What is also interesting is that the only sector thad added jobs was health care.
This is one of the major things that has helped explain why US consumer sentiment has been so out of step with headline numbers like employment, consumer spending, and GDP.
It also helps explain why there's so many economists are saying they see limited evidence of a "K-shaped economy", and say they see positive numbers throughout the distribution. It's very difficult to choose not to buy healthcare.
(The UK spends very roughly half of what the US spends on healthcare in terms of percentage of GDP. That's total (public plus private) expenditure. Singapore spends very roughtly half of what the UK spends by the same measure. Health outcomes amongst the three countries are comparable. If anything, Singapore is healthier.)
But yes, I agree that the US should let in more migrant workers. Good for the workers and good for the target country: cheap infrastructure is great!
They don't get treatment, and have to come back to their country. It's the same in the UAE, except there even if you're a westerner, if you work a manual job you will get sent to your country if you get seriously hurt (ask any sailor).
Sources?
[Edit] btw I just talked to my sailor friend, I was wrong, it doesn't matter if you're a westerner or not, if you are a sailor or a docker in Singapore, you will have to pay from your own pocket for healthcare or get back home, same as UAE.
If you have any resources you can recommend on immigrating to Singapore that would be helpful and relevant for folks considering it as an option (whether on an employment, student, or pension/non lucrative visa), I welcome them to add to my resources for distribution to those seeking an exit strategy. Thank you in advance.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47161587 (resources)
I love it in Singapore, but if you don't want to live in a steam sauna, there are better countries for you. And if you are an American, I guess you don't even benefit from our more enlightened tax system anyway.
https://www.irs.gov/individuals/international-taxpayers/fore...
> If you are a U.S. citizen or a resident alien of the United States and you live abroad, you are taxed on your worldwide income. However, you may qualify to exclude your foreign earnings from income up to an amount that is adjusted annually for inflation. In addition, you can exclude or deduct certain foreign housing amounts.
So there are mechanisms by which to avoid paying income tax to the US as as someone with a potential US tax liability living and working abroad, although it can be a facts intensive situation. Think like a Hacker, this is just another system and set of rules to hack ("How can I live outside the US, maximize my quality of life, pay the taxes due to my residency jurisdiction, while avoiding paying as much US federal income tax as possible?").
(For the 2026 tax year, the maximum Foreign Earned Income Exclusion (FEIE) is $132,900 per qualifying person, an increase from $130,000 for 2025. Married couples where both spouses work abroad and qualify can exclude up to a combined $265,800; the contents of this comment are for educational purposes only, and are not financial or tax advice, speak with a professional)
How so? What's hard to replicate here? Many rich places could let in more migrant workers. It's good for the workers, and good for the receiving country.
Malaysia and Singapore are two different countries. Despite being right next to each other they have vastly different GDPs, standards of living, government benefits, etc.
New Jersey and Manhattan are in different states. But in any case, why so xenophobic? Borders are an administrative hassle, but they have no moral weight.
Borders are a lot more than just a bit of paperwork or "administrative hassle". Central America is a very different place from US & Canada in many ways. Malaysia is quite a bit different from Singapore in a lot of ways despite such intertwined history.
I'm not passing any moral judgement here, I'm just acknowledging current reality. Singapore and Malaysia are different countries. NY and NJ are two states in the same country. The relationship is very different. Even with "Imperium in imperio" in the US.
To have a similar kind of comparison one would look at the cyclical migrant labor between the Southwestern US and Mexico.
healthcare is not for health. Its for sickness. Going to hospital doesnt make you "healthy" . We dont have any medicines to restore health to ppl suffering for diseases majority of healthcare spend goes to.
Maybe those countries dont have sickly population in the first palce like usa where a majority have metabolic diseases.
Another benefit: they tell you pretty quickly whether your application is approved or not.
If rich people had so much influence, Romney and Bloomberg would have been presidents.
People run to dismiss this with "well we need a different system then", but the problem is a fundamental one on par with "eating your cake and having it too".
The only way to get as close as possible to "good" healthcare is to have enough money to pay for everything out of pocket.
This isn't possible. Healthcare is a finite resource and having universal, government care not only puts your life into the hands of the government (see the UK for an example where parents are not allowed to take their children out of the hospital) but offers worse outcomes.
When you are young and healthy, it's great. As you age, life-or-death surgeries have long wait times. This can be seen in any country with universal care. My aging relatives in Canada are going through this right now and have been forced to come to the US to get surgery in months rather than waiting years.
