Health Care Sector Creates One of Every Three New Private Sector Jobs
The health care industry is bulletproof when it comes to increasing spending or creating jobs. Growth rates that are often double the rest of the economy have allowed the nation’s hospitals and physician offices to add nearly 1.5 million jobs over the past decade, a period when other private sector employers were shedding 2.8 million jobs, largely the result of the banking and financial crisis. In fact, there hasn’t been a single month in the past decade when health care providers as a group didn’t increase employment opportunities for job-hungry Americans.
Full article on the health care economy. HT to Jason Shafrin.
Sounds like the whole industry is recession proof.
Ordinarily (in any normal market) this would be good news. But it’s not good news when it means that I will be paying higher taxes and higher premiums for someone else’s wastefully delivered health care.
Health care is one-sixth of our economy – and growing. It’s an eye-opening experience to cut through the support and maintenance area of a large hospital (typically below ground level). It’s a maze of plumbing, wiring, pipes, supply rooms, etc. Much of the infrastructure has nothing to do with patient care. Often it has to do with meeting regulations or accreditation standards (e.g. every patient room must have a window).
I agree with Ken. All you people out there wasting money on health care are costing me a bundle.
Quite right: just counting the growth in health-sector jobs doesn’t really tell us much. Scenario A: A biotech company lands venture funding and hires a thousand people to staff up a new lab. Scenario B: The California Nurses Association lobbies a state government to impose a new nurse-patient staffing ratio so that hospitals have to hire a thousand more unionized nurses.
I doubt most readers would think that the increase of a thousand workers in each scenario had the same social benefit.
Perhaps the major problem with health-sector employment being so big is that it creates a huge constituency in support of the status quo, and against reform that frees the patients and providers. Daniel Hannan, Member of the European Parliament, states that the reason Britain cannot overthrow the monopoly of the National Health Service is that it employs 1.3 to 1.5 million people – the world’s 3rd largest employer after the People’s Liberation Army of China and the Indian National Railways!
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