Healthcare, green tech brighten dim U.S. jobs picture

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Healthcare and clean energy rank as bright spots in a bleak U.S. jobs market and both stand to generate even more employment under plans put forward by President Barack Obama.

The health industry, bolstered by the demands of an aging population and supplied by new technologies, has added jobs despite the recession and is destined for further expansion should Obama make good on his promise of affordable medical care for millions of uninsured Americans.

The mix of jobs is likely to shift as preventive medicine gets more emphasis, record-keeping functions are modernized and fewer diagnostic tests are ordered, economists say.

"Green" tech, propelled by efforts to cut carbon emissions blamed for global warming, will benefit from an economic stimulus package enacted this year and a climate change bill making its way through Congress.

Healthcare and the environment were singled out in a report this month by Obama's Council of Economic Advisers as two sectors projected to be major U.S. job engines over the next several years.

Investments in the two areas "are laying the foundation for long-term economic growth," said Heather Boushey, an economist with the Center for American Progress.

STRONG ECONOMIC MEDICINE

Healthcare has grown 3.7 percent since the recession began in December 2007, while the labor force as a whole declined 4.7 percent, said Heidi Shierholz, an Economic Policy Institute economist, citing U.S. Labor Department data.

One reason that medicine has held its own during the recession is that nearly 60 percent of all healthcare costs are covered by the public sector, including programs like Medicaid and Medicare, helping insulate the industry from hard times, said labor professor Eileen Appelbaum of Rutgers University.

"People think we have a private health system in this country, but more than half is publicly financed," she said.

Budget strains are starting to take their toll on healthcare jobs in many states, she said. But the Labor Department projects that U.S. healthcare employment will grow 20 percent above 2006 levels by 2016, even without Obama's proposed overhaul.

Government forecasts for clean energy and green technology jobs as a whole are harder to come by.

Economists from the University of Massachusetts and the Center for American Progress concluded in a study last month that the economic stimulus and the climate-change bills would generate $150 billion a year in clean-energy investments, netting 1.7 million new jobs annually.

GOING FOR GREEN

Most of those gains would come from retrofits of homes and other buildings to improve energy efficiency and insulation. Other high-growth areas cited in the report included renewable energy sources such as wind and solar energy expanded public transportation and construction of a highly efficient new electric distribution network, known as the smart grid.