Day: October 26, 2026

Key Points:

• The healthcare industry is driving much of Arizona’s growth, but employers can’t keep up with demand

• Healthcare jobs accounted for more than half of the 22,700 non-agricultural jobs added between September 2025 and September 2026

• Arizona could face a shortage of 76,000 healthcare workers over the next decade

PHOENIX — Mike Renaud says he would hire 20 physicians and 100 mental health therapists tomorrow if he could find qualified candidates.

Renaud, president and CEO of Valle del Sol, which provides primary and behavioral healthcare in Arizona, said the organization has increased its staff by 15% over the past year but still needs more workers to meet demand.

“We would grow faster, but we don’t have enough of the clinical people here in Arizona to hire,” Renaud said.

His experience illustrates a challenge for Arizona’s economy. Healthcare is providing much of the state’s job growth, but employers need workers and money to keep expanding.

Arizona added 22,700 jobs outside agriculture between September 2025 and September 2026, including 12,500 in healthcare and social assistance, according to the Arizona Office of Economic Opportunity. That means the healthcare industry accounted for more than half of the state’s overall job gains.

The numbers reflect the rising demand for care in Arizona, but meeting that demand requires enough people willing and able to do the work.          

Doug Walls, OEO’s labor market information director, said Arizona’s growing and aging population is driving demand for healthcare, including more frequent and specialized services. 

At the same time, slower hiring in other industries has made healthcare a bigger part of the state’s job growth, he said.

“It’s a little bit of both,” Walls said.

Healthcare and social assistance employment grew 2.6% through September from the same period last year, matching the annual pace OEO predicted. The long-term forecast, however, gives other industries a larger slice of the pie.

The agency expects healthcare and social assistance to add 113,466 jobs between 2024 and 2034, about a quarter of the state’s overall job growth.

The forecasts predict overall job growth after accounting for job losses. Employers must also replace workers who retire or leave, so they will need to hire more people than the growth figures alone suggest.

Walls said the forecast assumes the rate at which employees in the industry leave will stay about the same as demand grows. 

Still, he said, difficulty finding new workers and employee burnout are long-standing problems in the healthcare industry.

At the Greater Phoenix Chamber’s Economic Outlook event Oct. 1, business and healthcare leaders discussed the industry’s growth and challenges going forward.

Mark Whalen, Banner Health’s chief enterprise growth officer, said the nonprofit is investing in clinics and technology intended to give medical staff more time for patients. Finding workers remains a challenge.

“One challenge is having the workforce to meet the growing demand,” Whalen said.

A healthcare shortfall on the horizon

The Greater Phoenix Chamber Foundation’s 2023 workforce report estimated that Arizona could face a shortage of 76,000 healthcare workers over the following decade.

Keeping future doctors from leaving Arizona is part of the shortfall, said Dr. Daniel Derksen, director of the Arizona Center for Rural Health at the University of Arizona.

After medical school, doctors continue their training in supervised positions called residencies. Arizona needs more of those positions, Derksen said, because many graduates who leave the state for training don’t return. 

“We really haven’t kept up with the residency slots that we need for our population,” he said.

Derksen suggested encouraging more students from rural and tribal communities to pursue healthcare careers through loan repayment programs. He said those efforts could help bring workers to the communities that lack them the most.

Some training programs are helping people find work. OEO’s 2025 review of ARIZONA@WORK adult training programs found health-related training had the strongest effect on employment after participants left the program.

After accounting for the differences in people’s backgrounds and local job markets, the agency estimated that completing health-related training was linked to about 14 more people working for every 100 participants, compared with those who did not start or complete training.

That suggests training programs can help, but it remains unclear whether they meet employers’ needs.

Todd Sanders, the Greater Phoenix Chamber’s president and CEO, said its foundation works with high schools, community colleges and universities to prepare workers.

“There is a dire need for more talent, and we are squarely focused on that,” Sanders said.

Medicaid cuts aren’t helping

Hiring also depends on whether hospitals and clinics can afford more workers, especially in rural communities.

If patients lose Medicaid, the government health insurance program for low-income people, hospitals and clinics may face bills patients cannot pay.

“These safety net clinics and hospitals already run on very tight margins,” said Derksen, director of the Arizona Center for Rural Health.

Under the 2025 One Big Beautiful Bill act, some adults in Arizona’s Medicaid program will face work requirements and have to prove twice a year that they still qualify for coverage. Those changes begin in January 2027, according to Arizona’s Medicaid agency.

The need for more doctors and therapists shows the challenge behind Arizona’s job forecasts. Filling those jobs would also support workers in other industries.

Dr. Michelle Gourdine, chief medical officer at CVS Caremark, said at the economic outlook event that access to care helps people stay healthy enough to work, providing an economic boost.

“Health and economics are deeply interconnected,” she said.

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This article first appeared on Cronkite News and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Key Points:

• A new mobile app from Turning Point USA shows people who are likely to vote conservative and have not returned their ballots

• Anyone can download and use the app as it’s intended

• A similar app from Democratic organizations needs more authorization to use

PHOENIX — A publicly available app provides insight into who a conservative group sees as people likely to vote with their side.

Designed by Turning Point USA, the organization founded by Charlie Kirk to promote conservative candidates, the TPAction mobile app is specifically meant to aid volunteers who “chase” ballots. They use it to find people in a given neighborhood who have asked for early ballots but have not yet returned them, according to county election records.

But not just anyone with an unreturned ballot.

“It identifies who we want to vote,” said Tyler Bowyer, the chief operating officer of Turning Point USA, when asked about it.

And how does the organization do that?

“Why would I tell you that?” he responded in a chat on social media, followed by “LOL” — laughing out loud. “I mean, it’s basic logic who would determine our targets.”

But Bowyer declined to answer any more questions.

There’s nothing illegal about all of this, as voter registration records are public.

And lists are available regularly of those who ask for and have returned early ballots. That’s why those emails, text messages and phone calls people get on behalf of candidates and issues tend to stop once the ballot is returned.

Democrats have a similar program called MiniVAN that enables campaign organizers to send out volunteers — just like Turning Point — to find those voters it has identified as likely supporters whose ballots may be sitting unopened on the kitchen table.

But there’s a key difference.

While the MinVAN app can be downloaded to cell phones, actual voter information becomes available only when the user is linked to a specific list. And that list is not publicly available, but is under the control of the organization that controls the list.

That’s not the case with TPAction.

It takes only a name, address and phone number to sign up and activate the app once downloaded from either Google Play or the App Store.

And one option on a menu that appears when you sign in and click the arrows in the upper right is to “chase ballots.”

Click on that and you get a menu that tops off with “voters near me.”

That first turns up a list of neighbors within a couple of hundred yards — at least those who Turning Point believes is worthy of their attention — complete with their names, addresses and whether they’ve returned their early ballots. You may or may not be on that list.

There’s also an option to click on the map to show you exactly where they live from your position.

But you’re not limited to snooping about just the folks in your area.

At the bottom of the map is a button labeled “done for the day.” That not only releases the list back to Turning Point but clears the map for the next time.

And, more to the point, you can then reopen the app — and the map — from wherever is your new starting point. And that produces a list of people in that area who Turning Point wants to pursue.

The app also has other options to allow users to make phone calls directly to those on the list. It even provides information like the target’s gender, age and party, and whether that person is on the early voting list — meaning someone who asked for a ballot by mail.

And even direct texts are an option.