A report from the American Council on Competitiveness noted that “there has been some recent progress in the digital health sector, which aims to better integrate information and software technologies into all aspects of healthcare.” The report also concluded that “the U.S. has rather poor health outcomes relative to other developed countries and stands out as having exceptionally low healthcare productivity when measuring outcomes against spending.”
a. Briefly discuss the evidence for and against U.S. health care performing poorly relative to other countries when comparing outcomes to spending.
b. If the U.S. health care sector makes increasing use of information technology, will it be likely to employ more workers or fewer workers than if it fails to widely adopt this technology? Briefly explain.