On the bubble?

Is healthcare’s Great American Jobs Machine sustainable /

STAFFING UP

When Michigan’s state government— responding to the steady hemorrhage of manufacturing jobs in the 2000s—launched its No Worker Left Behind program, it wanted to channel displaced workers into the knowledge economy.

The move, it turned out, is helping drive growth in Detroit’s healthcare sector. Though the metro area’s total population dropped by 10% between 2003 and 2011, jobs in its healthcare industry surged by 11,400. The number of such jobs per capita in the region soared 24%, to 62 per 1,000 residents, well above the national average of 54.

“We see applicants coming to us from virtually every industry, including manufacturing,” said Michael Woolsey, director of human resources for corporate and physician services at Beaumont Health System in Royal Oak.

Detroit’s experience is typical of a national phenomenon: Aging, Rust Belt cities with declining or stagnant populations are continuing to add healthcare jobs at a rapid clip, sug- gesting to some analysts that they may be raising employment in the sector to what could turn out to be unsustainable levels. The job density in many of these regions—measured as the total number of healthcare jobs per 1,000 residents—has gone from around average to among the highest in the nation.

Faster-growing regions of the country are adding to healthcare employment, too. But with younger populations less prone to using the healthcare system, the job growth in most of those areas is more in line with the national average, or even a bit below.

The trends suggest regions betting on rebuilding their economies on the backs of resurgent healthcare sectors may be betting on horses that have already run their races. “Even as people migrate away from these Rust Belt cities and the Northeast, and toward the Sun Belt, the healthcare jobs seem to be more sticky,” said Chapin White, a senior researcher with the Center for Studying Health System Change, a policy not-for-profit in Washington. The jobs “seem to be staying in these cities where people are moving away from.”

Intense growth

The outsized healthcare job growth in areas such as Detroit takes place against a backdrop of rising healthcare jobs almost everywhere. Modern Healthcare’s analysis found that, overall, healthcare provider jobs per capita in the U.S. grew nearly twice as fast as the population between 2003 and 2011. Healthcare providers have added 2.8 million new jobs— the equivalent of the entire federal government’s workforce—since 2004.

For its analysis, Modern Healthcare compared healthcare job growth and population in 88 metropolitan areas with more than 500,000 residents. The magazine used U.S. Census Bureau data from 2003 and 2011 to compute a healthcare job-intensity number— defined as the number of jobs with healthcare providers per 1,000 people in the region.

Officials in Wayne County, which includes Detroit, do not see the rising number of healthcare jobs on top of a shrinking population— the surge in the area’s job-intensity made it the second fastest-growing region in the nation— as a sign of rising healthcare inefficiency. Instead, like their peers in other stagnant-population cities, they see healthcare as a catalyst for wider economic growth.

Detroit is developing TechTown, a research and technology park adjacent to Henry Ford Hospital. It’s also banking on economic development coming from spinoffs from Wayne State University’s $100 million research building, which is expected to open in 2014.

“The university is a huge anchor for down-