Health Care Added One in Five Jobs in April
45,000 of the 223,000 jobs added in April were in health services, according to today’s Employment Situation Summary from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This continues the trend seen in March. As shown in Table 1, jobs in ambulatory settings accounted for well over half of health jobs.
Longer term, jobs in ambulatory settings accounted for just under half of health jobs in the last year. Obamacare seems to be juicing jobs in the health services sector, which continues to challenge repeal efforts.
“45,000 of the 223,000 jobs added in April was in health care services”
And all of them bending the cost curve.
Just not in the direction Obama promised.
At this rate, everyone will eventually work in the health services industry.
Like in UK.
At one time, NHS was the largest employer in Europe. It may still be.
For about 20 years now, the inventive and dynamic tech sectors have created very few new high paying jobs on a net basis.
Instead the low productivity sectors — health care, government, and education — have created about 98% of new high paying jobs. (according to Tyler Cowen, Arnold Kling, Michael Mandel, and Nick Schultz.)
Health care jobs are — in general — more secure, less tiring, and far less susceptible to outsourcing than manufacturing jobs.
Whether we can sustain this is an enormous question. I am not wise enough to know the answer.
Thank you. That is a very good point. Healthcare jobs will likely increase as a proportion of jobs because of the productivity problem. However, some of the lack of productivity improvement in health care is due to government.
“productivity problem”
Assume you refer to Baumol’s disease. I agree.
I also think there are inefficiencies in the delivery of medical care (and in the business of insurance) that can be addresses and alleviated nevertheless.
Thank you. I do. And I agree that there is a huge amount of efficiency improvements that are lying around ready to be picked up, if the government got out of the way.
Yet the same inefficiencies keep people employed. I work in the health and life insurance business. At least 250,000 persons are employed in dredging up medical records, and then submitting the records to underwriters and claims examiners after paying someone to copy the records manually. The full adoption of Electronic medical records would send all those employees (and the real number may be higher) out in search of other jobs.
The same is true for medical payment issues. The existence of multiple fee schedules, and then discounts up or down on those fee schedules for insurers and government alike, and the delays in getting paid, surely keeps another 250,000 persons employed.
If America had labor shortages — which it surely does not, other than in a very few industrial and tech areas —
then becoming efficient would be an unalloyed good thing.
But with our glut of white collar workers, I think there would be some heavy sledding to get over the unemployment caused by efficiency.