Free Republic

Consolidation throughout the healthcare industry is increasing costs and driving more care through hospitals, the Physicians Advocacy Institute warned in a letter to Congress. Healthcare organizations have been joining forces to try to get ahead of the industry's shifting landscape. The number of physicians employed by hospitals and health systems grew by nearly 50% from 2012 to 2015, with a corresponding decline in the number of independently practicing physicians, according to the letter—supported with research from consultancy Avalere Health—sent to the House Energy & Commerce Committee's oversight and investigations subcommittee. The decline of the independent medical practice and lack of...

In the American labor market, services are the new steel.This moment was inevitable. It just wasn’t supposed to happen so soon. Due to the inexorable aging of the country—and equally unstoppable growth in medical spending—it was long obvious that health-care jobs would slowly take up more and more of the economy. But in the last quarter, for the first time in history, health care has surpassed manufacturing and retail, the most significant job engines of the 20th century, to become the largest source of jobs in the U.S. In 2000, there were 7 million more workers in manufacturing than in...

There's a lot of debate about the future of labor in America: Will manufacturing ever come back? Will automation be a job destroyer? Will we all be freelancers working from home, shifting from gig to gig every 6 months?It's all interesting to think about, but if you want to place one solid bet on the future of jobs in America, this chart would be a pretty simple place to start.Regardless of where the economic cycle is, health care jobs just keep going up in a straight line. Image: https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?id=CES6562000101 The chart is even more impressive when you look at healthcare...

WASHINGTON, Oct. 28 — In a reversal from past election cycles, Democratic candidates for president are outpacing Republicans in donations from the health care industry, even as the leading Democrats in the field offer proposals that have caused deep anxiety in some of its sectors. Hospitals, drug makers, doctors and insurers gave candidates in both parties more than $11 million in the first nine months of this year, according to an analysis of campaign finance records done for The New York Times by the Center for Responsive Politics, an independent group that tracks campaign finance. In all, the Democratic presidential...