Hospitals Brace for a Financial Pounding

So they're hiring. Many already have overcrowded EDs, so they're working on patient throughput solutions, better handoffs between the hospital and the ED. But amid this flurry of activity, they're also sitting on their hands to some degree.

Writ large, this trend extends to other businesses, which clearly aren't hiring despite sitting on a record amount of cash. CEOs blame the Obama administration and its wave of regulation to the finance and healthcare industries, for the lack of hiring. They're not hiring, the thinking goes, because they don't know what it'll end up costing them if, say, a bureaucrat interprets one of the new financial or healthcare laws in a way that would dramatically increase their costs. That's a bit of a cop-out of course, but, as we all know, perception is reality. I might add a little corollary to that old marketing saw: Perception is even more real when the boss is perceiving it.