Non-Hospital Healthcare Jobs Are Growing Fast
Jobs in health care, especially in outpatient settings, continue to rally. Of 217,000 nonfarm civilian jobs filled in May, 34,000 were in health care. This was twice the average monthly gain over the previous twelve months. As previously observed, most of these jobs are in ambulatory settings. Two thirds of the gains (23,000) were in physicians’ offices, outpatient-care centers, and home-health care. Hospitals only added 7,000 jobs from April. Table 1 shows the seasonally adjusted changes over the last twelve months. It continues to become apparent that the sector is undergoing a transformation: Care is being increasingly delivered outside hospitals. Although hospitals still account for one third of employment in health services, job growth there is anemic. Although outpatient-care centers employ only 715,000 workers, they continue to add jobs rapidly. Hopefully, this indicates a shift to more productive ways of delivering care. However, the perverse
incentives in ObamaCare (which cut hospital payments bluntly) caution against optimism. 
Furthermore, the government-medical complex continues to provide safe employment, despite much wailing from the trenches. The unemployment rate amongst workers in education and health services is just 3.9 percent. Only government workers (3.0 percent) and those in mining, quarrying, and oil and gas extraction (2.6 percent) are doing better. Oil and gas workers have good job prospects because technology has opened up new reserves, which undoubtedly adds to human welfare. Healthcare workers, on the other hand, may have good job prospects because ObamaCare diverts resources into an increasingly bloated sector of our society.
I used to work for a hospital system as an accountant. I suspect that’s a growth area in health care!
I am glad to see that jobs in the healthcare field are “rallying,” but I really would have liked to see the growth directly in hospitals. With the current shortage of doctors, wait times are and will continue to be ridiculous.
Thank you. But what if the same procedures can be done more efficiently and less expensively at an outpatient setting?
A few years ago a donor we had in common wanted me to meet with the executive director of an advocacy for New York-based hospitals. The director asked me why I was interested in their project to help the elderly with “aging in place.” I said that aging in place was an interesting experiment as a way to reduce long term care expenditures and unnecessary hospital admissions. She bristled at what I said; her reply… “Why, on Earth would you want to reduce hospital admissions? All the research shows that hospitals are an underutilized resource!”
Good to see that not only jobs for healthcare workers are opening up. Oil and gas workers are having an explosive labor market which is great! However, there are only so many qualified people for jobs that require high skill.
Job growth, in any sector, is good news right now. It’s going to be interesting to see how the trend proceeds as the provisions of the ACA are fully implemented because, as the article points out, it is filled with all kinds of incentives that could affect the supply and demand for healthcare workers.
It would be my guess that the workers in the most heavily regulated areas affected most by ObamaCare will have their job growth seriously impeded by the new law, while the areas of medicine least regulated will experience much stronger growth.
The problem is the healthcare growth is probably on the administration side not the clinical side so we are just feeding the needs of the govt bureaucratic beast without care for those with direct patient contact. Look at how many administrative people a Doctor must hire just to submit claims. It used to be 2-3 people per doctor and now it’s 7. And in a few years as Obamacare gets really running, it’ll probably be 10 admins per 1 doctor – in order to respond to the needs of the Accountable Care Organization that’ll have the doctors by the short hairs. Nothing is being done to control cost (other than denying service ala the VA ) or provide more doctors and nurses (causing greater denial of services. Oh and did I mention that Obama would be satisfied with another 10 million illegal immigrants to flood our already overcapacity healthcare system? Hold on for a bumpy ride.
I share your concern. The BLS data do not tell us what the people working in the facilities actually do – only how many people are working there!
Having spent 15 years in Health Care Insurance, and a Recent Master’s degree dedicated directly to the PPACA Legislation (ObamaCare) and having read the bill in its’ entirety; I can affirm that I was, and am untouchable for healthcare. You would think that this market sector would want somebody that has read the bill, has the experience – but the dirty little secret; they only want to hire people that support the PPACA. As a disruptive agent, attempting to bring personal responsibility, market driven channels and transparency of price to the arena – I am persona non grata.
I had to move overseas to get a job in the Health Care field.
Thanks America.