The Healthcare Industry's Payroll

The New York Times article Challenge to Health Bill: Selling Reform suggests that difficult choices about booming healthcare costs might be fought out according to lobbying, state and local interests in Congress. As the Times attempts to frame President Obama’s press conference on healthcare tonight, they point out that the fee-for-services business model, which some blame for rapidly rising costs, may be an object for reform. One way of looking at the economic scale and spatial concentration of state and local interests is to map the healthcare industries’ annual payroll and employment by county.

Below, we map (1) the annual payroll (in thousands of dollars) to employees of healthcare sector employers:
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and (2) the extent to which counties import or export healthcare services:
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In the above map, the integer values are Location Quotients. Any value above 1 (pink) indicates that the county is probably exporting healthcare services to people in other counties. For example, people are traveling to those counties from another to see the doctor. Values below 1 (blue) indicate that the county has a relatively small healthcare industrial base. Some counties, in brown, could not be mapped due to data disclosure issues.