Healthcare and social assistance employment grew 2.9% from March 2025 to March 2026, adding 680,500 jobs, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Total U.S. nonfarm payroll employment barely moved over the same time period. That concentration feels worrisome: A labor market largely dependent on one category of jobs sounds fragile.

Not so, as "there is no healthcare sector," Linneman says. What gets counted as one industry is closer to twenty: cardiac care, oncology, palliative care, hospice, dermatology, memory care, orthopedics, dental, mental health, etc. "Dental is very, very different than cancer," he points out. They don't share patients, providers, cost structures, or demand drivers. Mental health, which includes autism care in his framing, is its own category entirely, growing for its own reasons.

Demand across these categories runs on a spectrum: From heart attack treatment which no one would defer to laser hair removal which is completely elective. Linneman points to automobiles as a contrast. Cars exist for one defined purpose, moving people from one place to another, and demand for that purpose moves as a block. Healthcare has no single defined purpose that a single set of substitutes or one downturn could take out at once. "It's not like healthcare's gonna go down," Linneman says. Individual pieces of it can shrink — dental could shrink if new treatments reduce the need for procedures — without the rest following.

That heterogeneity of offerings connects to another fact about consumption: sometimes it creates value, sometimes it doesn’t. "Deciding to consume heroin and fentanyl... it's not a terribly high value-added-to-society consumption," Linneman notes. On the other hand, buying a new computer, joining a gym or taking a family trip creates value both for the individual and those impacted by the decision. "Somewhere between spending on heroin and spending on a meaningful vacation with family" is where most consumption decisions land, healthcare decisions included, Linneman says.

In other words, healthcare spending isn’t only wealth-consuming, it can be wealth-creating. Cataract surgery restores vision, and with it a person's ability to work, drive, and function independently. Linneman’s co-author on The Great Age Reboot, Albert Ratner, is 98 and has received roughly nineteen cardiac stents placed over three decades, each one extending a life that stayed "business productive, society productive, charitable productive, family productive." That's healthcare spending that pays the economy back.

Then there's the other end. Linneman lost two friends to pancreatic cancer in recent years, and describes the money spent on their treatment candidly: it bought a few extra months, at high cost, with no realistic path to a cure. The most expensive healthcare spending, on average, happens in the last year and a half of life, and by his account, that spending is heavily weighted toward the second category.

The point isn't that this spending is wrong. It's that a rising healthcare job count is spurred by both economically productive and unproductive dollars, to put a cold economist’s spin on it, and treating all healthcare spending as a red flag of wealth consumption misses the more complicated truth: some of it is prolonging productive lives, and some of it is economically unhelpful. How much each of these categories grows (or shrinks) going forward will determine how risky healthcare growth is to economic stability.

Linneman also notes that healthcare spending does not abide by ordinary consumer habits because insurance makes healthcare less expensive to the consumer. A $50,000 car costs the buyer $50,000; the same decision on a covered procedure "might cost you five hundred or a thousand." It is a different kind of consumption decision than almost anything else households buy (and fully pay for), and that’s part of why healthcare spending keeps growing even when other categories can not or do not.

For real estate investors making long-term bets on job growth in a market or submarket, “healthcare” as an employment driver is a misnomer. A metro adding oncology and cardiac jobs at a research hospital has a different wage profile, a different tenant, and a different durability than one adding home health aides. It’s important to know what ‘healthcare’ really means locally.

There are no footprints, no tire tracks, and no engine roar. Just a 500-pound rock carving a 500-foot trail through the cracked Death Valley mud like a slow-motion ghost.

Racetrack Playa is a dry lakebed scattered with dolomite boulders that tumbled off the surrounding hills. The largest run 700 pounds.

Geologists argued about it from the 1940s. The stones obviously moved. Nobody had ever watched one do it. Theories piled up: gale-force winds, magnetic fields, ice. Aliens got a mention.

Then Richard Norris, a paleobiologist at Scripps, and his cousin James bolted GPS units to fifteen rocks, set up cameras, and waited. In the winter of 2013, rain pooled and froze overnight into a sheet of ice an eighth of an inch thick. A light wind broke it into panels that stacked behind the stones and shoved.

The Norrises were standing there. Sixty rocks sailed past at two yards a minute. But the panels ran tens of yards across, and that much surface area doesn't need much wind behind it.

The water evaporated. Only the tracks remained. The rocks are in motion a few minutes out of every million. Which is why it took seventy years.

A great read: https://www.livescience.com/37492-sailing-stones-death-valley-moving-rocks.html

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