Ballooning Healthcare Industry Nothing To Celebrate — In Fact, It Might Be Killing Us

Originally published with Dr. Deane Waldman at The Daily Caller. 

The U.S. economy is stalling. The latest August jobs report shows that total nonfarm payroll employment rose by just 22,000. The unemployment rate remained stuck at 4.3 percent, with 7.4 million Americans out of work.

If that weren’t troubling enough, the annual benchmark revision just slashed previously reported job gains between March 2024 and March 2025 by 911,000 jobs — one of the steepest downward corrections in decades. That means the labor market was far weaker than Washington and many headline writers led the public to believe.

Seeking any glimmer of good news, the media seized upon healthcare as a “bright spot.” So-called “healthcare and social assistance” jobs grew by 64,000 in July and 31,000 in August. Over the past year, healthcare has averaged 42,000 new jobs per month, the only consistently growing industry. 

But here’s the uncomfortable and unreported truth. Most of the new hires are not doctors, nurses, or caregivers. They are administrators, consultants, billers and coders, compliance officers, regulators, and lawyers — jobs created by government regulations and insurance bureaucracy.
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This is not prosperity. This is not good health. It’s proof of a broken healthcare system.

​The long-term trend is ominous. From 1970 to 2020, the number of practicing physicians in the U.S. roughly doubled. But at the same time, the number of new healthcare bureaucracy jobs exploded by more than 4,400%. Today, 23.5 million Americans are employed in “healthcare.” Fewer than one-third – seven million – actually provide patient care. The rest feed the paperwork machine.

When President Obama financed the Affordable Care Act by shifting $716 billion out of Medicare, most of it supported administrative overhead. And because administrators are paid first-dollar-out, doctors and nurses are paid with the leftovers.

The results are medically disastrous: dangerously long wait times for care and fewer providers available. After the Affordable Care Act’s $1.76 trillion price tag, average maximum wait times rose 25%, from 99 days to 132 days. That delay isn’t just inconvenient — it causes “death by queue,” where Americans die while waiting for care that Washington promised but never delivered.

If we want to reverse course, Washington must stop conflating bureaucratic expansion with improvements in health care. Here are three effective reforms they should immediately consider:  

1. Flip spending priorities. Instead of paying administrators first, fund patient care first. When budgets tighten, trim overhead, not bedside medicine. Healthcare exists to heal patients, not to create lifetime employment for bureaucrats.
   
2. Unleash supply through deregulation. Scrap outdated restrictions like certificate-of-need laws and narrow scope-of-practice rules that keep qualified professionals from treating patients. Freeing providers to practice to the full extent of their training will expand access and lower costs.
   
3. Empower patients directly. Shift resources away from federal programs that inflate bureaucracy and into personalized healthcare accounts. When patients — not Washington — control dollars, providers compete on price and quality. That restores efficiency and puts the focus back where it belongs: on the patient.

A true bright spot will not be more taxpayer-funded healthcare clerical jobs that divert money away from patient care. It will be when Americans can once again see a doctor quickly, affordably, and without wading through an impenetrable thicket of paperwork.

Healthcare bureaucracy isn’t saving the U.S. labor market — it’s draining our health system of both money and time. To truly empower patients, we must redirect resources away from administrators and toward care.