Focus on health care jobs 'misguided'

News outlets report on a New England Journal of Medicine piece that argues that providing access to affordable health care is more important than protecting health industry jobs.

Boston Globe: Protecting Health Care Jobs Shouldn't Be Part Of Cost-Control Debate, Harvard Economists Argue
Hospital officials frequently warn state and national lawmakers that aggressive cost controls will lead to health care job losses. But two Harvard economists argue in this week's New England Journal of Medicine that health care jobs have no place in the policy debate. There's a bigger employment picture to consider, Harvard School of Public Health professors Katherine Baicker and Amitabh Chandra write (Conaboy, 6/6).

WBUR: 'The Golden Goose Fallacy': Fear Of Killing Health Care Jobs
Actually, the title of the "Perspective" piece just out in the New England Journal of Medicine doesn't mention any golden geese. It's "The Health Care Jobs Fallacy." But in the debate around pending Massachusetts proposals for cutting health costs, "the golden goose" -- as in, the goose that lays the golden eggs and must therefore not be killed -- is coming to be code for: "We must not hurt our state's biggest industry, which provides something like 1 in every 8 jobs, many of them good ones" (Goldberg, 6/6).

Kaiser Health News: Capsules: The Downside Of Health Care Job Growth
Health care employment has been the bright spot in the otherwise lackluster recent jobs reports. As overall employment decreased by 2 percent from 2000 to 2010, employment in the health care sector actually increased by 25 percent. But that's not necessarily a good thing, according to an opinion piece published in the most recent edition of the New England Journal of Medicine (Gold, 6/7).