Although not necessarily attributable to the Affordable Care Act, an aging population, or any single factor, it is remarkable how much job growth has occurred in health services since the Great Recession. It is especially remarkable relative to other jobs. Also, changes in employment in health services are not cyclical: They are recession-proof, but they still kept climbing when the economy started to recover. A job in health services seems to have one-sided risk: You don’t go down when other jobs do, but you go up even faster when other jobs increase, too.

Nonfarm civilian employment peaked in January 2008 (at 138.4 million jobs), just before the Great Recession, and bottomed out in February 2010 (at 129.7 million jobs). Jobs were lost in 24 of those 25 months. Nonfarm civilian employment did not cross the January 2008 threshold again until May 2014.

Since the Affordable Care Act was signed in March 2010 and began to enroll many more Americans in coverage in 2014, many observers have asserted price inflation in health care has been moderate by historical standards. Such claims are misleading because many observers decline to differentiate between nominal and real inflation. In fact, prices for health-related goods and services have increased significantly.

The measurement of inflation most economists use to gauge the impact of price changes on ordinary people is the Consumer Price Index (CPI), which has been published for decades by the U.S. government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics. It measures prices facing consumers for all the goods and services we buy.