Healthcare careers have long been seen as a sure bet, especially given the growing number of older Americans. Courtesy of Stanford economist Neil Mahoney, there is fresh evidence of how much those jobs are rewarding.
For example, revenues for U.S. healthcare workers as a group have risen nearly twice as fast as healthcare workers in other industries, based on data over more than 40 years. In 2009, the American healthcare sector overtook retail as the country’s largest source of employment.
This is another revelation New Working Paper Mahoney, Trion Director of Stanford Institute of Economic Policy (SIEPR) and Professor of Economics at Stanford University School of Humanities Sciences: Despite the stories of our urban cities, challenges to healthcare to boost local employment are declining, despite being hit hard by manufacturing. Healthcare jobs are only slightly offset in manufacturing, not at all among non-white workers or those with university degrees.
Other takeaways from a study of US census data from 1980 to 2022:
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Healthcare wage hikes don’t benefit workers equally. The big winners associated with the rest of the US workforce were middle-class and middle-class medical workers. For example, nurse compensation is up about 82% compared to nearly 37% of all US workers.
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Physician assistants, nurses, and other so-called “mid-levels” have provided more than half of primary care services in the United States since 2010. This is more than double the number of mid-level positions when job types are big enough to consistently track. Currently, there are more mid-levels in the US than primary care physicians
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Approximately a quarter of healthcare jobs are held by women and have not changed since 1980. What’s different now is that there are three times as many female doctors as 40 years ago (although the majority of male doctors remain). The proportion of men working as nurses and aides is also increasing.
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The proportion of doctors and aides born outside the United States is generally growing faster than foreign-born workers. Meanwhile, foreign-born nurses and mid-level shares are growing at a lower percentage than the overall economy average.
Overall, Mahoney and his collaborators – Joshua Gottlieb of the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy. Kevin Linz of Washington’s Center for Equality Growth and Victoria Udarova of the U.S. Census Bureau say the findings have important policy implications.
According to the research authors, healthcare is one of the biggest trends in the US labor market for generations, and has become the “modern middle class “job engine””.
He says the reason the engine has not reached a surge in manufacturing decline is because the “MEDS from manufacturing” policy proposals have either not received the necessary resources or if so, they have not produced the desired results.
“Now we’re reading more clearly about what’s going on in the healthcare job market,” says Mahoney.
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That’s what this story was like It was originally published By Stanford Institute for Economic Policy.
