top, researchers who generate +$950,440 in positive externalities; at the bottom, financiers who generate -$104,000 in negative externalities. In a glaring omission, telephone sanitisers were not listed.


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 29 2017, @04:03AM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 29 2017, @04:03AM (#532805)

    Not true. The main reason for the high cost of medical care is that there's a large number of people who don't have medical coverage who then get charity care. Or, after years of no routine preventative care they get a job with coverage and all those expenses that weren't being paid come back in triplicate.

    There's also a huge amount of over-testing that goes on in order to cover the doctor's backside in case something was missed and a system where doctors and hospitals overbill for absolutely everything because there's little to no chance of being paid the right amount for all of it. Some health insurance companies will pay excessively for one part of the procedure and nothing for another. And in order to get the money they need and want, the people doing the billing will overcharge for basically everything knowing that the insurance company will only allow a fraction of the amount billed to be paid.

    The correct solution to this is to pay for medical school and medicare for all singlepayer system where the government handles the accounting and payment for all medical care received in the country. It's what every other industrialized country does.

  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday June 29 2017, @01:05PM (2 children)

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Thursday June 29 2017, @01:05PM (#532932) Journal

    The correct solution to this is to pay for medical school and medicare for all singlepayer system where the government handles the accounting and payment for all medical care received in the country. It's what every other industrialized country does.

    Every other "industrialized" country has medical costs that rise faster than their economy whether or not they run single payer systems. While the US is much worse than the rest, everyone has the same problems that will make the status quo, single payer or not, unsustainable in the long run.

    My view is that individual pays is the only approach that makes sense in the long run.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 29 2017, @04:24PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 29 2017, @04:24PM (#532986)

      A single payer system is essentially mandatory insurance.

      Nobody chooses to be sick. So requiring the individual to pay won't really reduce the use of the system.

      • (Score: 1) by khallow on Friday June 30 2017, @12:33AM

        by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Friday June 30 2017, @12:33AM (#533192) Journal

        Nobody chooses to be sick.

        The point of a health care system isn't to force people to pay to be sick.

        So requiring the individual to pay won't really reduce the use of the system.

        The individual would make choices about what's important to them as opposed to a one-size-fits-all system that uses other peoples' money. If health care is really important to them, then they can spend more of their personal wealth on that. If it's not, then they can spend less.