Does anyone know the percentage of Americans employed by the medical insurance industry?

[warren pease]

I've heard it's as high as 11 percent. And I have a feeling that a high percentage of that percentage will be out of work for a long, long time.

If they don't get jobs in an expanded Medicare program, they're going to kick unemployment figures into the stratosphere -- possibly high enough to precipitate a 1929-class depression, but without the manufacturing base or FDR's wisdom to pull the country back from economic chaos.

Globalization has only made US workers more vulnerable, and unless Obama gets serious about protecting US jobs and pulls out of multinational "free trade" garbage like NAFTA, GATT and CAFTA, the US will take its rightful place among third world economies.

Any comments, particularly from those who currently work for these bastards?


Full disclosure: I take a back seat to nobody in my loathing for the current scam and my support for a Yurpean-style single-payer system, not some half-assed "public option."


sf

[Laelth]

1. There are a lot of people who work in medical insurance.

Both for doctors and hospitals and those who work for the insurance companies, themselves. A lot of them would lose jobs if we adopted a Canadian single payer system. Few, if any of them, will lose jobs with the pathetic "public option" insurance that's currently on the table.

Even if we went with a single payer system, however, many of these jobs would become public rather than private. Adjusters would switch employers, but not professions.

Still, in all, these positions are mostly vampiric in nature (sucking time and resources) but doing nothing to improve health care. I will not cry to see them go, but I would support subsidized retraining for displaced adjusters. We need more nurses.

:dem:

-Laelth

[warren pease]

11. Agreed re middle-men parasites and that training to produce more nurses is mandatory...

Thanks for your reply.


sf

[RaleighNCDUer]

2. My understanding is that is the percentage in the healthcare industry

as a whole, so the med insurance industry would be a subset of that.

But I have no idea what the numbers are.

[warren pease]

9. See lurky's post below for the answer... n/t

[Vincardog]

3. Too damned many. The real question is how many people are hurt by employing those people?

[warren pease]

7. Great point. I was mainly thinking of the relatively blameless clerks and such...

... but the money squandered on utterly useless execs and aparatchiks, as well as salaries and perks for the armies of actuaries and malevolent claims "adjusters" (whose real job is to "adjust" your claim down to zero via technicalities)...

Those shitheels need a stint on the night shift at McDonalds to get their priorities in order.


sf

[leftstreet]

4. Surely their skills would transfer to debt collections

With all the 'stimulus' money that went to Wall Street, no doubt ShitiBank et al are hiring

[warren pease]

6. You'd think so, but those salaries and bonuses for all the tireless, ass-busting execs...

...suck up an inordinate amount of cash. Gawd knows pushing paper is "hurd wurk," as some presidential usurper recently said.

sf

[lurky]

5. 11% is medical workers ONLY, not insurance.

I was curious, so I did a little looking and found the most recent BLS data:
ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/suppl/empsit.ceseeb12.txt

In May 2008, "health and medical insurance carriers" employed 448,000 people. At the same time, there were over 138 million total non-farm workers in the U.S. That means that health insurance companies directly employ less than one third of one percent ( 0.324% ) of all U.S. workers. It's not clear from the statistics how many insurance agents, HR specialists, medical billing people, etc, make their living from our health insurance system. Say, just for the sake of argument, that twice as many people (call it a million) fall into this secondary category. In that case, we are still talking about only 1% of the U.S. workforce.

Granted, if you were one of the people whose job was made obsolete by a Canadian-style system, it wouldn't seem like a small thing. But I'm guessing that a new national system would be looking to hire many new people with experience with medical claims...

[warren pease]

8. Great stuff. That's exactly the data I was looking for and have spent way too much time...

...doing lousy research, in the wrong places, to actually find it.

Thanks a lot, lurky.

sf

[lurky]

12. Glad to help!

:hi:

[JVS]

10. Fuck em. They produce nothing and hinder the public good.