Hillistes and Health Care

In Tunisia they go by the French-Arabic slang - - hillistes.  In Egypt they are shabab atileen.  England calls them NEETs (not in education, employment, or training).  In Japan they are freeters. Germany they are arbeiter and Spain the word is mileuristas.  In America - - "boomerang" kids who move back home after college because they can't find work.  Even in China.  They are known as the "ant tribe" - - recent college graduates who crowd together in cheap flats on the fringes of big cities because they can't find well-paying work.

They go by different names, yet they are the same people.  The jobless young of the world.  The numbers are staggering - - widespread global unemployment.  In the U.S. - - 44% of black teenagers and 23% of white teens.  Greece is looking at 35% unemployment of the 15-24 year old age group.  All of Sahara Africa is over 20% - - grandparents are not in the streets of Cairo.  The streets of Cairo are full of unemployed and disenfranchised teens.

You can slice the world in many ways - - young and old; rich and poor.  When one group is young and poor and the other old and rich - - policy execution becomes a tricky thing.  The desire to invest in the future runs directly into the economic and political reality of our obligations to pay for the past.  Health care in the U.S. is a perfect example - - consider the words of Bill Gates as he spoke with Charlie Rose:

We spend 17.8 percent of our GDP on health care.  And the next highest is at 12 percent.  You have some, like Britain, who are down at 9 percent.  That is just mind-blowing.  And our outcomes aren't better.  The incentive system exists to have all sorts of ways of spending money on 70-years old and 80-years old - - spend $100,000 on this, spend a half-million on that.  You're taking resources you can invent, we have no metric that would hold us back.  So, innovation is inventing ways of taking resources away from the young, whether that's education or anything else.

And the 17.8 percent is a little misleading - - nothing in the recent health care reform bill curtails an increase to 25 percent.  At some point it all becomes rather clear to our global youth - - we are going to say no to education, training, and investing in the future and we are going to say yes to "I've-fallen-and-I-can't-get-up" gizmos.  When that becomes clear, that the past appears to be more important than the future, the kids of the world are going to discover it is a very short walk from milkshakes to Molotov cocktails.