Health care jobs grow . . . in administration
— -- After New Hampshire's legislature severely cut Medicaid funding last summer, hospitals throughout the state began shedding jobs. Exeter Health Resources, which runs a 100-bed hospital near the coast, lopped off 110, almost 5% of its workforce, many of them nurses and other caregivers.
Yet Exeter is still hiring — mainly administrative workers. "We're trying to balance the need to cut costs with the need to grow," says Mark Whitney, Exeter's vice president for strategy. "It's an interesting balance."
It's a paradox, too. Even as cutbacks in Medicaid and other programs gouge hospital budgets, and overall health care demand slackens as penny-pitching patients put off procedures in a bad economy, hospitals are creating jobs: a net gain of 95,000 this year, 13,000 of them in September and 6,600 in October, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
In fact, the health care sector is not only the nation's top job generator, but it's also one of the few major industries producing new jobs at all. Of the 80,000 net new U.S. jobs created in October, 12,000 of them were in health care. Hospitals, doctor's offices, clinics, labs, home health care agencies and nursing homes all are creating net new jobs. Over the past 12 months, health care has created 20% of all new jobs.
What's up?
General restructuring
The new jobs appear to be driven not by patient demand as much as a general restructuring of the health care industry that includes changes mandated by the 2010 federal health care law, the 2009 federal stimulus funding, new government regulations and increasing use of information technology. Strong anecdotal evidence — hospital job listings, interviews with health care employers, analysis by health care economists — indicates the attention now is on hiring clerks and administrators.
"We need to deal with new technology, new services, new regulations, electronic health records, government reporting requirements on quality," says Exeter's Whitney. "A lot of this is related to the new federal health law."
Hospitals are also preparing to compete for tens of millions of now-uninsured patients the federal law will make eligible for health coverage beginning in 2014. So even as budgets are cut, the competition for patients will become more intense.
Exeter is seeking billing specialists, information technology experts and program managers at the same time it is cutting nurse positions. Job listings at hospitals around the U.S. show the same trend.
Those who study the link between jobs and the health care overhaul aren't surprised. "What we're experiencing right now (around the USA) is similar to what we experienced in Massachusetts," says Douglas Staiger, an economist at Dartmouth College. He co-authored a recent study on job growth in the state between 2005 and 2010, in the wake of the health law signed by Mitt Romney when he was governor.
Health care jobs grew in Massachusetts 9.5%, cumulatively — almost twice as fast as in the U.S. as a whole — driven by administrative jobs. "Most of it was from enrolling patients who were previously uninsured," says Staiger.
Doctor and nurse hiring grew as well, but not as fast.
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