Healthcare is a Booming Business

...and that's why it's getting more expensive.

Politicians and pundits want to point to political causes and solutions for rising health care costs. They're all wrong. Health care costs have risen because it costs more for the providers to do business. As medical technology advances, hospitals need more employees to manage the equipment, not less. The cost of both capital investment and labor has been rising, leading to higher costs over all. It's pretty basic stuff.

In today's Wall Street Journal, they have a great article and interactive graph that shows how health care employment has overtaken factory employment in many cities across the country. This is no surprise, even in the absence of lower labor costs overseas. Advances in factory technologies have led to the need for fewer employees which is the exact opposite of the health care industry. In most of the cities that I scanned, health care employment is over 10% of all jobs. As the population ages and technology continues to advance, that number probably won't be declining.