Will Our Children Be Better of Than We Are? Productivity in Health Care and Other Sectors

In a recent poll, two thirds of respondents stated that they thought that their children would have a lower quality of life than they themselves.  One problem is that health spending is devouring so much of our incomes, but productivity is not increasing.

I suppose that this may be fundamental, to some degree I think that there are significant limits to increasing the productivity of a primary-care practitioner. (Although there is a lot of technological innovation in health care waiting to explode if and when the government gets out of the way, so I may be wrong).

However, there are some parts of health care where productivity has increased dramatically, e.g. cardiac surgery. (Indeed you only have to go back a few decades for longitudinal measurement to become meaningless, because the practices were so different.)

Read the entire thread at John Goodman Health Policy Blog.