Couldn't you argue that an increase in compensation driven by 'ballooning healthcare costs' wouldn't actually improve the standard of living of workers? Comparing wages (rather than total compensation) to cost of living would seem more pertinent in this regard.

He's pointing out how there are many facets to the problems we see in America. Healthcare, education, and housing in many areas take massive chunks out of people's livelihood.

I hear a lot about the politics of the poor and the rich, but not about how to actually solve these problems we see in our economic system today.

There's something rotten in Denmark.

I didn't say people are better off.

We need awareness on where the problem stems from if we want to advocate for effective solution (instead of appealing solutions that won't do much).

This may be an unpopular opinion, but new medications for difficult to treat diseases do raise the quality of life for those populations, despite being incredibly expensive. I'm certainly not saying they shouldn't be less expensive, mind you. :)

The overwhelming evidence is that 1) this is not the case and 2) that it's been improvements to access rather than intensity of medical care that have had the biggest impacts.

This is a major component of Robert J. Gordon's The Rise and Fall of American Growth. Effectively, medical progress in the U.S. halted roughly in the 1960s and 1970s, with a very small number of exceptions.

If you go back to the bigger picture, virtually all improvements in healthcare outcomes were made prior to 1920, and those largely constituted public health, sanitation, and nutritional improvements. Laurie Garrett attributes 85% of the improvements in lifespan to public health, rather than acute medical treatments.

Improved pre-natal, natal, and childhood circumstances (medical, nutrition, nurturing, nutrition, and safety), overall safety improvements, environmental regulation, and reductions in high-risk behaviours (smoking, drinking, indiscriminate and unprotected sex, injected drugs) have all had major impacts.

Joel Mokyr notes that the truly effective medical advances are tremendously underreported in GDP statistics as the measurement basis is cost rather than benefit.

Sorry, but this turns out to be a tremendous and highly-repeated canard.

That’s true, but it costs dramatically less in places like Ireland, Singapore, or Japan to benefit from those drugs as compared to the US.

I agree with your point, but are you also implying that 'new medications for difficult to treat diseases' are a primary driver of 'ballooning healthcare costs'? I don't think healthcare costs are increasing as quickly in other developed countries while they do benefit from constant medical advances.

Which "developed" (hopefully we can develop some more) country is creating these medical advances? One might guess the US, but I don't really know. Any good studies I could read?

Well, if we are talking about recent great medical advances, i think Spain and France are leading right now with the discovery of CRISPR. And i'm pretty happy about this, if it were discovered by an american pharmaceutical company, no other laboratory would have even heard of this before a patented product hit the market, and every research on the subject would be subject to a patent too.

Most of them. It kind of comes with having a good healthcare system. And education.

David Ricardo. Rent vs. Wages.

(Rents win.)

A lot of that is largely fictitious. If an employer health insurer doubles their prices, supposedly my compensation has increased a lot, but in fact, I'm poorer, because my share of the health insurance premium has increased and my coverage has not. The only one getting richer is the insurer.

Are we going to argue then that worker compensation in all the many countries with universal government-paid health insurance is also going through the roof? But my health insurance is identical whether I work or not...

I don't disagree. The worker is worse off on average with this trend.

The point is in where to focus the solution. Yes unionizing (or other wage negotiation methods) will help in some areas, but the best economic bang for your buck is fixing incentives in health insurance.

Counterintuitively, slashing the tax cut on employer provided health insurance would be a step forward (especially if combined with other tax measures).

Worker productivity has been steadily increasing for the past century, but wages stopped growing in the 70s-80s. No amount of corporate compensation can compensate for that.