What's Really Propping Up The US Economy ( Answer : The Healthcare Sector. The Rest : NONE)

Business Week ^ | 09/16/2006 | Michael Mandel, with Joseph Weber

[SirLinksalot]

What's Really Propping Up The Economy

Since 2001, the health-care industry has added 1.7 million jobs. The rest of the private sector? None

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If you really want to understand what makes the U.S. economy tick these days, don't go to Silicon Valley, Wall Street, or Washington. Just take a short trip to your local hospital. Park where you don't block the ambulances, and watch the unending flow of doctors, nurses, technicians, and support personnel. You'll have a front-row seat at the health-care economy.

For years, everyone from politicians on both sides of the aisle to corporate execs to your Aunt Tilly have justifiably bemoaned American health care -- the out-of-control costs, the vast inefficiencies, the lack of access, and the often inexplicable blunders.

But the very real problems with the health-care system mask a simple fact: Without it the nation's labor market would be in a deep coma. Since 2001, 1.7 million new jobs have been added in the health-care sector, which includes related industries such as pharmaceuticals and health insurance. Meanwhile, the number of private-sector jobs outside of health care is no higher than it was five years ago.

Sure, housing has been a bonanza for homebuilders, real estate agents, and mortgage brokers. Together they have added more than 900,000 jobs since 2001. But the pressures of globalization and new technology have wreaked havoc on the rest of the labor market: Factories are still closing, retailers are shrinking, and the finance and insurance sector, outside of real estate lending and health insurers, has generated few additional jobs.

Perhaps most surprising, information technology, the great electronic promise of the 1990s, has turned into one of the biggest job-growth disappointments of all time.

[SirLinksalot]

SEPTEMBER 25, 2006

COVER STORY

Online Extra: Table of Projected Job Openings, 2004-2014

Health care is hot, but it's not the only game in town if you are looking to choose a career. Here is a list of selected professions that someone with a postsecondary education might consider, ranked by the number of projected job openings from 2004 to 2014. These statistics are drawn from labor-market projections by the Bureau of Labor Statistics in November, 2005. (For more, see www.bls.gov/emp/home.htm.)

Nurses are at the top of the list, with 1.2 million projected openings in the decade, both from growth in the profession and the need to replace nurses who are retiring or moving into other lines of work. The number of projected openings for doctors is about equal to the number for lawyers and social scientists, good news for those of you who always wanted to go to med school.

But what is especially striking about this list is the sheer number of teachers who will be needed in the coming years, at every level. Health care may be the wave of the future, but education isn't far behind.

Openings from growth and net replacements, 2004-2014 (thousands)
Registered nurses	1,203
Postsecondary teachers	892
Elementary and middle school teachers	815
Top executives	808
Engineers	507
Secondary school teachers	474
Computer software engineers	448
Human resources managers and specialists	323
Media and communication occupations	253
Art and design occupations	221
Physicians and surgeons	212
Social scientists	209
Lawyers	205
Marketing and sales managers	202
Scientists	197
Entertainers and performers	188
Clergy	139
Computer and information systems managers	124
Medical and health services managers	105
Athletes, coaches, and related workers	84
Psychologists	72
Architects	37
Data: Bureau of Labor Statistics

By Michael Mandel

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[Brilliant]

Adding jobs is only part of the picture. In fact, adding jobs is irrelevant when you've got only 4.7% unemployment. The real question is how much your real income is increasing.

[SirLinksalot]

Graphic :

True Picture of the Job Recovery :

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_39/b4002004.htm

[DoughtyOne]

Ah ah ah cabulls--tshew... excuse me.

Yeah, the DOW is near it's all time high because hospital doors are open. When I need advise like this I usually buy some bubble-gum or crackerjacks.

[SirLinksalot]

CHART : PERCENTAGE OF JOB GROWTH COMING FROM HEALTH SERVICES IN THE USA, JULY 2001- JULY 2006

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_39/b4002005.htm

[jrooney]

And YOUR POINT IS??

[SirLinksalot]

CHART : WHERE THE JOBS ARE NOT ( THESE INDUSTRIES ARE LOSING JOBS ). TAKE OUT HEALTHCARE AND HOUSING --- NOTHING MUCH IS LEFT :

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_39/b4002008.htm

[SirLinksalot]

And YOUR POINT IS??

