As health systems report their earnings for the first quarter of 2022, the red ink is flowing in torrents. This is mostly due to financial losses on investment portfolios. More concerning, however, are hospitals’ substantial operating losses.

During a Fitch Ratings webinar on the mounting pressures confronting not-for-profit providers, Senior Director Kevin Halloran described health systems’ current financial performance as follows,

No matter how you look at it, the first quarter of 2022 will be one of the worst on record for most providers.

The conventional wisdom about inflation needs a course correction.  Here’s why:

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the wages and total compensation of Americans working full-time at least kept pace with inflation from January through March.  Based on what people tell government surveyors, median weekly earnings after inflation stabilized in the first quarter of 2022 after falling steadily through 2021.

This is the third article in a four-part series on reimagining American medical education and ongoing clinician training. 

My newest work on how the combination of Covid-19, Russia's invasion of the Ukraine, PRC engagement in the Caribbean, and transnational organized crime dynamics, are gravely stressing and transforming the Caribbean.

This report argues that the struggle between democratic elements and authoritarian populist elements of the increasingly dominant but diverse Latin American left will define the future of the region, with significant implications for the US.

Most Russian experts and military strategists I follow doubted Putin would invade Ukraine. I agreed with their rational arguments, but here we are. I’m reminded of the Haruki Murakami novel 1Q84. The heroine alights from her taxi and gradually discovers that she is living in a world where everything is almost the same, except there are two moons. Since Covid began, I doubt I’m alone in feeling that I have somehow gotten off at the wrong stop, and am living in a hellishly perverse alternative universe.

As we will see, the largescale errors in the Census cost New York, Texas, Florida, Arizona, California, and New Jersey one seat each—and resulted in an extra representative for provided an extra representative for Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Oregon, Montana, Wisconsin, and Indiana.

This short work gives particular attention the increasing PRC presence in the digital economy and its technologies, as well as providing recommendations for US policymakers.

This piece is the third in a series of six columns in which David Johnson addresses five structural defects undermining nonprofit healthcare. He outlined all five defects in the first column of the series. Part two is here.