January 1st, 2008
How health care dominates local economies
The Missoula, Montana Missoulian has launched a three-day series about the impact of health care on the western Montana economy.
While we generally bemoan health care in terms of costs, fact is it’s a primary driver for economic growth as well.
In western Montana, for instance, the paper estimates one jobs in every eight are tied to health care. The industry is the main driver of the Missoula economy. It’s turning I-93 into an industrial corridor.
The focus on health care is also changing the state’s politics, reducing the impact of forestry, ranching, and the extraction industries.
The wealth is not spread evenly. It’s concentrated in university towns and in major cities.
Health care development can have a major impact on urban planning, even in large cities like Atlanta, where I live.
My own home is worth double what it might be because we’re just a few miles south of Emory University Hospital and the CDC, an area known here as the Clifton Corridor (above, from Emory).
While tech businesses can locate out of town, and thus build out of planned centers, health care growth, as in Atlanta’s case, often happens around college campuses, in formerly residential neighborhoods underserved by mass transit.
Doctors and other medical professionals like living close to work. Real estate where I am is crazy, even while it’s collapsing in other parts of town.
The point I’m making today is that health care impacts the economy both positively and negatively, and it’s changing the urban fabric around the country.
These are important economic facts we need to consider, facts we seldom give much thought to. The way health care is woven into the fabric of our economic lives, as well as our technology and very existance, deserves more attention than it gets.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist since 1978, and has covered technology since 1982. He launched the Interactive Age Daily, the first daily coverage of the Internet to launch with a magazine, in September 1994. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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| 01/02/08
