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U.S. News & World Report released its annual Best States rankings July 28, evaluating all 50 states on how they best serve their residents across eight categories: healthcare, education, economy, infrastructure, opportunity, fiscal stability, crime and corrections, and natural environment. Utah ranked No. 1 overall for the fourth consecutive year.…

More data is pointing to concerns of skyrocketing healthcare costs in the upcoming years. Steeper medical utilization is one cause for concern, according to several sources. Meanwhile, HR 1 is radically reshaping Medicaid, and the expiration of ACA enhanced subsidies risk more people going uninsured. Here are eight things to…

A total of 743 general acute-care hospitals have closed across the United States since 2000, according to a July 22 news release from the Health Care Affordability Lab at Yale University in New Haven, Conn., and shared with Becker’s. The closure data is tracked through June 1, 2026. Hospital beds…

San Francisco is the fastest-growing large U.S. city for jobs and talent, according to a July 22 list from LinkedIn News. It was created by identifying the U.S. cities with the strongest job market momentum and net positive migration, focusing on areas with more than 2.5 million LinkedIn members. Dallas…

Nearly 1 in 4 U.S. workers (24%), the equivalent of about 23 million adults, are staying in jobs they want to leave to keep their employer-sponsored health insurance, according to a July 21 report from the West Health-Gallup Center on Healthcare in America. The share marks an 8-percentage-point rise since…

Emergency medicine physicians per capita vary more than fourfold across the U.S., from 51.32 per 100,000 residents in the District of Columbia to 11.55 in Alabama, according to data from KFF and the U.S. Census Bureau.  Becker’s used KFF’s count of professionally active emergency medicine physicians, sourced from Redi-Data as…

The District of Columbia has the highest concentration of general surgeons in the U.S., with 71.79 general surgeons per capita, according to a Becker’s analysis of state-level general surgeon counts from KFF and 2025 U.S. population estimates. Idaho has the lowest concentration of general surgeons per capita at 9.66. The…

Scottsdale, Ariz., is the best place in the U.S. to rent, largely because of its quality of life, according to a July 7 ranking from personal finance website WalletHub. To develop the list of the best local rental markets, WalletHub compared 182 U.S. cities, including the 150 most populated and…

The District of Columbia, New York and Massachusetts have the most physicians per capita, while Mississippi, Alabama and Nevada have the fewest, according to Bureau of Labor statistics and Census data. Becker’s used the bureau’s latest data — 2025 statistics — to find the total number of physicians and used…

The nurse practitioner workforce is projected to grow 11% annually through 2030, far outpacing projected growth for physician assistants and physicians, according to workforce estimates published in Health Affairs. Researchers from Columbia University, Brandeis University, George Washington University and New York University forecast physician supply will continue growing about 1%…

Nurse AI adoption is accelerating faster than hospitals are building strategies to support it, a report from Incredible Health found. Healthcare staffing company Incredible Health released its 2026 Annual State of Nursing report July 7. The findings are based on a national survey of 2,240 U.S. nurses. The report also…

Among organizations, 23% said clinician burnout is not a current focus, compared to 17% that reported its their No. 1 concern. In a LinkedIn poll, Becker’s asked, “Where does clinician burnout rank among your organization’s top operational concerns heading into the second half of 2026?” The poll received 323 votes…

Health systems are paying twice for the same clinical talent. Most have not figured that out yet. At large academic medical centers, hundreds of clinical students rotate through hospitals and outpatient sites every year. They work beside nurses, therapists, and pharmacists. They are evaluated daily by preceptors who form fast,…

At least 15 rural hospitals have closed in the last year. Hundreds more are operating under sustained financial pressure from Medicaid cuts, reimbursement gaps and a workforce market that increasingly tilts toward larger systems. For the executives running small community hospitals, financial survival has become a daily discipline requiring thoughtful…

Fremont, Calif., ranks as the city with the lowest health and safety stress, while Memphis, Tenn., is the most stressed, WalletHub found.  WalletHub compared 182 cities, including the 150 most populated U.S. cities plus at least two of the most populated cities in each state. Each city was compared across…

The nursing home workforce gained 3,300 jobs in June, bringing the total number of workers up to 1,586,600, the American Health Care Association said in a July 6 news release shared with Becker’s. The association used the Bureau of Labor Statistics to find current nursing home workforce statistics. Here is…

For years, labor dominated the hospital expense conversation. Staffing shortages, travel nurse premiums and wage competition consumed the attention of CFOs and operations leaders across the country. Recent data from Kaufman Hall shows times have changed. Labor costs have stabilized into a relatively predictable range while drugs, supplies, purchased services…

Healthcare added 21,500 jobs in June, slowing down from the average monthly gain of 38,000 over the past year, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Here are four things to know from the July 2 jobs report: 1. Hospitals added 9,200 jobs in June, up from a revised…

The nation’s age-adjusted death rate fell 4.6% in 2025 to 689.2 deaths per 100,000 people — the lowest rate ever recorded in the U.S. — according to provisional CDC data published July 2. An estimated 3,094,593 people died in the U.S. in 2025, according to the report from the CDC’s…

There’s a widening gap between what a nursing degree certifies and what a hospital unit actually demands in practice, nursing leaders say. New nurses are arriving on the job less prepared for the nuances and complexity of clinical care, leaving hospitals and health systems to increasingly shoulder the additional training…

Two Chicago-area safety-net hospitals have closed within a year of each other — both owned by Princeton, N.J.-based Resilience Healthcare — and no health system, buyer or partner has publicly committed to reopening either. Chicago-based Weiss Memorial Hospital, a 239-bed acute care facility, closed Aug. 8, 2025, as CMS moved…

Young adults are far less likely than older generations to maintain an ongoing relationship with a primary care physician, a new survey shows. The poll was commissioned by Columbus-based OSU Wexner Medical Center and conducted by the survey and market research firm SSRS. The survey includes responses from 1,006 U.S.…

While 2026 kicked off with fewer hospital closures compared to the same period in 2025, three hospitals in three states are on the verge of closing, and their situations mirror what many facilities across the country are facing. In Chicago, Roseland Community Hospital has negative 65 days cash on hand,…

When the COVID-19 pandemic receded, clinical workers expected three things: sustained recognition for what they had endured, a period of respite and a return to some version of normalcy. Most got none of them. Instead, they returned to waiting rooms full of patients who had deferred care for years and…