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Strategies & Market Trends : Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: mishedlo who wrote (40548)	11/3/2005 2:04:59 PM
From: RealMuLan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 116555

How Good is the Economy at Creating Good Jobs? Executive Summary Between 1979 and 2004, real gross domestic product (GDP) per person in the United States increased about 60 percent. This report asks how well the U.S. economy has done translating this economic growth into good jobs. The report defines a “good” job as one that offers decent pay (at least $16 per hour or about $32,000 per year), employer-paid health insurance, and a pension. In 2004 (the most recent year for which data are available), only 25.2 percent of American workers had a job that met all three criteria. In both 1979 and 2004, about one-fourth of workers were in jobs that qualified as “good” by the definition used here. The basically unchanged good jobs rate across the two years suggests that the economy has failed to convert long-term economic growth into an expanding supply of good jobs. After controlling for improvements between 1979 and 2004 in the “human capital” of the U.S. workforce —American workers today are, on average, older and much better educated than they were at the end of the 1970s— the economy now produces 25 to 30 percent fewer good jobs than it did 25 years ago. In 2004, about one-fourth (26.6 percent) of Americans were in “bad” jobs, defined as a job that pays less than $16, has no employer-provided health insurance, and no pension. This is close to the share of Americans in bad jobs in 1979 (27.9 percent). If anything, the analysis presented here may paint an overly optimistic picture of the current economy’s capacity to generate high-quality employment. The data used here for health insurance and pensions do not allow us to control for declines in the quality of many employer-provided health-insurance plans (most importantly the rise in the employee share of the cost of such plans) or for declines in the quality of pension plans (especially the shift from defined-benefit to defined-contribution plans). cepr.net

To: mishedlo who wrote (40548)	11/3/2005 5:01:36 PM
From: patron_anejo_por_favor	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 116555

<yawn> Wake me up when we have single-payor health care! washingtonpost.com U.S. Health Care Costs Big Money Survey Says Americans Pay More, Get Disorganized Care By Rob Stein Washington Post Staff Writer Thursday, November 3, 2005; 2:48 PM Americans pay more when they get sick than people in other Western nations and receive more confused, error-prone treatment, according to the largest survey to compare U.S. health care with other nations. The survey of nearly 7,000 sick adults in the United States, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Britain and Germany found Americans were the most likely to pay at least $1,000 in out-of-pocket expenses. More than half went without needed care because of cost, the survey found, and more than a third endured mistakes and disorganized care when they did get treated. While patients in every nation sometimes run into obstacles to getting care and face deficiencies in treatment, the United States stood out for having the highest error rates, most disorganized care and highest costs, the survey found. Frankly, the "single payor" lobby has not been good at identifying it's natural constituency. They should be going after big business leaders. Canadian business folk LOVE socialized medicine, since it means they don't have the headache and expense of administering it. It's also the way to solve a lot of the pension problems in the US, since a lot of the healthcare liabilities (of the pension funds) would be eased.