Caregiver’s Toolbox Ep. 41 “How Many People Are Employed By A Healthcare Company?”
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Caregiver’s Toolbox Ep. 41 “How Many People Are Employed By A Healthcare Company?”
Speaker 1:
Welcome to The Caregiver’s Toolbox, tools for everyday caregiving. We provide education and information on senior care topics. Here’s your host, Ryan McEniff.
Ryan McEniff:
Hello everybody. Welcome to another episode of Caregiver’s Toolbox, tools for everyday caregiving. My name is Ryan McEniff, I’m here with Janet. Janet, we are back. Last week, I did one. It was, what I call, a blitz podcast, where I just rant for four minutes about stuff. You’re not involved, just because, when we get busy at work, sometimes I just do one from home real quick, but Janet is back with us.
Janet:
I’m here.
Ryan McEniff:
We have the yin and the yan, the good and the bad. I guess it’s up to you to decide who’s what, right?
Janet:
That’s right. Naughty and nice. It’s the season.
Ryan McEniff:
But it is the season. One of the things that I was going to do, kind of a blitz podcast on, but since we’re here and we’re talking about… This probably will be a shorter one. But this was something that I saw on the interweb, on the internet somewhere. It was a few weeks back, and I kind of put it into my Evernote as, “This would be a good one to do a blitz on,” but then I did a blitz on something else, I can’t remember what it was. It was on an article on baby boomers. It wasn’t on baby boomers it was on how one in five people, one in five households in America doesn’t have net positive, net worth.
Janet:
That I’ll believe.
Ryan McEniff:
It was all about like, do these people… Everybody tells me like how, oh, it’s so great, you own a home healthcare company, it’s going to be making you tons of money. Usually the two things I say is, “Well, there are a lot of competitors, one, so it’s not like I’m the only one here. I’m not like John D Rockefeller with standard oil where I own the whole, the whole industry. Two, you know, I’m pretty concerned about baby boomer is not having money to pay for these things because the mentality, at least around here, I mean I’m not from the Midwest, but you see how in California, at least this the 4,000 square foot house, the three car garage, the truck, the BMW, and then the minivan or the SUV or whatever you want to call it that stuff costs money. And that means a lot of money isn’t getting saved.”
Janet:
Exactly. Well now there’s even ads on TV for different financial companies where it’s the idea of have you planned, do you have enough money to live out your life on?
Ryan McEniff:
Yeah.
Janet:
They have these different gimmicky, this is when you think you need to start a saving. When reality says you got to save there. A lot of people are concerned about outliving their money.
Ryan McEniff:
I think that’s a real concern.
Janet:
Absolutely.
Ryan McEniff:
You don’t know if like my mom, you don’t know if you’re the person that gets cancer at 65, or you’re the person that lives to 95, and he had only saved for 85 years on this earth.
Janet:
Yep.
Ryan McEniff:
So, but one of the things that we were going to talk about today and do a podcast on, and I’ll try to get this up tomorrow, tomorrow being Friday, today’s Thursday, the 14th. We didn’t have the time to get one out on Tuesday. It’s been you over here, but is this map I saw? I was on the internet and I, and just like the blitz podcast last week, I like talking about, reading about, and being knowledgeable about finance. I subscribe to the Wall Street Journal, not to really deal with the politics, but I like the business, the economy side. I think that stuff’s interesting.
So, I saw this map of the nation, and the article is about who is the biggest employer in all of the United States. From looking at this map, who would you say is the biggest employer of all the United States?
Janet:
Walmart USA.
Ryan McEniff:
Walmart USA. All right. You might say, well, why the heck am I listening to the Caregiver’s Toolbox talk about Walmart being the biggest employer in the country, and you would absolutely be right in thinking that. The reason why I found this map so interesting is not because it talks about if Amazon and Walmart are going to go head to head being the biggest employers in the near future. But it’s because of the things I noticed on the map. Janet, I’ll just talk for a moment, then you give me your opinion on this.
Most of the south and Midwest is dominated by Walmart, but then we’ll start from left to right from the west coast to the east coast, to the things that I found interesting. Oregon, Oregon, biggest provider, biggest employer, Providence health services, Idaho, St. Luke’s health services, Utah, Intermountain healthcare, North Dakota, Sanford health, South Dakota, Avera health. Minnesota, the Mayo clinic. Pennsylvania, University of Pittsburgh medical center center. Connecticut, Yale health systems. Rhode Island, Lifespan system of hospitals. Massachusetts is of course, Partners healthcare, God emperor partners healthcare, and then of course, University of Vermont medical center in Vermont is the number one employer there.
Basically what this map showed that out of the states, 22 of these states were Walmart was the biggest employer of that in the next 12 states, it was healthcare systems. So though it wasn’t under the same umbrella of one company, it shows you how big the industry is of healthcare. That in 12 states, the number one employer is a hospital, or a medical center, or an insurance company. What do you think about that, Janet?
Janet:
It really is mind boggling and it would be interesting to see what that map would look like if you looked at healthcare companies that were national companies; because there are companies like Steward healthcare, they’re not based in Massachusetts, but they have a number of Massachusetts facilities. Or in the assisted livings, there are places that are regional, they’re multi-state. So it’s in some ways, even bigger than the list you came up with, it’s clearly the largest employer in our country.
Ryan McEniff:
Yeah, I would imagine that. I mean, just to guess, but if you start putting together all the hospitals, all the sniffs, all the assisted livings, the home health agencies, the VNA’s, and anything that’s related to that, whether that’s durable medical equipment companies, hospice companies, if I didn’t mention them already.
Janet:
Pharmaceuticals.
Ryan McEniff:
Pharmaceuticals.
