“Health Care Productivity” Is An Oxymoron

It has long baffled me when politicians and others trumpet job growth in the health care sector, while at the same time bemoaning rising health costs, as if there was no connection. Some Rust Belt cities like Pittsburgh and Cleveland have bet a large portion of their economic future on their growing health care industries, and some economists attribute much of the nation’s recent economic revival on the growth in the health care sector. But job growth in itself is not always a good sign. An insightful piece by Robert Kocher suggests that the situation is even worse than I already suspected.

Kocher concluded that productivity is actually dropping in health care, with hiring outstripping output. He figures that the health care workforce has increased 75% since 1990, with almost all of the growth coming from non-doctor workers. There are 16 non-doctor workers for every doctor, and only 6 of those have a clinical role. As Kocher says, “[T]he problem with all of the non-doctor labor is that most of it is not primarily associated with delivering better patient outcomes or lowering costs.” So what the heck are they doing?