The Medical Bubble Keeps Inflating

There have been many different thousands of businesses that have shut down in the United States since the height of the virus pandemic last year. Restaurants, general goods stores, smaller retailers, and all manner of self-owned construction businesses have all vanished, most never to return. It is estimated that around 80% of all businesses were forced closed by the government, and the scary thing is that the government is again considering forcing a nationwide lock-down due to a supposed Delta variant of COVID being more dangerous. Though not every industry was gutted in such horrific fashion and left bleeding and struggling to survive. Some industries are thriving now more than ever, like the healthcare industry, where there's an actual boom of medical staffers so big that economic experts are calling it a bubble.

In large cities and urban areas, nurses, doctors, and other healthcare practitioners increased tenfold. Much of this was the government on a hiring frenzy, and millions of people who had never worked in the healthcare industry before were hired in some small role to handle things like admissions, distribution, cleanup, etc. Not necessarily only doctors and nurses; all sorts of staff were hired on to complement these medical professionals. Though, that's also not to say that a lot more doctors and nurses weren't hired. In fact, a lot of doctors ended up in America from overseas, coming from nations like India and Pakistan into America to practice medicine during the pandemic.

Hospitals were packed. ICU wings didn't have a bed to spare. Roadside medical tents were popping up to deal with the onset of COVID-positive patients. For a time there, it was some legitimately scary stuff happening in the streets of America. Though what happens when all of that goes away? This is a potential economic bubble burst that very few are talking about. Medical-related jobs pay pretty good money, and so people hired on, even in a temporary capacity, are reliant on that income. Should this bubble burst, tens of thousands, or even more people could lose their jobs instantly.

There are a lot of people who lost their entire livelihoods due to their whole industry collapsing who might just throw their hands up and shrug this off as just another in a line of unimportant economic happenings. Like the media loves to say so often: "Learn to code". Flippantly dismissing people who may end up homeless and starving. So compassion for the unemployed is in really short supply these days. However, this could affect the economy much more than just some plumbers and electricians going out of business. Not that these aren't important jobs, to be sure, though they were deemed unessential for a reason.

America needs its healthcare workers to be available. If the bubble bursts, for instance, and countless people are fired, and we happen to get another variant bringing about another surge, millions of people could potentially suffer as a result before any of these employees could be brought back; and that's even assuming they would want to be brought back to a position that had fired them. It's a very dangerous genre here. Perhaps people went too overboard in the hiring process, which leads economists to believe that the firing process would clear house of far more than would be necessary.

The Aftermath of the Burst

The fact is that unemployment has essentially drained America of its money. States are absolutely tapped and are still begging the federal government for more money. The federal government just got through printing another few trillion dollars for infrastructure bills, immigrant assistance, and now nearly a billion dollars will be going to help resettle Afghan refugees in America. If the bubble were to burst in this industry, it could have a cascading effect, like so many other industries do. For instance, thousands of people unemployed stop patronizing a business, which then goes bankrupt, whose owners and employees have to get on unemployment, and on it goes.

With most economic disasters, you only hear about the initial big boom. Like the Stock Market crash of the Great Depression, or the housing bubble bursting in 2008's recession. Though what you rarely hear about is how much more damage is done in the following weeks and months, as the economic hardships ripple out and cascade through the public and end up affecting multiple industries. Those stories aren't as "sexy" to run on media, but economists know that these are the hardships that make recovering so incredibly difficult. Not to mention that a lot of people would likely be without adequate healthcare they have come to rely on this past year. There are a lot of potential jobs on the line here.