Honestly this shouldn’t be too surprising, but the Affordable Care Act isn’t just giving people more access to quality healthcare.  It’s also putting Americans to work and saving many of our nation’s hospitals, as reported by Dan Diamond of Forbes magazine…

Obamacare was once called “The Job-Killing Health Care Law.” But the latest jobs report suggests that the broader economy—and the health care sector, specifically—is adding jobs at a healthy rate.

• Since the Affordable Care Act was signed into law in March 2010, the health care industry has gained nearly 1 million jobs—982,300, to be more precise—according to Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates released on Friday.
• Meanwhile, the rest of the economy has added 7.7 million jobs since March 2010, and for the first time, more people are working since the recession began five years ago.
• Private-sector jobs also grew for the 51st straight month, Justin Wolfers observes at The Upshot, which ties the longest consecutive streak on record and overlaps with the passage of Obamacare 50 months ago. But that streak is piddling compared to health care, which just reported its 131st straight month of job gains.

Booming growth in the heath care industry shouldn’t come as a surprise. The health care sector was gaining about 25,000 jobs per month in the years before the Affordable Care Act, and the law’s infusion of newly insured patients will help bolster providers’ bottom lines.

Besides the obvious job creation needed to handle millions of additional patients and insurance plans, the ACA has also created jobs by upping compensation for hospitals, especially in states that took some form of Medicaid expansion.  Hospitals and doctors have previously had to shoulder the cost for any patient that was treated and then could not pay for their care.  But now thanks to the ACA, those hospitals are able to provide a better quality of service because more of their overall care is compensated.  As previously discussed in this blog, the Medicaid expansion has often proven a necessary life line for our nation’s rural hospitals, some of which were forced into debt for seeing so many patients that couldn’t pay.

The healthcare needs of the United States will only continue to grow as a larger and larger share of the population ages.  But thankfully because of actions taken back in 2010, we’ll be much better prepared for them with more people working, and more avenues to quality care.