But universal health care can reduce the number of seriously sick, and extend the work life of the elderly. By reducing those factors, it may increase their workforce participation.
The comparison to child labour laws doesn’t really work, because reducing the ability of children to work didn’t affect the number of children in society (except for those who would have been crushed to death by pre O+H+S machinery ). UHC can reduce the number of sick and elderly, increasing their workforce participation.
It’ll increase retirement levels but I’m not sure by how much.
I read various blogs about early retirement and health care costs are one of the biggest fears of retirees. Take that fear away and more people would retire.
Then again some people stay in shit marriages due to health insurance. Universal health care may also increase divorce rates. But again I don’t know how much.
The OP asked “would national health care inadvertently promote unemployment”. I am only demonstrating that yes, among certain segments it might, and that might be tolerable if not outright desirable.
Of course the comparison to child labour laws works. In fact it’s the perfect comparison. Do we want to maximize employment to the exclusion of everything else? Yes. Then of course we need child labour. If not? Then we need to talk about what labour is socially necessary.
It makes it more difficult to change jobs or go to part-time hours, though. A lot of older people I know either become self-employed consultants, or reduce their hours (which in the US can mean you lose employee-provided healthcare, can’t it?), or change job completely to something enjoyable but not as stressful or as difficult physically - and possibly lower paid and part-time, so they are still in the workforce but not in the same job. Teachers often go part-time, for example, doing a job share; it’s a difficult job to do full time in your sixties. Not depending on your employer for your healthcare makes all those things much, much easier.
The supply of health problems is larger than the supply of medical researchers and medical providers. They’ll find other illnesses to research and treat.
Just like having government healthcare makes it easier to exit the labor force, you are correct that it also makes it easier to just reduce one’s participation in the labor force.
Your third sentence contradicts your first. If UHC (or in Canada’s case, UHI) makes unemployment less costly, you will get more unemployment. Absent any argument to the contrary, that’s just logic.
The question is not whether you get more unemployment; the question is whether that number is statistically meaningful. If in fact, as economics would suggest, UHC increases unemployment, but the difference is 500 people in a country as big as Canada, it’s not a meaningful difference in terms of making an impact on the public policy debate. It couldn’t even be detected in the unemployment rate measurement. If the difference is 50,000 people, it would make a difference. It seems to me 500 is the likely answer; it just strikes me as odd that anyone would make a decision about unemployment based on knowing UHC exists, but I don’t know. Does UHC encourage entrepreneurship? The hiring of employees? That’s possible too, but again, it’s not gonna be easy to ascertain that effect in numerical terms.
Coming up with that figure is not gonna be an easy task. It is interesting to note than Canada has, and has pretty much always had, higher unemployment than the USA, but we could spend months determining the reasons why.
Would guaranteed health care put food on one’s table, a roof over one’s head, a car in one’s driveway, clothes on one’s back, etc, etc, etc? Of course not, so to assert otherwise would be ridiculous. Besides, virtually every other first world country has universal health care, and there has never been any statistical evidence to support such an assertion.
A retiree’s effect on unemployment depends on what happens after they retire. Unemployment is a measure of those seeking work divided by the total workforce. A retiree is neither seeking work, nor part of the workforce. If there were 10 workers in a room and 1 of them, Fred is seeking a job, then the room’s unemployment rate would be 10%. If Bob, the widgetmaker- one of those employed workers retires, then the new unemployment rate would be 1/9 or 11.1%. Of course, if WidgetMaking Inc, needs a widgetmaker, then it would likely hire unemployed Fred and the unemployment rate would be 0. Just conjecturing, I would say that a person retiring from the private sector helps unemployment since the private sector is not known for keeping unnecessary employees just for kicks. The public sector is probably a wash, since it is more likely to keep employees past their ‘sell date’ and may not choose to replace them.
Which isn’t the same as being unemployed, especially since some of these people still work full time, just in a different job.
RickJay - the OP was talking about retirement from the very first post. I agree that it doesn’t count as unemployment, but that’s how the discussion was started.
I’ve written, what, four times now that “unemployed” isn’t the relevant term here. Two people reducing their time by half an FTE each is very similar, if not equivalent to one person quitting entirely.
Yes, yes, I fully understand retirees are not unemployed.
But wouldn’t their retiring lead to more openings, to be filled by currently unemployed persons? Dropping unemployment numbers in the process, because UHC let’s them retire without fear. I would suppose those numbers would offset the deliberately un/under employed, was my point.
Depends on how it’s implemented, to some degree. If UHC covers everything, such that you don’t need Medicare supplemental insurance, then I can see people retiring, or retiring earlier than they otherwise might, because they don’t need to earn enough to cover their healthcare. And a corresponding factor where people are less likely to become employed, because they also don’t need to earn to cover their healthcare. Whether or not those factors balance out I don’t know.
The idea that people will now feel emboldened to quit and start their own businesses, thus boosting employment and the economy, is also possible. Most businesses fail within a couple of years. And certainly it is possible that businesses fail, or fail to expand, because they can’t afford to buy health insurance for their employees. If UHC costs less overall than is currently being paid in premiums + Medicare/Medicaid taxes, then sure - more money will be available for business. If it costs the same, then it’s a wash and will neither help nor hurt. But it’s not a given that it will cost less.
Yeah yeah, Canada spends less than we do. But if we want to save money on UHC, we have to CUT spending, rather significantly. And no other country has done that, to my knowledge. Major cuts in spending have effects, as we all recognize.
Maybe UHC will be a good thing overall. I am not aware of many things in life that have only good effects, however.
Not on a one to one basis, no, but in general terms, that’s the effect, which is why it’s such a weird way to look at the question.
Does UHC encourage more early retirement" would be a more coherent way of phrasing the question, and it seems to me it quite obviously would - though, again, the question is by how much. My parents retired early and I can absolutely imagine they might not have, or at least my Mom (with way better benefits) would not have, had health insurance relied on employment.
). UHC can reduce the number of sick and elderly, increasing their workforce participation.