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Comment by faet | Hacker News Reader

Real compensation has been growing. It's just now a larger portion of 'compensation' is benefits rather than just wages.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/COMPRNFB

edit:

in the 60s/70s wages were 80% of compensation.

https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/cwc/compensation-in-the-1970s.p...

wages are now 70% of compensation and 63% for public employees.

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/ecec.pdf

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So if healthcare costs are benefits, some portion of the compensation is growing just because healthcare costs are growing. But that doesn't really provide any net gain in positive economic effects (such as through added disposable income).

Unless one is employed in healthcare.

One is usually not employed in healthcare......

"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/

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...

Healthcare is flush with cash with so many middlemen it's almost inconceivable. It is also recession proof.

Uhh no. Those costs are transfered (at least in part) to the employee every year when they reup.

This is one of the problems with GDP/econometrics in general: It tries to measure value but actually measures prices.

If I lower my prices (maybe as a charitable act, or due to competition), I haven't decreased my value, but econometrics thinks I did. If you and I pay each other to waste fuel, pollution and time to drive to each other's homes to do the laundry, that's consider "better" than if we stayed home and did our own, according to econometrics.

These statistics are only in the U.S. whereas wages have been relatively stagnant across the whole globe with much better healthcare systems that aren't dependent on work.

What benefits are Europeans getting instead of wages?

Most European countries have aging populations, so it seems fair to assume that healthcare costs there are rising as well.

We're handling that mostly by increasing the age of retirement, not increasing labor costs.

Who's handling the healthcare costs of the middle-aged workers not old enough to retire?

They are in terms of NI (social security taxes) increases

Ok, so instead of money coming from the retirement system it comes from NI (social security taxes).

How does it result in a drop in healthcare costs while the general population is aging? If a person has health issues at 68, and the retirement age has been just moved to 70, that person won't magically get a clean bill of health.

And immigration. The US would naturally be in population decline without that. Immigration is a two edged sword. On one hand, it removes jobs from existing citizens. On the other hand it funds social security (among other things) and negates problems with population decline.

Germany has what I would call a better healthcare system, but how much you pay for it is coupled to your income. So it is not independent of work.

In Germany the employer has to pay about half of the social security for their employees (this includes health, nursing care, pension and unemployment insurance). There are additional benefits in case of sickness or pregnancy.

I wonder if there's some skew there where pensions aren't counted as benefits, but 401k company contributions are.

The employee side contributions seem relevant, too (though neither side exists at all when it comes to lower paging jobs). Those are counted as wages, I'm assuming, so if wages as a proportion has been decreasing and defined-benefit pensions have been lost, so an increasing part of wages goes to retirement savings, that seems like a double-whammy.

It's not exactly a benefit if you're just paying more is it?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/03/26/21-gr...

kind of a bogus measure. if the nominal cost of health insurance coverage rises, and your employer continues to pay for it, your total compensation went up, but you didn't benefit from it at all. it just became more expensive for your employer and the health insurer effectively raised their "tax" rate.

you would benefit as much as health outcomes were improving, but I don't have detailed data here.

that isn't what compensation means, and the amount of money it costs to improve your health outcomes is not much how much those improved outcomes are worth, it's how much you were billed

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