Labor & Employment Law

Recession?s Lost Wages Cost More than Health Care Reform

By Tula Connell

Here’s a stunning fact that points both to the need for Washington lawmakers to rapidly move on massive job creation and pass health care reform:

The wages lost as a result of the 2008-2012 recession will top $1 trillion?more than the estimated 10-year cost of health care reform. The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office estimates unemployment at more than 7 percent in 2012.

Last year, in fact, the United States spent $2.3 trillion on health care?$7,681 per person, a far larger per-person cost than in western European nations where everyone actually gets health coverage (unlike the 47 million Americans here who don’t.) Yet opponents of health care reform and foes of a public-sector role in job creation continue to harp on the long-discredited theory that the private sector will come to the rescue of our nation’s ills. As Mark Weisbrot, an economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), points out:

For conservatives to insist that we now rely only on the private sector for economic recovery is a bit like Bernie Madoff starting a new mutual fund from prison with the slogan, “Trust me.”

Full post as published by AFL-CIO NOW BLOG on January 05, 2010 (boomark / email).