on Sep 18th, 2006Health Care Job Opportunities (Everything is Outsourced)
Rather than go see The Illusionist starring Ed Norton, why not pull up a seat to the American Economy and watch with fascination as the job market vanishes to destinations abroad that remain, for the most part, out of the American voter’s eye. The only job opportunities in this country appear to be in health care, that bloated whale of a business that has more bureaucratic blubber than Vice President Dick Cheney. But don’t hold your breath, medical tourism is on the rise, and it won’t be long before even those jobs have gone abroad.
Corporate America is selling out the country and using the political system to mask their rapacious greed for profit. If you thought today’s average CEO has your well-being in mind and aims to maintain your standard of living, then you might want to buy yourself a good shovel, because the crap is going to be piling a mile high the longer you believe it.
What they’re waking up to is the true underpinnings of the much vaunted American job machine. The U.S. unemployment rate is 4.7%, compared with 8.2% and 8.9%, respectively, in Germany and France. But the health-care systems of those two countries added very few jobs from 1997 to 2004, according to new data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation & Development, while U.S. hospitals and physician offices never stopped growing. Take away health-care hiring in the U.S., and quicker than you can say cardiac bypass, the U.S. unemployment rate would be 1 to 2 percentage points higher.
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.
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
Business Week, September 26, 2006