Isthe slight uptick over the past eight months in health care's shareof employment a signal of something bigger? (Photo:Shutterstock)

Of the 263,000 nonfarm payroll jobs that the Bureau of LaborStatistics estimates were created in April, 27,000 were in healthcare.

This is not really news: Since the beginning of 2015, theaverage monthly gain in health-care jobs has been 28,959. Since2010, it's been 23,893; since 2000, it's been 24,041; since 1990,it's been 23,709. Only four of the 351 months since January 1990have seen declines in health-care employment.

That kind of consistency is in itself somewhat newsworthy,though. Most industries don't behave like that! Here's the growthin health-care employment since 1990 compared with job growth inthe rest of the economy:

During recessions, employment declines. But over the past threerecessions, employment in the health-care sector kept on rising.One result is that, while health care's share of nonfarm payrollemployment has risen from 7.3 percent in January 1990 to 10.8percent today, those gains have almost all come during andimmediately after economic downturns.

Theslight uptick over the past eight months in health care's share —if you stretch things out to two decimal points, it has gone from10.73 percent in August to 10.81 percent in April — is interesting.I certainly wouldn't call it a recession signal, but it's worthkeeping an eye on.

The BLS health-care-sector numbers don't include health insurersor government hospitals. Add them in (which I didn't do in theabove charts in part because there are no April data available forthem yet), and health care accounts for 12.1 percent of payrollemployment. But government hospital employment has grown onlymodestly since 1990, and while employment at health insurers hasgrown a spectacular 174 percent, it's still a pretty small part ofoverall health-care employment.

The gains in health-care employment are great news if you want ajob in health care. So is the fact that weekly earnings in thesector, which were lower than those for private employers overallin 1990, are now about 13 percent higher for non-supervisoryworkers, a premium that arose in the 2000s and has stayed about thesame since 2009.

All this good news for health-care workers is not necessarilygood news for the U.S. economy, though. Health care is alow-productivity-growth sector that, over time, has arguably been adrag on other U.S. industries. Plus, its share of employment can'tkeep growing forever, right? A 27,000-job gain doesn't mean as muchwhen employment is at 16 million as when it's at 8 million, so thepercentage increases in health-care employment are smaller now thanin the 1990s and 2000s. But they've still been higher in mostrecent months (not April, when the two were pretty much even) thanthe gains for total nonfarm payroll employment. The end of thehealth-care boom is not yet in sight.

Justin Fox ([email protected]) is aBloomberg Opinion columnist covering business. He was the editorialdirector of Harvard Business Review and wrote for Time, Fortune andAmerican Banker. He is the author of “The Myth of the RationalMarket.” This column does not necessarily reflect theopinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and itsowners. To contact the editor responsible for thisstory: Brooke Sample at [email protected]

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