Without the health care industry, the Kansas City areas economy would have suffered far more in the Great Recession and slow recovery.

A new Brookings Institution study of the largest metropolitan areas found that the Kansas City region has more than the national average share of health care practitioners and health technologists in its labor force, and the health care industry has grown faster here than the national average.

While health care jobs nationally contributed to 13 percent of job growth in the recovery, those jobs represented 18 percent of the post-recession growth in the Kansas City area, according to the report released Monday.

Health care created about 6,300 jobs out of about 35,000 created in the Kansas City area since the recovery began and that can be a good news/bad news thing, said Martha Ross, a fellow in the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program.

Its good to have job growth in that industry, but you want broad employment growth, so its important for the metro areas overall health to have growth in other industries as well, she said in a telephone intervew.

Theres another mixed blessing about job growth in health care: The average earnings of health care practitioners, a category that includes physicians, nurses and dentists, are nearly double average worker wages. Thats good for the local economy.

But the average wages of home health care aides and other kinds of nursing assistants are lower than national pay averages. And their limited discretionary income means less purchasing power and a small economic ripple in the economy.

More than 85,000 workers out of the Kansas City areas employment base of about 970,000 are health care practitioners, technicians, such as lab workers, and health aides, Brookings reported, based on U.S. Department of Labor industry classifications.

Nationally and in the Kansas City area, about 1 in 10 jobs are in the health care industry. From 2003 to 2013, employment in that industry grew 22.7 percent, far outstripping the 2.1 percent job growth in all other industries.

Brookings said that in the 100 largest U.S. metro areas, the share of health care practitioners which includes doctors, nurses and dentists averages 3.6 percent of all employment. In the Kansas City area, those jobs account for 3.8 percent of employment.

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Health care fuels Kansas City area job growth