Health costs and employment

While earnings have been improving we have not yet seen a significant increase in hiring. While inevitably, hiring will resume, the simple fact is that man industries that just went through painful layoffs will use that opportunity to implement permanent productivity increases that will result in a smaller need for employees.

Further, we unfortunately have many incentives to outsource jobs to other countries. One of the biggest of these is the excessive health care costs we have in this country. Now, health care reform is partly based on reducing these costs but if we do expand coverage, this will lead to increased demand and that normally leads to increased prices.

Clearly, we need some reforms designed to control cost increases in health care delivery and drug costs in this country. These reductions should not be related to reduction in beneficial health care but should be focused on elimination of waste to include unnecessary tests and procedures. Now, in each case the doctor patient role should not be precluded but we need to eliminate some of the fear of malpractice that leads to doctor's ordering tests that are not medically necessary.

It is certainly not desired to excuse doctors who are negligent, but we do need to reform the process which drives up the cost for malpractice insurance because of a pre-disposition to equate the performance of every conceivable test to good medical practice.