Health care employment has been the bright spot in the otherwise
lackluster recent jobs reports. As overall employment decreased
by 2 percent from 2000 to 2010, employment in the health care
sector actually increased by 25 percent. But that’s not
necessarily a good thing, according to an opinion piece
published in the most recent edition of the New England Journal
of Medicine. “Treating the health care system like a (wildly
inefficient) jobs program conflicts directly with the goal of
ensuring that all Americans have access to care at an affordable
price,” write Katherine Baicker and Amitabh Chandra, two
researchers from Harvard. By 2020, almost one out of nine
American jobs will be in health care, an April study from the
Center for Health Workforce Studies projects. As the country
wrestles to reduce health care spending, which already consumes
about 18 percent of GDP, those extra jobs could be a step in the
wrong direction. “Salaries for health care jobs are not
manufactured out of thin air—they are produced