From Akron to Youngstown and Canton to Cleveland, as in cities and towns across the country, workers who once walked out of factories at the end of each shift now stream out of hospitals.
While manufacturing employment has fallen nearly 40 percent in northeastern Ohio since 2000, the number of health care jobs in the region has jumped more than 30 percent over the same period. In Akron, the onetime rubber capital of the world, only one of the city’s 10 largest employers still makes tires. Three are hospitals.
“People who used to make deliveries to factories are now making them to hospitals,” said Samuel D. DeShazior, Akron’s deputy mayor for economic development.
Akron’s transformation is echoed in places as varied as Los Angeles, Birmingham, Ala., and Pittsburgh, along with rural areas like Iron County, Mo., where health care accounts for one-fifth of all employment.
The outsize economic role of the American health care industry heightens the risks posed by the Republicans’ effort in Washington to repeal the Affordable Care Act, enacted in 2010 under President Barack Obama, and it comes at a delicate moment for the broader economy.
