Health Care “Propping Up the Economy,” According to Business Week
Despite the upswing in Information Technology jobs discussed yesterday, this industry is only trying to recoup the losses of nearly 1.1 million jobs in the last five years. The future of the tech industry is looking brighter, but it has hardly fulfilled the promise that economists and labor specialists expected or hoped in the late 1990s, when it was looked upon as the industry with the most potential to take over the market for high end, educated jobs. Meanwhile, factories are continuing to close, retail businesses are continuing to scale back, and even those industries that are healthy are not adding many new jobs.
The by-line beneath Business Week’s cover story reads, “Since 2001, the health-care industry has added 1.7 million jobs. The rest of the private sector? None.” It’s perhaps a slight simplification of the fact — the majority of industries have seen at least a sliver of job growth, and some, like the real estate industry, has been quite prosperous, but it’s certainly true that the only one that is exploding is the Health Care industry. But in his article, “What’s Really Propping Up the Economy,” Michael Mandel calls Health Care “the main American job program for the 21st century,” noting that “with more than $2 trillion in spending — half public, half private — health care is propping up local job markets in the Northeast, Midwest, and South, the regions hit hardest by globalization and the collapse of manufacturing.”
Mandel cites examples from all over the country, beginning in Philadelphia, Pennyslvania, where 4,000 new jobs have been added at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia in the last six years, while non-health-care businesses added a negligible amount by comparison. Johnstown, in the same state, was hit hard by the collapse of the steel mills, factories, and coal mines that once supported the town, and now the town’s economy is only held up by Conemaugh Health System, employing 5,000 of the town’s 23,000 residents.
In Cleveland, Ohio, the Cleveland Clinic is the city’s largest employer with 29,000 residents working for them; the CEO of the company estimates that its business supports at total of 75,000 jobs. The next three top employers in Cleveland are all also in Health Care. Some areas of the U.S. are adding more Health Care jobs than others, and these high-growth states are dubbed the “Health Belt.” Mandel continues to track the trend to Detroit, Michigan, North Carolina, and discuss the slightly different situation in Florida and Arizona, which you can investigate yourself by reading the full article.
Because the bottom line, is that “if current trends continue, 30% to 40% of all new jobs created over the next 25 years will be in health care.” Mandel notes that the government’s expenditures on Health Care are actually what is fueling the job growth, perhaps secretly following the theories of John Maynard Keynes, a British economist who stated that the government should be responsible for creating jobs in order to stimulate growth. The author is wary of the unbalanced economy that this could create, but for someone looking for a new career with job security, you couldn’t make a safer bet than Health Care.
After all, it’s a field with reasonable wages and opportunities for entrance on all levels. The main expenditure in the Health Care field is human labor, and so most of the $2 trillion governmental funding is actually going directly to the workers. It’s also a market that can’t be realistically outsourced, like many IT jobs. “Health care is all home-produced,” points out Uwe Reinhardt, a Princeton University economist and health-care expert.
Mandel states that the most promising factor in the Health Care industry is that it “has taken over the role manufacturing used to play in providing opportunities for less skilled workers to move up.” Jobs are available on all levels, but the majority of them require some training or certification, and the more education, the better the job will be. So start to build a secure future for yourself now, and take a look at the Health Care degrees that we can connect you with today.
If you live in the “Health Belt,” there are no end of schools available to jumpstart your new career in Health Care. If you live in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the Sanford Brown School has programs in Medical Assisting, Medical Billing and Coding, Sonography, Ultrasound, Surgical Technology, Nursing, and other Health Care-related fields; elsewhere in Pennsylvania, the Western School of Health and Business in Monroeville and Allied Medical and Technical Careers in Forty Fort and Scranton have just as many opportunities.
At the north end of the Health Belt in Maine, the Seacoast Career School in Sanford offers degrees in Medical Assisting and Medical Billing and Coding. To the south, Bryman College in New Orleans, Louisiana, has programs in Dental Assisting, Massage Therapy, Medical Administrative Assisting, Medical Assisting, and Medical Insurance Billing/Coding. Cleveland, Ohio, boasts its own branch of the Sanford Brown Institute, among the many rich opportunities for schooling and working to which the Midwestern Health Belt lays claim. Resources are literally too numerous to mention, so browse your own state to see which is nearest you.
And no matter where you live, excellent online degrees are available to you in your own home, 24 hours a day. The University of Phoenix offers a Bachelor’s in Health Care Services and a Master’s in Nursing. Anthem College Online is one of many to offer a Bachelor’s in Health Mangament/Administration, but also offers programs in Dental Assisting, Medical Assistanting, Massage Therapy, Hospital Unit Coordinating, Medical Billing & Coding, Pharmacy Technician, X-ray Technician, and Surgical Technology. Many of our online schools provide similar opportunties, so take the first step to allowing your new job in Health Care “prop up” your household economy, in addition to helping the community and facing the needs of the entire country.
A discussion of his article is ongoing at Michael Mandel’s own blog at Business Week; an excellent perspective is also available at The Big Picture.