Question
What laws and policies are impeding economic growth of the U.S. economy?
Answer
Hands down, lack of a functional healthcare system.
Fix that one problem and nearly every other problem will take care of itself. Including whipping China in the 21st century race for global dominance.
Conversely, almost every stupid thing Americans are forced to knowingly do, from individual to corporate to city/state/federal government levels, seems to be related in one way or another to healthcare system pathologies. If there is a deeper root cause, it might be litigiousness, I don't know. But healthcare is the most clean-edged bottleneck problem I can identify. And unlike other problems which have certain deep fundamental causes, this one is entirely human-made and has no reason to exist in a society with as much prosperity as this one (yes, even in these China-indebted, recession-wracked times, America has enough wealth that it should not have a healthcare system problem).
I was going to say "lack of a public, universal healthcare system" but then it struck me that healthcare being attached to employment for absolutely no good reason is not the only irrationality or even the worst one. There is a bountiful number of ridiculous elements to the system.
Dan Munro probably has better thoughts on just how much of a burden this is, but from what I've seen people's life decision-making is controlled to a ridiculous degree by the need to maintain health coverage. Especially as you get older and either serious health risks or actual conditions start to creep into your life. In a perverse way, the state of the system is actually scaring me into living healthier.
Natural risk aversion in all areas of life (entrepreneurial risk-taking, in-job risk taking, decisions to have children...) is wildly amplified to absurd, Alice in Wonderland, levels by the structure of the healthcare system. I've met more than one person contemplating leaving the country for healthcare reasons (and they were healthy!).
People are resourceful and energetic in making a life for themselves in nearly every department. They are even willing to accept ordinary levels of health risk. But when healthcare is broken in such really weird ways, that's one thing they cannot solve by themselves.
There was an Atlantic article that offered an apt analogy: the way we use insurance to pay for all healthcare is like using auto insurance to pay for gas.
I'd add: itemized by the drop, with separate line items for pressing the fuel grade button, pulling the nozzle trigger, etc. With claims being filed in triplicate each time and requiring approval before you pump. From an office 2 miles away. And with the list price at $100/gallon and obscure and complicated rules in the background bringing it down to $20/gallon if you have insurance.
And even that absurd analogy only gets at 10% of what is messed up.
We've come to see the system as normal. We are so used to it that we don't realize just how horrifyingly irrational it is. Though it is far more resource-poor and corrupt, structurally, even the system in places like India is better.
As an indication of how severe the healthcare problem is: I spent 12 years working my way through the USCIS system to go from student visa to citizenship. If there's one thing that could possibly make me leave the US in the future, it will be healthcare.
For all its great advantages that define the American Dream, the American Nightmare that is healthcare in this country is nearly enough on its own to make people even go back to developing countries so they don't have to deal with the headaches. My mother visited a few years back from India and had a medical emergency. She was so horrified by the process and costs of getting care that she refused to visit again (though she later changed her mind and made one more trip).
Fix that one problem and nearly every other problem will take care of itself. Including whipping China in the 21st century race for global dominance.
Conversely, almost every stupid thing Americans are forced to knowingly do, from individual to corporate to city/state/federal government levels, seems to be related in one way or another to healthcare system pathologies. If there is a deeper root cause, it might be litigiousness, I don't know. But healthcare is the most clean-edged bottleneck problem I can identify. And unlike other problems which have certain deep fundamental causes, this one is entirely human-made and has no reason to exist in a society with as much prosperity as this one (yes, even in these China-indebted, recession-wracked times, America has enough wealth that it should not have a healthcare system problem).
I was going to say "lack of a public, universal healthcare system" but then it struck me that healthcare being attached to employment for absolutely no good reason is not the only irrationality or even the worst one. There is a bountiful number of ridiculous elements to the system.
Dan Munro probably has better thoughts on just how much of a burden this is, but from what I've seen people's life decision-making is controlled to a ridiculous degree by the need to maintain health coverage. Especially as you get older and either serious health risks or actual conditions start to creep into your life. In a perverse way, the state of the system is actually scaring me into living healthier.
Natural risk aversion in all areas of life (entrepreneurial risk-taking, in-job risk taking, decisions to have children...) is wildly amplified to absurd, Alice in Wonderland, levels by the structure of the healthcare system. I've met more than one person contemplating leaving the country for healthcare reasons (and they were healthy!).
People are resourceful and energetic in making a life for themselves in nearly every department. They are even willing to accept ordinary levels of health risk. But when healthcare is broken in such really weird ways, that's one thing they cannot solve by themselves.
There was an Atlantic article that offered an apt analogy: the way we use insurance to pay for all healthcare is like using auto insurance to pay for gas.
I'd add: itemized by the drop, with separate line items for pressing the fuel grade button, pulling the nozzle trigger, etc. With claims being filed in triplicate each time and requiring approval before you pump. From an office 2 miles away. And with the list price at $100/gallon and obscure and complicated rules in the background bringing it down to $20/gallon if you have insurance.
And even that absurd analogy only gets at 10% of what is messed up.
We've come to see the system as normal. We are so used to it that we don't realize just how horrifyingly irrational it is. Though it is far more resource-poor and corrupt, structurally, even the system in places like India is better.
As an indication of how severe the healthcare problem is: I spent 12 years working my way through the USCIS system to go from student visa to citizenship. If there's one thing that could possibly make me leave the US in the future, it will be healthcare.
For all its great advantages that define the American Dream, the American Nightmare that is healthcare in this country is nearly enough on its own to make people even go back to developing countries so they don't have to deal with the headaches. My mother visited a few years back from India and had a medical emergency. She was so horrified by the process and costs of getting care that she refused to visit again (though she later changed her mind and made one more trip).