I work for a consulting engineering firm of the architectural persuasion: we make buildings work [whereas structural engineers make them stand up, while architects merely make them look pretty... sorry, SDG ;) ]. The client base for this firm consists, by a huge margin, of hospitals -- more technically, the holding companies for 'chains' of hospitals.

To give you an idea of how business has been, a recent article in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram quoted a figure of $1.3 billion in new hospital construction in the past year... and that's only in Tarrant County, Texas (of which FW is the seat). I haven't seen similar numbers for Dallas, but guess that they're comparable, at minimum (Dallas Co. has a much larger population than Tarrant). A good chunk of that has been ours, and our projects range farther afield than Texas. For instance, there's a 1,000,000-s.f. facility for the U of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and another of about the same size gearing up for Cleveland, OH.

Thanks to this job, I have health insurance for the first time in five or six years -- but I'm also a cog in the machine that drives up hospitalization costs.