It’s probably not a huge population, but I bet it’s nontrivial.
And it being not huge is not a reason to not pursue a more optimal economic outcome.
We need incremental change. A few steps of incremental changes leads to broadly impactful change.
Suppose nationally it’s 2 million people, who, because of their particular economic situation, could pursue a better economic outcome were it not for the constraint of substantially unequal health care among their “eo’s”.
That’s several decent-size metro areas.
And that’s just the population number, made up for sake of argument.
More importantly, we don’t know the dollar economic impact of the better economic outcomes of that 2 (or unknown X) million, including multiplier effects, like for Oscar:
And marginal effects are important in economics - they set the terms at the point at which decisions are made for the larger population: salary negotiations, housing prices, migration decisions, education decisions, etc.
I agree.
But I didn’t label it as a friction.
You did, just now.
I labeled substantially unequal health care across the set of “eo’s” as a friction, which it is.
It’s a financial penalty (and maybe health or mortality risk penalty) on economic activity that could potentially be reduced to achieve a better economic outcome, similar to a tariff as a trade barrier is a friction.
You also keep focusing on averages in pay and health costs while dismissing variation among individuals and among “eo’s” with respect to pay, health benefits and economic situation.
That variation is what drives better outcomes in economies.
I addressed this many times already.
The scenario I proposed equalizes health care across the total set of “eo’s” and emphasizes that people are not economic clones.
Because people are not economic clones and their is greater variety of “eo’s” in the bigger set, EO, if we keep health care cost and value the same, but expand access to care from the smaller set EOh to the larger set EO, we get a better economic outcome.
A more optimal outcome is almost always found in the larger set, and nearly certain in economics with large variation in agents and decision sets.
Explained here: