Quote:
Originally Posted by austlar1
When you find those figures, please post them. I spent an hour trying to pull them apart. The Bureau of Labor Statistics wants to lump healthcare and education into one category, so the absolute numbers become kind of meaningless and tend to depend in large part in the overall size of the metro area. My hunch is that Houston has a larger healthcare industry than most other similarly sized or larger cities. There is just too much synergy created by the presence of this huge medical complex that it is hard to think otherwise. Does Houston pull in a lot of patients from faraway places? There is reason to believe that it does based on the fact that a lot of well known people have come to Houston for medical treatment (cancer or cardiac care mostly) over the years. There are several thousand hotel rooms in the immediate area of the TMC, but I can't tell you that 100% of their clientele is there for medical reasons. I can tell you this much, Houston is a much more interesting and culturally diverse city as a result of the TMC being located there. The presence of so many doctors and medical educators has played a big role in moving Houston past its somewhat raw beginnings. I know you are inclined to hate all things Houston, but I think you would be genuinely impressed with the TMC should you ever have a reason to visit. Any city in this country would be thrilled to have something like the TMC. Ironically it came to be in large part because of the philanthropic whim of one of Houston's more notorious right wing oil barons, Roy Cullen. That is a story for another day.
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Hate it? You're projecting. I've said Houston is not very urban and I prefer urban places, but that only equals hate in your mind.
As for the visitor thing, we're all clear that the TMC is #1 for certain maladies and therefore visited for it, much like certain other cities. The question is volume.