Adding 30 some odd million people to the healthcare rolls means adding the new infrastructure to see and diagnose them and the doctors and nurses to serve them and the equipment the providers need to diagnose and treat them. Even if at first we are talking just non intrusive ambulatory primary care it could make a huge difference.
Aside from making more people healthier spending billions on healthcare expansion means high paying domestic healthcare jobs, construction jobs, manufacturing jobs, its almost like gearing up to fight a war against disease, its not really spending, its an investment in America
Its a huge economic stimulus package.
In addition to requiring more satellite facilities, vans, providers, it means more mass transit to reduce transportation barriers and connect people with their healthcare. It means training more people to speak more languages to remove language barriers from healthcare. It means more electronic medical records technology, more sophisticated equipment for dentists, opthamologists, and more people working in labs doing phlebotomy or in radiology diagnosing cat scans, sonograms and xrays.
On December 9 of this year President Obama announced a program that has gone relatively unobserved even though it helps half a million people with ARRA money for Primary Care
President Obama Announces Recovery Act Awards to Build, Renovate Community Health Centers in More Than 30 States
Program to Create Jobs in Low-Income Communities, Help CHCs Serve More Than 500,000 Additional Patients
WASHINGTON - Today President Obama announced nearly $600 million in American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (Recovery Act) awards to support major construction and renovation projects at 85 community health centers nationwide and help networks of health centers adopt Electronic Health Records (EHR) and other Health Information Technology (HIT) systems. The awards are expected to not only create new job opportunities in construction and health care, but also help provide care for more than half a million additional patients in underserved communities. The President also announced a new demonstration initiative to support the delivery of advanced primary care to Medicare beneficiaries through community health centers.
With more money going into more types of diagnostics and research and the recent breakthroughs in cancer and other diseases what once was untreatable may become as routine and controllable as diabetes. Its conceivable that with 30 million more patients all drugs will have economically large user groups and production costs will come down. I can imagine future legislation to make all drugs sold in the US generic.
I don't know why nobody is making the connection between healthcare and jobs, where I live most of the good jobs are in healthcare.