Matt Yglesias makes a point I’ve been hoping to make myself:

I can tell you a story about how a tiny number of financiers have been able to hoover up money from the executives of rival financial institutions as deregulation has led to consolidation of the industry. I can tell you a story about how a tiny number of financiers have been able to hoover up money from the broad class of rich people in the 80th-99th percentile who own the bulk of the financial assets in the country by swindling them. I can tell you a story about how a tiny number of financiers have been able to hoover up money from the broad class of rich people via the income tax and “bailouts.”
But the median wage earner seems harder to me. Especially because they somehow got to the median German wage earner, but not to the median Chinese wage earner.
Here’s another story. A lot of the median wage earner’s money has been hoovered up by the health care system. If we had single payer health insurance in the United States then increases in per capita health care spending would exhibit themselves as higher taxes. Instead, most people get health care through employers who subsidize their premiums, so increases in per capita health care spending exhibit themselves largely as lower wages. Optimistically, in exchange for all this extra money we’re now getting way better health care. Pessimistically (and, I think, more plausibly) an awful lot of it is getting “hoovered up” to little good end.

As I imagine Matt would agree, health care dollars do flow into the coffers of medical providers, pharmaceutical companies, the manufacturers of medical devices, and other who participate in a perversely regulated medical marketplace, so the money doesn’t quite vanish. Indeed, job growth in the health sector has represented a large share of total employment growth over the last decade, and an even larger share of private employment growth, though perhaps we should say “private” given the role of public subsidies.