Health care spending - and new jobs - exploding

Thinking of a new career? Health care may be the way to go.

Why? Consider this: In 2007, total health expenditures in the U.S were $2.24 trillion. That’s big enough to rank U.S. health spending as the seventh largest economy in the world. In short, we spend more on health care than the entire gross domestic product (or national income) of countries such as Italy, Spain and Canada.

That staggering figure was part of a presentation on health care costs by Glenn Melnick, a Ph.D. and an expert in health economics and finance at the University of Southern California. He is among a host of health experts who are joining hundreds of journalists like me in Seattle this week for the Association of Health Care Journalists conference.

Perhaps even more startling than the $2.24 trillion figure is the expectation that it will grow even larger. In the next 10 years, the U.S. is expected to add $2 trillion more in new spending.

So what does that mean? More jobs. From 2001-2006, the health-care industry added 1.7 million jobs, while the rest of the private sector added none. Thirty to 40 percent of all new jobs created in the next 25 years will be in health.

- Richard Martin, Times staff writer

Comments

[David]

And if you want you can work for terrible wages and no patient ratios in Florida, or go to California and make twice as much with patient to nurse ratio laws. Florida is also about ten years behind the Northeast and West coast.