Times are tough, unemployment is high, and everyone expects that the Health Plan will inject billions of dollars into the economy. Health care jobs are one of few growth categories in the last years, from hospitals to home care.
This week, the New York Times on-line had 3 articles, in the education section, about career change, all with some advice on health care jobs: Choosing a Program to Improve Your Future , For Outsiders, Opening Doors to Health Care, and How to Bear the Tuition Burden Without a Paycheck. They are worth reading, but I think that health care is the next career bubble, and probably economic bubble as well.
Health care is a service, which has the advantages that it can not, for most part, be outsourced to India or China. This makes health care jobs more secure than, say, manufacturing or programming.
But, with the exception of medical research, health care does not produce anything – it is the equivalent of yard work or flipping hamburgers. It will not improve the deficit, or our international competitiveness. So while it is nice to create all these jobs, without also finding an income source to pay for them, salaries will have to go down with time. And if every laid off employee switches to health care jobs, they won’t be too high to begin with. As for the business of medical care, again, without finding a source of funding, the long term focus will have to be on cost cutting and ‘efficiency’, which leads to a really nasty work environment.
Universities are in the business of enrolling students. While it is nice if these students get jobs when they graduate, this is really not the universities’ problem if they do not. I would suggest that one follows the advice of ‘let the buyer beware’ before spending too much on such a career, and look deep within oneself to make sure this is really a career worth pursuing. And as for investing, my bet is that the industry valuation will baloon in in the coming years, with medical data management and treatment assessment going along, but then decline when the funding runs out and the reality sinks in – if we all serve burgers to one another, we are no better off than cooking our own.