THE POINT IS IN THE TITLE OF THIS THREAD. I Don't have any other point or agenda.

[WashingtonSource]

Business Week is run by a bunch of Marxists. Don't believe anything they say.

[Don Corleone]

When I need advise like this I usually buy some bubble-gum or crackerjacks

Or read the advice in a fortune cookie!

[SirLinksalot]

Here is how Businessweek looked at the jobs data :

---

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_39/b4002009.htm

How We Looked Inside

For this article, BusinessWeek built up a picture of the broad health-care industry using job data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. At the heart of the health-care sector, of course, is private health services, ranging from mega-health systems such as the Cleveland Clinic down to small private physicians' practices. But the health-care sector also includes companies that are developing and manufacturing drugs, medical supplies, and equipment; health-insurance providers; wholesalers and retailers of drugs, medical equipment, and supplies; health charities; and government-run hospitals. So a biotechnology company such as Amgen Inc. (AMGN )would be in the health-care sector, as would the American Heart Assn. and the hospital system run by the Veterans Affairs Dept.

Using this definition, the health-care sector represents 12% of the total workforce today. Hospitals alone, private and public, employ 5.7 million workers -- over 4% of the total workforce.

Our analysis used 12-month averages to smooth out statistical blips, a big issue at the state level. The end date, July, 2006, is the latest month for which job figures for all industries are available. The baseline date, July, 2001, is exactly five years earlier, thereby avoiding problems with seasonal variation.

That date also has the virtue of being very close to the month -- June, 2001 -- when 12-month average employment hit its high for the boom. That means employment in today's reasonably good labor market is being compared with employment at the previous peak, which is the right way to do the calculations.

[WOSG]

This article is idiotic, certainly when it implies health care is keeping up the economy.
Productivity is golloping in many sectors other than health care, so production is up while employment is not.

With health care, the advances are in new ways to do things, not necessary higher productivity ways to do the things that
Health care is one of the few sectors where there is less productivity advance and more demand for services. The result is obvious: more jobs, higher share of economy, and political demagogues who try to sell people on the 'free lunch' of socialized care because the costs are so high.

[SirLinksalot]

Business Week is run by a bunch of Marxists. Don't believe anything they say.

Interesting, some of their columnists are conservative, free market advocates and supply side economists. Nobel Prize winner, Gary Becker being just one of them.

[carola]

My mother saved the hospital bill (filled in by pen on a form printed on a half sheet of paper) given to my parents when I was born:

Room 409 5 days at $9.00 $45.00
Anaesthetic Fee 10.00
Delivery Room 12.50
Medicine 3.52
Dressings 4.00
Nursery 8.00

Total $83.02

My parents paid with cash before they took me home. Of course this was 1948, but still, things have become very complicated and expensive since then.

[jrooney]

Crawl back to DU fool. The economy is booming. Short of the other trolls that crawl through here, no one believes the economy is not booming. How do you have a low unemployment rate, whe nno jobs are being created? ANSWER - jobs are being created! LOWER UNEMPLOYMENT than Clinton ever saw. About to pass Clinton on the stock market. Interest rates lower than Clinton ever gave us and low taxes. All thanks to GW. Yeah, the economy is not booming.

Clinton's econmomy was BUILT ON FALSE FININACIAL DISCLOSURES BY 100'S OF COMPANIES during his tenure.

I do not care what some business writer says in an article. As we have seen the past five years most writers and reporters have a political agenda to hurt this president because they are stuck on stupid.

[DoughtyOne]

Thanks, another great source...

This is just another veiled attempt to dismiss an economy that is clicking along rather nicely, much to left socialist's chagrin.

[patton]

Holy heck. Christopher got RSV, spent nine days in the hospitol, bill was about ~$100,000.00

That was in 1995.

[Extremely Extreme Extremist]

Interesting, some of their columnists are conservative, free market advocates and supply side economists.

And George Will is a contributor for the Washington Post.

So what's your point? BusinessWeek is Newsweek with financial makeup.

[jrooney]

And we all know how reliable Newsweek is. The Enquirer is a more trusted source for fact finding.