For the first time in a decade, health care sector job growth stayed flat in July, according to the latest labor brief from the Altarum Institute's Center for Sustainable Health Spending.

July's figures are subject to revision as more solid data comes in from the Bureau of Labor Statistics in coming months. But the news of the halt in growth probably signals the end of a long-lived health jobs boom — a trend that experts have been expecting for a while.

Ani Turner, deputy director for the Center for Sustainable Health Spending, points out that while health spending has been slowing down in recent years, with three to four percent growth versus the six to seven percent of years past, health employment growth held steady even during the recession and its aftermath, when overall job figures were plummeting.

"It's got to catch up at some point," she said.

Indeed, the Bureau Labor of Statistics observed that overall health employment has slowed down in 2013 compared to 2012. "Thus far in 2013, health care has added an average of 16,000 jobs per month, compared with an average monthly increase of 27,000 in 2012," their analysts write.

The job losses are particularly pronounced for hospitals: they lost 4,400 jobs in July, and downward revisions erased most of last month's gains. Over the past three months, hospitals have lost 13,000 jobs.

Turner said this downturn is consistent with figures that show that hospital utilization was lower than expected and never recovered after the recession.

Cost control

Changes to health care brought on by the Affordable Care Act are contributing to the jobs slump, experts say.

In particular, new regulations imposing Medicare reimbursement penalties on hospitals with high readmission rates are forcing providers to reduce hospitalizations by significant numbers.

In Minnesota alone, Medicare penalized 29 hospitals — about half the state's total — for readmitting patients too soon after discharge. In North Carolina, 61 of the 88 hospitals being tracked by CMS will face penalties.

But hospitals are already taking action to turn their penalties around. For example, a group of North Carolina hospitals began implementing a transitional care program that cut its readmission rate by 20 percent.

Overall, pressures from both the public and private sector are motivating hospitals to reorient their business model around value-based spending, which means reducing emergency room visits and certain kinds of technology, among other adjustments — and this trend doesn't seem to be going away any time soon.

Healthcare Act