Health Care Legislation and Job Creation?

Health Care Legislation and Job Creation?

Proponents of the Health Care Legislation, which some members of Congress and the President are trying to pass, indicate that one of its side benefits will be that it will create jobs.

It does make sense that if health care is accessible to more people, then it will require more workers to provide this service, such as doctors, nurses, technicians, and administrative workers.

However, this may be at the expense of other parts of the economy.

For instance, the wealth in an economy comes from the primary and secondary economic sectors.

These would include, in the primary sector, the extraction of raw materials such as coal, oil, farm and fishing crops, ores, and the like.

In the secondary sector, it would include the manufacture of products such as automobiles, computers and electronics, appliances, and so on.

There are some products which support the health care industry and which could be classified into the secondary sector of the economy such as MRI and X-Ray equipment.

However, the actual providing of health care by itself, which is the bulk of the industry, does not create wealth.  It would fall into a tertiary sector of the economy.  Typically, the tertiary sector only exists when there is a strong primary and secondary sector, which are the wealth creating sectors.

The workers in the tertiary sector do not create wealth, but rather are the recipients of a redistribution of the wealth, for a service, from the other two sectors.  The redistribution may come directly from their customers, through an insurance company, or through the government.

So although jobs possibly could be created within the health care industry, they will not be jobs which are related to a growing economy, but rather from a redistribution of wealth from other sectors.

Since this will drain the other sectors of their wealth, it might, also, reduce some of the jobs within those sectors.  This reduction of money and jobs from the wealth creating sectors will stymie the overall growth of the economy.

A better approach to achieving health care for all citizens would be to invest in the primary and secondary sectors, thereby creating more overall wealth and a resultant more people employed.

This, of course, would allow for more citizens to purchase health care without the need for a government assistance program.