Health care dominates new American jobs: Opportunities for offshore medical treatment

The governments of some Gulf States send their citizens to Thailand for checkups and health care, specifically Bumrungrad Hospital. That's what someone from Bahrain told me recently.

In today's Business Week there's an article about how health care accounts for most of the new jobs in the United States. It doesn't surprise me. A few years ago I was talking to a young woman in her early twenties about her university and career plans and she told me about how she was on the waiting list for admissions into the San Jose State occupational therapy program.

Careers as well as prices in health care are virtually immune from the business cycle. Unlike technology jobs like computer programming, these jobs also seem to gracefully upgrade workers' technological knowledge as technology affects their jobs. I always seem to be bumping into refugees from the last technological downturn. In graduate school at Stanford there were refuggees from disk drive companies upgrading their skills, high tech of the 1980s. I remember bumping into refugee engineers and programmers from the aerospace defense industry later on, then the internet era.


According to today's business week article:

"Almost invisibly, health care has become the main American job program for the 21st century, replacing, at least for the moment, all the other industries that are vanishing from the landscape. 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..."

"Health care is highly labor intensive, so most of that $2 trillion ends up in the pockets of workers. And at least so far, there's little leakage abroad in terms of patient care. "Health care is all home-produced," says Princeton University economist and health-care expert Uwe Reinhardt. The good news is that if the housing market falls into a deep swoon, health care could provide enough new jobs to prevent a wider recession. In August, health-services employment rose by 35,000, double the increase in construction and far outstripping any other sector."

"John Maynard Keynes would nod approvingly if he were alive. Seventy years ago, the elegant British economist proposed that in tough times the government could and should spend large sums of money to create jobs and stimulate growth. His theories are out of fashion, but substitute "health care" for "government," and that's exactly what is happening today."

"Make no mistake, though: The U.S. could eventually pay a big economic price for all these jobs. Ballooning government spending on health care is a major reason why Washington is running an enormous budget deficit, since federal outlays for health care totaled more than $600 billion in 2005, or roughly one quarter of the whole federal budget. Rising prices for medical care are making it harder for the average American to afford health insurance, leaving 47 million uninsured."

"Moreover, as the high cost of health care lowers the competitiveness of U.S. corporations, it may accelerate the outflow of jobs in a self-reinforcing cycle. In fact, one explanation for the huge U.S. trade deficit is that the country is borrowing from overseas to fund creation of health-care jobs."

It would be nice to hear a critique of all this from a trained health care economist.