So, if the productivity-wage divergence is simply a reflection of US healthcare costs, how does that chart look for other countries where healthcare doesn't glue itself to employment?
Yeah, I got up to here and stopped reading. Not really an honest attempt at debunking this data, just handwavey "it's all health care costs and its stupid".
Does it explain some of the divergence? Sure, but it doesn't even come close to making up the wage / productivity gap.
I imagine much of the other "debunkings" are similarly naive
A cursory search of how much of wages healthcare costs as a percentage of total compensation is in the US comes out to 7.6% in 2022. In 1971 it was 2.9%
> For employee-benefit plans in 1971, health insurance contributions equaled 2.9% of all wages and salaries.
> Insurance benefit costs accounted for 7.6 percent of total compensation and 26.8 percent of total benefits among private workers in September 2022. The component breakdown can be seen in table 1. Health insurance accounted for 7.1 percent of total compensation, with 0.2 percent for short-term disability insurance, 0.1 percent for life insurance, and 0.1 percent for long-term disability insurance. (See chart 1.)
I don't have the background to properly evaluate either the site or the rebuttal. My only feeling is that the rebuttal makes a good general point about "bullshit asymmetry" and cherry-picking statistics.
Oh, the site is definitely cherry picking and I wouldn't take any one chart or data point as meaningful.
It's just that there are a lot things that point to a turning point since 1970. It's like looking at something like obesity. It's tied to heart disease, cancer, ED, million other things. Any one of those things could maybe be explained away but if you look at the aggregate and how many things there are I think its okay to say "obesity likely has health effects".