MAID has been great for healthcare costs in Canada. Many people that would otherwise have been costing the system money, are now a benefit. The sad realization is that government-run programs need MAID to cut down on costs.
I know lots of expats living in Asia that are now getting older. They have to go elsewhere to get any surgeries done, because of this exact reason.
To make it better, we should only have insurance for surgeries that can't benefit from the free market and are relatively rare. Common surgeries and procedures should have no insurance. The prices would eventually fall to levels that were affordable.
The masses don't want plans like this. They like easy solutions that sound good when you say them and don't take a whole lot of thought besides an elementary school level of thinking.
You see this to an even more extreme degree amongst the ultra rich and powerful, who are often using cutting edge, experimental treatments, and often reaping the downsides of being on that edge (though of course also the upsides).
Edit: Seems the lead author is also a vocal supporter of universal healthcare, being a senior fellow of the Center for American Progress. So yeah, probably why it's such a strange setup, and what compelled me to check since this kind of thing is super common for "activist research".
I guess the takeaway is to always take a study for what it is, rather than what it paints itself to be.
- infant mortality
- maternal mortality
- colon and breast cancer survival
- heart attack mortality
- childhood acute lymphocytic leukemia (most common childhood cancer)
Those are one of the most common health issues.
Also, here is another recent paper showing how it’s better (health care wise) to be average in EU than wealthy in US: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsa2408259
There are also other oddities like using median county wealth rather than household wealth. In many wealthy counties there are still poor areas, I know more than a few. In fact if you look at the appendix, most of the households in the study are, well, average or poor. They also don't include absolute numbers or definitions for the illnesses.
All in all, it's a bad study, and clearly made to color in an agenda.
The second study looks more grounded, thanks.
Or if that random doctor who just walked in is out of network and going to charge $30,000 for my stitches when $3,000 was already egregious.
i softly agree but also think that a body does not need to generate value to pay for the costs in order for the whole process to sustain itself. Monitoring the stars for asteroids heading towards earth provides no market value, for example, but we can still afford to do it. so it's a matter of cost and available expenditure. the market is not net 0, so its possible to generate enough value to have enough to afford healthcare as an expense as a society
what are the costs of fixing a body? The residency pipeline is a bottleneck on labor, but assuming that gets sorted out and AI is capable of guiding any reasonable person through the process, why cant the cost of labor for a doctor drop dramatically?
i would guess limited resources are the biggest blockage, but i dont know how to break down a $20k hospital bill for giving birth into its actual costs. its hard to believe that really needs to be $20k.
I actually think its the opposite. there is so much friction with healthcare and the process of healing is slow enough that costs are inflated because the overall operating cost for the entire facility including rent, ER, having people on standby, who knows what else, all need to be recovered through whatever volume they process and they arent processing as quickly as the resources are able.
healthcare needs do not subscribe to a neat work schedule, and so we have to pay a lot of market prices to have the right availability at all times. but thats not a true cost, it is a result of accounting and underutilization
Now, almost every woman I'm related to is in health care.
I've been joking for years that eventually everyone will either be in the hospital, or working there.
Any sector that's resistant to productivity growth is liable to become bigger and bigger part of the economy.
in fairness also regulation makes it hard when it specificies the solutions not the parameters (just to illustrate the idea not an actual rule: you must have X thickness of PVC versus your pipe must withstand X pressure)
All of these have led to conditions where it is expected for an entire house to go from start to finish in 100 days. A house with very high standards of plumbing, electrical, hvac, insulation, and other essentials compared to previous generations.
And I agree that the standards have been rising such as better R-values, car charging, AC, cat5 etc.
U.S. healthcare is a giant predatory clusterfuck and seems impossible to meaningfully reform.
Americans of all ages are spending more on healthcare, and seeking more healthcare interventions than in previous decades.
i.e. young americans are spending more on health care than young americans used to, even if it's also true that there are fewer young americans now, and more old americans.
In 1860 someone who went to a doctor would have worse outcomes than someone who stayed home. As medicine gets better over time there is more and more value in seeing a doctor. In turn more an more people are talking to their doctor about things that they would have just ignored a few generations ago. Sometimes this results in unnecessary treatment, but it also results in catching and fixing a lot of real problems that would have made life worse before we could treat it.
Americans are spending a lot more on quality-of-life medical interventions, many of which are outside the normal standard of care that would be covered by healthcare systems. It is a booming business in the US and many people seem to have no trouble paying for it.
My main caveat / counter point is that preventative care may actually increase as more and more people jump on the live for ever, dont die, longevity hacking trend.
All basketball players are tall, but that doesn't mean that all tall people are basketball players.