> The health-care industry overtook the retail sector as the nation’s largest employer in December, giving local economies and their workers a stake in the indu

> The health-care industry overtook the retail sector as the nation’s largest employer in December, giving local economies and their workers a stake in the industry’s growth. Health jobs surpassed manufacturing jobs in 2008. This seems to me the biggest source of the problem. As the saying goes it’s hard to get someone to understand something when their salary depends on them not understanding it. These days healthcare jobs - technicians and clerks and so on - are the new factory line work. Ie readily available good paying jobs that you can get (in many cases) without a college degree. These personal care jobs are also hard to replace with automation since the entire point is to deal with other humans. Thus most people agree “the system” is broken but any specific proposal made to change it meets a big backlash of people who imagine - perhaps rightly so - “that could cost my job!”