Job openings in health continue to make all-time highs. In October, the Health Care and Social Assistance dataset showed 1.8 million available jobs in health care, a record as best as we can tell. About 1.2M of those are probably health care which means there is sufficient demand to employ 17.2M people. What is interesting, if you apply the normal employment growth rate of 3.4% over a 20 month period in 2018-2019, absent the pandemic and a massive mood swing generally, there would be 17 million people employed in health care. In other words, increased demand translates into the need for another quarter million workers. Some of that delta could also be due to lower productivity from new hires but, given how lackluster that has been, probably not a good enough answer for now.
To put that 250k jobs in context, it is equal to six months of employment growth for the sector under normal circumstances.
And each month it grows.
Add that to the list of non-transitory things and here is hoping by 4Q earnings we hear how exactly each subsector is going to deal with the brave new world of resource constraints in health care.
Emily Evans
Managing Director – Health Policy
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