The other says that if you look at my remarks above (and possibly listen to the voices in my head that only I can hear, since I'm not sure how much of this I've said in detail or were I've said it) my view is that comparing unemployment figures in the way the laissez-faire propagandists do is nonsensical. Is my version half-assed? Yes, of course it is: I'm a blogger responding in his coffee breaks. It's no more half-assed than the crap from the FT. What do you want for a first try? I have lots of responses to take into account and perhaps I can come to a better way of making my point so as not to confuse USians who have an instant defence mechanism if you criticise their mighty warriors in any way or possibly suggest that spending more money on the military than the rest of the world is not a good idea.
I do agree that what we would really need to do (and I said this above I hope) to break out the population of working age into:
You also need to know the labour force participation, the demographic structure of the country and an idea of how these things are changing over time.
Once you know all that and take it into account you can start doing comparisons.
However, if people want to start publishing headlines like "15% jobless in Sweden" without that, then I don't feel all that guilty for putting together an analysis that could have been better. I'll even work up a better version next week. Want to bet the FT will do the same?
Huh? Of course the US has one. In fact US public sector spending on health care in dollars per capita is comparable to that of European countries. It's just that our health care system is utterly FUBAR, so private spending is also immense, and all that combined gives works out to give us worse results than that of the wealthy European countries.
Take a look at this graph It's part of a Paul Krugman NYRB article on the US health care system.
There are workers employed by the government - federal, state, and local (a quick google tells me that NYC owns 11 hospitals 6 diagnostic centers and 80 clinics, for example, there seems to also be a state owned hospital here and I believe there is a federally owned VA one as well). There are workers employed by the for profit private sector . There are workers employed by the non profit private sector. In most cases hospitals in all three of those categories treat both people covered by public provided insurance and those with private insurance, as well as those with no insurance at all (emergency rooms are required to provide urgent care regardless of the patient's ability to pay for it).
So there isn't a yes or no answer to your question - is a doctor in private practice whose patients mostly rely on Medicare 'employed' by the government? What about a doctor working in a public sector hospital whose patients are primarily those with private insurance?
As for sympathy with Sweden. While there is many aspect of the swedish model I disagree with. A equal free public health service is not one of them.
