The health-care industry is surprisingly suffering in the middle of a pandemic.
The U.S. GDP shrunk 4.8 percent in the first three months of the year, Commerce Department numbers released Wednesday reveal. That's the biggest economic contraction since the Great Recession, and health care accounts for half of that downfall at a 2.25 percent loss, economist Justin Wolfers noted.
It may seem ironic that health care is shrinking even as hospitals hit capacity with COVID-19 patients. But elective surgeries have been halted across the country, cutting hospitals' revenue streams by billions of dollars in just the past few months and putting around 100,000 health care workers out of jobs.
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