--- tully <tully2 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> It is common here to relocate for better pay at a
> job. Better
> healthcare benefits could be seen as a sizeable
> increase in pay.
> That it might not come from the employer wouldn't
> matter.
[WS:] Employment compensation and healh care costs (or savings) are two very different things. The first is certain and definite - one knows how much one is going to earn from a new job and for how long. The later is highly hypothetical - I have no idea what the cost of my health care is going to be during the next 2-3 years - I hope it will be rather low, limited to routine exams, but if I am diagnosed with a serious illness or I am injured by a drunk driver or a madman with legally acquired firearms that calculation can change rather dramatically.
Consequently, I would be inclinde to move to another state if offered a job that pays substantially more, because I can easily calculate what the cost of such move will be and whether the pay incrase will offset that cost. However, I - and for that matter a vast majority of the population - has no way of predicting what the cost of thier health care will be in the next few years, unless they have already been diagnosed with a chronic or a terminal condition.
But otoh people who are chronically or terminally ill usually need social support network. Since moving to another state often means giving up that network - these people would face a tough choice between better institutional care and better social support network.
In sum, people are more likley to move for a job than for better health care. Of course in this dog-forsaken country anything social amounts to nothing - only money counts - so there might be enough buttheads willing to chase after tax savings and screwing up their social relations in the process - but that needs to be empirically verified rather than inferred a priori.
>
> Because increased healthcare needs also bring
> increased jobs in
> the healthcare services industry and a
> correspondingly increased
> tax base, it may make no difference at all.
[WS:] That is highly speculative, at best. One can also argue the opposite i.e. that better health care will attract those who need that care the most, i.e. sick and unable to work. Consequently, one can expect increase tax burden without an increase in employment.
It is possible to estimate regional impact of increase in health care on other industries using RIMS tables http://www.bea.gov/bea/regional/rims/, and my understaning is that the multiplier effect of health industry, while not trivial, is not exceptional i.e. there are better ways of creating jobs than importing sickos.
Wojtek
____________________________________________________________________________________ Looking for last minute shopping deals? Find them fast with Yahoo! Search. http://tools.search.yahoo.com/newsearch/category.php?category=shopping