Healthcare Employment Surpasses 15 Million

While the U.S. economy slowly recovers, healthcare jobs have skyrocketed, benefiting from favorable federal policies and greater access to care.

Healthcare employment hit a new milestone in April when the sector surpassed 15 million jobs, with 390,000 new jobs created in the past 12 months, Bureau of Labor Statistics jobs data show.

In April, healthcare grew 45,000 jobs, including 25,000 in ambulatory care, 12,000 in hospitals, and 8,000 in nursing homes and residential care.

Healthcare job growth for the month was outpaced only by employment in professional and business services, where 62,000 new jobs were created in April, but healthcare still tied with construction for the second-fastest growing employment sector in the country.

Expanded Access and an Improved Economy

"This has really been a sustained increase in employment, month-over-month," says Thomas Wickizer, PhD, professor and chair of the College of Public Health at the Ohio State University. "I think in part it is the effect of the PPACA (Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act) that has brought more people in to the [healthcare] system through expanded insurance coverage."

As an estimated 22.8 million Americans previously without health insurance got coverage between September 2013 and February of this year, demand for medical services increased—much of that in ambulatory care settings. "Overall, the aggregate effect of that is to increase the demand for number of different allied health occupations," Wickizer says.

Additionally, a slowly improving economy might have some influence in increased demand for healthcare services, says Katherine Baicker, professor of health economics and acting chair at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

"The first thing to realize is that healthcare employment and healthcare spending are likely pro-cyclical, meaning they are higher when the economy is doing better," Baicker say. "While some healthcare use is not sensitive to economic conditions, many patients put off elective procedures during uncertain economic times."

Baicker points to an improving economy combined with increased volume in outpatient procedures as factors driving ambulatory job growth.

She warns against viewing these new jobs in healthcare as a "fix" for the economy. "We don't want to think the goal of health reform is promoting health employment," she says. Baicker says the healthcare sector should strive to reach the same health outcomes using fewer resources, employees and procedures to keep costs down.

"In general, people are very excited when there's job growth, and for a good reason," Baicker says. "But we need to think carefully about what it means to have higher employment in the healthcare sector, because that's likely to translate to higher healthcare spending and higher health insurance premiums, which can make healthcare less affordable overall."

Additionally, the unemployment rate and number of unemployed people are essentially unchanged from last month, but the overall number of unemployed workers has dropped slightly, by .8%. 191,000 jobs have been added to the economy overall since February.