The bottleneck is the cause of the Baumol effect. If medicine didn't require qualified and licensed human labour to provide then we wouldn't have such high healthcare costs.
Now admittedly, there is a gap between the increase in labour productivity of wait-staff and the labour productivity of healthcare providers over the period since, say, the industrial revolution, but both are outstripped by orders of magnitude by the increase in productivity in the manufacturing and IT sectors. Manufacturing is no longer bottlenecked, because we offshore it, and IT is not bottlenecked because new technology is continuing to rapidly increase labour productivity.
I think, my layman’s understanding is the Baumol effect can be basically thought of as paying people to not be the next highest productivity gaining job.
So say bond market traders and computer programmers got more productive relative to doctors, then baumol effects would be paying doctors to not quit and get jobs at google or some bond desk. It’d be much less pronounced/related than say, trade school electricians who haven’t become much more productive with the advent of computers but are still needed. Doctors have a lot of other effects limiting their supply by things the licensing practices
Right, I think that's a valid way of seeing it, and you pay them not to do the next highest productivity gaining job because their current job is productive, particularly in price inelastic sectors like healthcare.
The reason I think it's valid to call it a disease is because you want it to be higher productivity yet, and more price elastic. Increasing healthcare provider productivity would not lower their boats, it would either shift them into the next highest productivity job, or better all round, shift them into new roles within the healthcare system opened up by the increased productivity (for example, personalised healthcare).
From the point of view of "the alternative is people earn less", "disease" does seem a misnomer. I was thinking from the point of view of "the alternative is sectors become more productive", so "disease" doesn't seem to fit as well.
Now admittedly, there is a gap between the increase in labour productivity of wait-staff and the labour productivity of healthcare providers over the period since, say, the industrial revolution, but both are outstripped by orders of magnitude by the increase in productivity in the manufacturing and IT sectors. Manufacturing is no longer bottlenecked, because we offshore it, and IT is not bottlenecked because new technology is continuing to rapidly increase labour productivity.