The rise of cash-only care
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All those government layoffs and employee buyouts have hit the labor market. From Marketplace, I'm Sabri Beneshour, in for David Brancaccio. The U.S. economy gained 64,000 jobs in November, but it lost 105,000 in October. The unemployment rate rose to 4.6 percent. It was 4.4 percent in September and 4.2 percent a year ago. David Kelly is chief global strategist at J.P. Morgan Funds and joins us to talk about it. Good morning. Good morning. So overall, doesn't sound great. What's your take here? No, it's a pretty grinchy report. We've lost jobs in three out of the last seven months, and the average job growth has been 17,000 jobs per month, which is miserably low. Now, that was partly because of cutbacks in the government, but even the private sector, we only saw 46,000 jobs on average created over the last seven months.
Speaking of government workers, we lost 162,000 government jobs in October. How serious is it when such a huge chunk of workers is suddenly out of work? Well, we knew this was coming because what this really is, is back in the spring, a lot of federal workers took a buyout. And the way the buyout worked is you got paid through the end of September. So this is really a lot of workers who've not been actually in the office for many, many months, and many of them, I hope, have got other jobs at this stage. So the general weakness in private sector payroll employment growth does say the economy is pretty slow right now. What does this mean for the Federal Reserve and what it's going to do with interest rates?
Well, interestingly, the market's expectations for the Fed in January didn't change at all in this. And I think that's partly because with all the problems of the data, we really didn't know what to expect from this report. So markets move when you have something different from expectations. We really didn't have good expectations one way or the other. But I think the Fed also realizes that come early 2026, there's going to be a lot of income tax refunds. and that could cause consumer spending to pick up a bit and maybe employment growth to pick up a bit. So I think we're very far from calling this a recession. David Kelly, Chief Global Strategist at J.P. Morgan Funds, thank you so much. Anytime. The prospects for electric vehicles have dimmed under the Trump administration.
In response, Ford announced yesterday that it is scrapping some EVs and focusing on hybrid and gas-powered vehicles. Marketplace's Nancy Marshall-Genzer has that. Ford says it will no longer make its fully electric F-150 Lightning truck. It's also pulling the plug on a new electric truck it was planning and electric commercial vans. Ford says this is because of lower-than-expected demand, high costs, and regulatory changes. The Trump administration allowed an electric vehicle tax credit to expire. It's also easing up on tailpipe emissions regulations. This retooling will cost Ford more than $19 billion. Now the company will charge ahead with hybrids. The F-150 Lightning will become an extended-range electric vehicle with a gas-powered generator.
Ford says about half of its global sales will be hybrids, EVs, and extended-range EVs by the end of the decade. Ford says it's also repurposing its battery factories to produce storage systems, which are in high demand right now as data centers increase demand for power. I'm Nancy Marshall-Genzer for Marketplace. We have talked a lot on this show about how health insurance is getting more and more expensive. And that is aside from the disappearing Affordable Care Act subsidies that are going to make it even more expensive for more than 20 million people. All of these factors are fueling interest in a market for cash-only doctors. These are doctors who don't take insurance. They just take cash. Reporter Alex Olgin has the story.
In the last six weeks, Brittany Pollard has made more progress on managing her chronic pain than over the last six months. She credits her new doctor in Chicago. I really felt listened to, not just a problem to be fixed, you know, not just a billing code.
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