When people pay their insurance premiums every year, they are hoping that those premiums will cover future expenses. Specifically, that their health insurance companies will cover their bills if they fall ill, their car insurance companies will cover thei

Dean Baker
The Hankyoreh, February 5, 2017

February 3, 2017

February 3, 2017

February 3, 2017 (Jobs Byte)

Alexander MainThe Hill, February 1, 2017

During the height of the 2008-2009 recession, there was considerable debate about the origins of the soaring unemployment rate. The New York Times and other major media outlets said that the problem was mostly low demand, pointing out that there were more people searching for jobs than companies searching for workers. During the recession, companies decreased their monthly hiring by about a third, despite the fact that the number of Americans searching for work had more than doubled.

The data mostly indicate that workers weren’t choosing to stay unemployed; rather, they were losing their jobs and having trouble finding new ones. This can be seen most clearly by looking at the ratio of unemployed job losers to unemployed job leavers. Unemployed job losers are out of work because they lost their previous job; unemployed job leavers are out of work because they voluntarily left their last job. In 2006, there were roughly four unemployed job losers for every one unemployed job leaver; by early 2010, that ratio had shot up to nearly 11-to-1. This indicates that the vast majority of the drop in employment during the recession was due to companies laying off workers, not to workers leaving their jobs. Moreover, this phenomenon held true for every major demographic group, as can be seen in the figure below:

Four years ago, we calculated the potential savings to the federal and state governments, as well as beneficiaries, from lower drug prices. In the paper, Reducing Waste with an Efficient Medicare Drug Benefit, we compared how much people in the United States paid for drugs with payments in other wealthy countries. We then calculated how much the federal and state governments, as well as beneficiaries, would save on the Medicare prescription drug benefit if we paid the same amount for drugs as people in other countries.

The calculation had low and high savings scenarios. In the low savings scenario, it was assumed people in the United States would pay as much for prescription drugs as in Canada, the highest country in the group. This involved savings of 27.8 percent on drugs, since Canadians pay on average 72.2 percent as much as people in the United States. The high savings scenario was based on drug payments in Denmark, which are on average 34.5 percent as high as in the United States, implying a savings of 65.5 percent.[1]