Dive Brief:
- The healthcare sector grew by 33,000 jobs in September, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday, putting it behind only professional and business services employment, which rose by 67,000 jobs.
- The healthcare sector job growth for September was more than twice the growth recorded for the sector in August, which saw a relatively low 14,000 jobs added.
- Employment for the overall economy grew by 156,000 jobs for the month, while unemployment remained "little changed" at 5% and about 7.9 million unemployed people.
Dive Insight:
Broken down, the healthcare sector's growth in September was comprised of 24,000 more jobs in ambulatory healthcare services and 7,000 jobs in hospitals. Every category within those areas was up except for medical and diagnostic laboratories, in which September jobs were down 0.4% compared to August.
While it's up from August, the sector's growth is not quite as high as it was in other recent months, with July recording 43,000 jobs and June recording 39,000.
Politico's Dan Diamond noted in August healthcare was on pace to become the country's biggest sector in within three years, though with August and September a bit slower, the ongoing pace remains to be seen. Also, it is still unclear how the pace might be impacted by any major changes to healthcare policy that could come with the next administration. Plans put forward by Clinton are projected to add healthcare coverage for another 400,000 to 9.6 million people with her proposed modifications to the ACA, while plans from Trump are projected to decrease coverage by 15.6 million to 25.1 million people with a repeal of the ACA.
The question of how much healthcare job growth is really a good thing has been being asked for years, including in a 2012 New England Journal of Medicine paper that argued, "The challenge is that it's easy to count jobs but much, much harder to figure out who paid for them and whether those resources could have been put to better use."