Janet:
Huge.
Ryan McEniff:
Yeah. I mean, I would imagine the healthcare system overall might employ more people in the United States, whether that’s a percentage or an overall number, than maybe any other industry that’s out. I could be completely wrong. Maybe it’s the government. Maybe because you have these, the government would be number one, but maybe in the private sector it would be a healthcare system. Who knows, maybe retail with Walmart and all the retailers might be number one, but either way, it was a map that kind of surprised me on how dependent not only are we on healthcare to stay alive, but how dependent we are on healthcare to for our jobs, for our economy, for all of the different industries that are involved in that when it goes all the way down to the CVS’s and the Walgreens that are, yeah, they’re kind of convenience stores, but they’re really pharmacies, and they’re there to help out with healthcare needs.
Janet:
CVS, I think, is looking to merge, or buy, or something.
Ryan McEniff:
Already bought. Already purchased.
Janet:
Is it Aetna or someone?
Ryan McEniff:
Aetna, CVS bought Aetna, which is a whole nother. I didn’t even do a podcast on that because I don’t, it’s like, it’s so big.
Janet:
Just boggles the mind.
Ryan McEniff:
I don’t even know how you even eat that whale. I don’t know where that’s you’re going to find out the good, the bad, and the ugly like five years from now of like whether that works out or not. But I mean it’s got to be one of those, those things where the amounts of people that are involved in the healthcare system is monumental. It kind of made me think like, “Wow, I’m involved in it, and my employees are involved in it, and all of those things that are part of a system in helping sick people.”
Janet:
It defines where people live for access to these things. There was an article, I want to say it was this past week and it was maybe in the Boston globe, I’m sure it’s elsewhere that they ranked the number one state. The healthiest state in the country to live in. For the previous five years, Hawaii held the title. Well, this year, Massachusetts beat out Hawaii, and they listed what the criteria was. One of the places where Massachusetts pulled ahead was access to mental health services. So it’s not even just what we think of as the traditional physical medical conditions, but also mental health and what that brings.
Ryan McEniff:
Yeah, that makes sense. We didn’t even mention the mental health side of things. Maybe we forget about that because we don’t… One, I think you, when you think of somebody sick, you think physically, right.
Janet:
Right.
Ryan McEniff:
You think somebody’s injured, or somebody has a disease and we’re not in the mental health industry, so that’s maybe something that’s kind of an out of sight out of mind.
Janet:
And, it’s a funding issue and all of that.
Ryan McEniff:
Yeah, absolutely. It’s probably been out of sight out of mind for many different people, including important people that make big decisions in this country. That’s absolutely a good point. You know, how many people feel that they need mental health help, and that’s a whole nother segment of the industry that’s involved. It was just an interesting thing, and if you want to look it up, you just basically type into Google, the mapping, the largest employers in America, and there will be multiple websites that came up.
I just printed this one out because I liked the map that it represented, I thought it was an easy to see map versus sometimes they do all the logos for each employer. I thought it was, I thought it was interesting, and I think it would be good to hear the feedback from the listeners that are on our Facebook page, on who are you employed by, and what are your thoughts on being in one of those states that their biggest employer is the healthcare industry? I mean, it’s got to be so important. I have friends that live in Connecticut and Connecticut, i think it’s a bit of a stereotype that it’s all rich, because you think about the people from Manhattan that live in the Southern tip of Connecticut, and what is it, and the Greenwich county or whatever that county is down there.
But there’s a very big swath of Connecticut that is not filled with millionaires and billionaires it’s filled with thousandaires. I know that with my friends that are down there in the towns that are, even in the beach community towns. It’s either you’re a cop, you’re a fireman, or you’re a nurse, or a doctor. I mean, it’s one of those services where you’re either a government service worker, you’re working at Electric Boat, and Electric Boat is based in New London, and they’re a government contractor, or you’re in the healthcare industry. That’s what’s keeping things going down there versus, there’s no big, huge industry that’s down there right now, and the industry that they did have, which was insurance companies, they’re all leaving.
Janet:
That’s right. In rural parts of the country where small hospitals are finding it hard to keep their head above water, and are in fact closing, that’s devastating the economy in those areas.
Ryan McEniff:
Sure.
Janet:
It’s not like it’s something they don’t need, but if you have a 45 minute in an ambulance to get somewhere, that’s a whole nother world and that’s a significant part of our country that has to start dealing with that.
Ryan McEniff:
Sure. I mean, I remember the friend that I have down there, she’s a nurse and they had a bad night where there were two or three, I can’t remember. There were a couple major accidents that involved multiple cars and multiple people in them. Then they all went to this community hospital and the hospitals, “I can’t take care of 10 emergencies people at once.” So then they’re getting Medivacs out there and they’re just getting medical helicopters in and out to bring them to Providence or bring them to another one, because these small community hospitals are run on a shoestring budget. When those big disasters occur, they’re like, we’re not staffed for this amount of people. That costs lives when somebody’s got to be transported by ambulance or even the helicopter. It still takes time.
Janet:
Yep.
Ryan McEniff:
It still takes valuable time to get somebody up and get somebody into a facility that’s going to be equipped to handle whatever’s going on.
Janet:
Right.
Ryan McEniff:
So anyways, I thought that was just a good, interesting article. It doesn’t necessarily deal with home health, but it’s in our segment of healthcare. So take a look at that. I found it interesting. We’d love your feedback on the Caregiver’s Toolbox on Facebook. Look us up, please interact with us. We’ll certainly interact with you and give us your thoughts and opinions on things.
Thank you very much, Janet.
Janet:
My pleasure.
Ryan McEniff:
Thank you for listening and we will catch you on the next one.
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