Kai Risdahl

Marketplace's Kaylee Wells explains what's going on there.

We're going to break this down into short, medium, and long-term trends.

Let's start with the biggest and most immediate factor here, the Kaiser Permanente strikes.

Daniel Zhao is chief economist at Glassdoor.

He says that dip is temporary.

So we should see a lot of those jobs bounce back in March when those folks come back to work.

Because remember, we went from adding 77,000 health care jobs in January to losing 28,000 in February.

30,000 striking people is a blip and doesn't explain the whole gap.

Which brings us to the medium term trend.

Dean Baker is a senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

Medicaid, Medicare, that kind of thing.

The government cuts mean less health care funding, even for the private sector jobs.

So we've got strikes in the short term, funding cuts in the medium term.

Both of those mean fewer health care jobs.

Andy Challenger is chief revenue officer at the outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

And he says the long-term outlook for health care jobs is much rosier.

Because as the U.S.

population gets older, the demand for healthcare jobs will keep growing.

I'm Kaylee Wells for Marketplace.

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