Growing Southern Nevada’s health care economy

Last week The Lincy Institute, the Vegas Chamber, the Vegas Chamber Leadership Foundation, and the Nevada Health and Bioscience Corporation hosted a symposium on the future of Southern Nevada’s health care economy. Today, health care is the fastest-growing sector in the regional economy having added more than 42,000 jobs since 2016. 

Yet, despite this growth we only have 70 percent of our expected health care jobs. Consequently, we continue to have poor health and social outcomes and export tens of millions of our health care dollars to out-of-state providers annually.

At the symposium, Paul Umbach, president and founder of Tripp Umbach, a nationally recognized leader in health care economics, highlighted the primary barrier to growing our health care economy and a key reason why Nevada is still missing nearly a third of its expected health care jobs: the lack of residency and fellowship programs or what is commonly referred to as GME (graduate medical education) that provide advanced training for medical school graduates. 

With four medical schools now operating in the state, Nevada will continue to produce medical school graduates at a rate above the national average. However, without simultaneous expansion of GME, only one in six of these graduates are likely to practice in Nevada. As a consequence, Nevada is poised to continue underwriting the training of doctors for other states.

A fact sheet developed by our centers reports that the Kirk Kerkorian School of Medicine at UNLV graduated 317 students from 2021 to 2025, with 133 (42%) of its students securing medical residencies in Nevada. The UNR School of Medicine produced 324 graduates during the same period, with just 45 (14%) of its students perusing a residency position in Nevada. For graduates of both the Kirk Kerkorian School of Medicine at UNLV and UNR School of Medicine for 2021-2025, the most popular residency specialties are internal medicine (92), family medicine (72), and emergency medicine (64). Medical students are much more likely to practice medicine where they complete their GME training, and even more likely to remain in state if their residency program is in the state where they attended medical school. 

Umbach offered recommendations based upon his decades of work in more than forty states. He proposed the creation of a Southern Nevada Physician Workforce Expansion Council, a regional authority to coordinate regional physician workforce strategies with the goal of retaining at least half of the students graduating from Southern Nevada’s three medical schools—the Kirk Kerkorian School of Medicine at UNLV, Touro University, and the Roseman University School of Medicine. The body would also be charged with securing federal, state, and local dollars to build the GME programs in high need areas such as general surgery, internal medicine and OB-GYN subspecialities, pediatrics, and psychiatry.

Umbach noted that there are models in other states and regions that can inform the Southern Nevada effort. For instance, a ten-year initiative in Northwest Arkansas reveals the gains possible in the health care economy when a region acts in a purposeful and collaborate manner.

Unfortunately for Nevada its focus on growing its health care economy is occurring at time of federal retrenchment. The One, Big, Beautiful Bill Act signed into law last summer requires states to implement stringent qualification requirements that are designed to reduce Medicaid enrollments. In a state where a quarter of the population is covered by Medicaid, including nearly half of Nevada’s children, reducing access will increase costs as those who lose eligibility will delay care until their illnesses are more advanced and more costly to treat. At a time when the federal government continues to reduce funding for health care, it is critical that states develop innovative solutions to fund and sustain adequate health care for their residents. 

To this end, the symposium also focused on new programs to increase mental and behavioral providers. Nevada has long been a mental health desert and the poor quality of care provided to children led to a Department of Justice investigation and settlement requiring improvements in community-based services and reduced use of institutionalized care. In response, Nevada has developed innovative programs to strengthen the mental and behavioral workforce pipeline. 

One example of state innovation is BeHERE NV that was launched in the 2023 session of the Nevada Legislature. The program draws on a successful model pioneered in Nebraska that introduces high school and college students to mental and behavioral health career paths and seeks to bolster Nevada’s mental health workforce with homegrown talent. Another example is last session’s Senate Bill 165 (2025). The legislation established new degree and certificate programs to support the school-based mental health workforce and created a psychology internship program to oversee post-graduate training required for licensing. Panel participants leading these programs discussed the importance of growing our own providers to fill existing workforce gaps, addressing compassion fatigue among behavioral help professionals to promote retention, and reducing barriers to care by enforcing mental health parity requirements for insurers.

Even in the face of federal obstacles, now is the time to build on our current momentum. In 2027, legislators and the governor should create the necessary regional governance structure to implement the recommendations noted above while dedicating permanent funding needed to grow our health care workforce. Doing so will transform the health of all Nevadans while creating an array of good paying, recession-proof jobs ranging from highly skilled physicians and surgeons to certifications for entry-level positions to support hospitals, doctors, and other health care professionals, including many desperately needed positions in mental health services in our schools and communities.

Indeed, in the last decade Nevada has invested state resources to successfully diversify the northern Nevada economy. In Southern Nevada local and state dollars have been used to elevate the sports economy through the construction of assets such as Allegiant Stadium and the under-construction baseball facility for the soon-to-be Las Vegas A’s. In recent sessions, the Nevada Legislature has repeatedly considered massive investments to bring a motion picture studio to the region that would have created far fewer jobs at a much higher cost than would result from investing in the region’s health care economy. Recession-proof health care jobs will yield a far greater return on investment for the state economy, and for the future health and wellness of all Nevadans. Our residents deserve nothing less.