Baumol's Cost Disease in Healthcare

A 3D model of the productivity-growth mismatch behind decades of rising healthcare costs. Two production floors run side by side — a manufacturing line whose output per worker compounds year over year as automation takes hold, and a healthcare ward whose output per provider barely moves, because a consultation or an operation still takes roughly the same skilled human time it always has. Wages are shared across the economy, so both sectors must pay competitively rising pay — and that single fact, with zero waste or inefficiency assumed anywhere, is enough to make healthcare's relative cost climb every year. Adjust each sector's productivity growth rate and the labor-market wage-coupling strength, watch the live cost-index chart and automation visualization update, and see the exact exponential relationship the source article's "rising costs" section is describing.