NBC News
The cuts to health insurance programs proposed by the president, Donald Trump, in his fiscal bill that is now in Congress, put hundreds of thousands of jobs in the health sector, one of the most historically strong areas of the US labor market.
The Republicans of the Congress are negotiating the budget plan that can leave almost 8 million people without a doctor, according to the Congress Budget Office. And another 2 million would lose the coverage of the Affordable or ACA health care law – more known as Obamacare – if Congress lets the tax subsidies to health insurance expire.
Less funds for Medicaid and fewer people with medical insurance would mean less visits to the doctor, recipes and medical procedures and, as a result, less need for workers to provide this type of services.
Trump’s plan could cause The loss of almost 500,000 jobs in the health sector During the next decade, according to an analysis of the George Washington University and the background of the Commonwealth.
Meanwhile, the expiration of tax subsidies to ACA program, which were promulgated in 2021, would cause the loss of another 140,000 jobs, according to a separate analysis of the George Washington University.
“Hospitals, health centers and pharmacies in some parts of the country will close because they will lose income,” said Leighon Ku, director of the George Washington University Policy Research Center, which worked on the analysis. “Jobs will be lost, and we are talking about middle class jobs.”
That would be a hard blow to one of the strongest and most stable areas of the labor market in recent years. Health assistance represented almost half of the jobs created in the United States in May, according to the Office of Labor Statistics.
Last year, about half of the 2.2 million jobs added to the economy corresponded to sectors related to health care, according to a global S&P analysis. This has helped compensate for employment cuts and growth stagnation in other labor market sectors, such as retail trade and manufacturing industry.
“At this time, much of what these positive figures are promoting and reinforcing the labor market is the health sector,” said Allison Shrivastava, economist of the Indeed.com employment portal. “It is something that has been a constant. The health sector has been a fairly large strut while the rest of the labor market cooled.”
The provisions related to illness insurance are part of a broader bill that has been approved by the House of Representatives and is currently in the Senate.
The project, which the Republicans have baptized as Big Beautiful Bill Actwould cut about 800,000 million dollars from Medicaid, the medical insurance program for people with low income and disabilities, in order to help compensate part of the 4 billion dollars of extensions of tax cuts for individuals and companies.
A version of the bill currently in the Senate, which plans to begin to vote next week, would go further in reducing the expense in Medicaid, including a willingness to limit the use by the states of taxes on hospitals and other health care providers that help states to finance their part of the Medicalid program.
The cuts They would especially affect health care providers from rural areaswhere patients are more likely to be insured through Medicaid than in metropolitan areas. Researchers at Georgetown University discovered that 40% of children in small and rural peoples are insured by Medicaid.
According to a report from this month of the Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform, one third of all rural hospitals in the country are already at risk of closing due to financial difficulties.
The community health centers, which employ more than 300,000 workers and receive part of their federal government financing also. These centers, which serve at least 32 million patients a year, mostly low income, obtain about 40% of their medicaid income.
“Our health centers operate with very narrow margins, so any type of interruption in payments or reimbursements, even for a short period of time, can have a significant impact,” said Joe Dunn, head of policy of the National Association of Community Health Centers.
“About 40% of the health centers are in rural areas of the United States, they are often the only primary care of the community. We have health centers in villages of some hundreds of inhabitants, and there may be no other type of health care network,” he added.
In the absence of changes in the policy of Congress, the health sector seemed to be aimed at continuous growth, and largely isolated from the most general concerns about tariffs and economic deceleration. According to Shrivastava, the number of employment offers for doctors and surgeons in Indeed.com is 90% higher than the levels prior to the pandemic, the offers for home health auxiliaries have increased by 46% and vacancies for nurses by 16%.
Employment offers in the health sector in Ziprecruiter.com represent 27% of all active employment offers and job offers in the health sector are beginning to constitute a greater part of the new job offers, according to site data.
The loss of this impulse in hiring as a consequence of cuts in financing would stop the labor market.
“At the moment, the labor market as a whole is in a situation of stagnation,” said Shrivastava. “People do not want to leave their work, they are nervous about whether or not they may find another, and companies are not willing to hire. Health has been the exception”
