A Pennsylvania medical device company is moving its distribution operations to Olive Branch, creating about 225 jobs within four years, Gov. Phil Bryant announced Monday. Teleflex Inc., based in Limerick, Pa., is a leading global provider of specialty medical devices used in critical care and surgery. The company employs about 11,500 people serving 130 countries. The new distribution operations will be located in an existing 627,000-square-foot building at 11244 South Distribution Cove in Olive Branch. It wasn’t clear where distribution operations are located currently. Bryant noted that Teleflex is the first company to use incentives pushed by the governor and approved by the State Legislature earlier this year. In his State of the State address, Bryant outlined his Health Care Zone Act, one component of his Mississippi Works program aimed at improving health care and attracting more medical jobs to the state. Businesses that locate within a five-mile radius of a Mississippi hospital — Methodist Healthcare of Memphis is building a hospital in Olive Branch — and invest $10 million or create at least 25 jobs are eligible for state incentives. Those incentives inclu Read more text

Eli Lehrer considers the “role of high salaries and wages in health care inflation”: In discussions of America’s high health care costs, surprisingly little attention is paid to salaries and wages. Yet the fact that medical jobs simply pay more than those in other sectors is beyond dispute. A physician practicing in a primary care setting, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, earned an average of just over $200,000 in 2010, while specialists averaged over $355,000 (the highest of any professional category tracked). By comparison, lawyers average just over $110,000, airline pilots about $92,000, and chartered actuaries (who calculate risk for insurance companies and must pass complex exams longer and arguably more difficult than the medical boards) about $150,000. The wage disparities, however, don’t stop with physicians, who do, after all, need to complete an academic curriculum that’s beyond most people’s abilities. Registered nurses and dental hygienists, who need only associate’s degrees, earn about $70,000 a year. This is about as much as degreed computer programmers. And it’s significantly more than high school teachers and forensic scientist Read more text

The new chief of Denver Health said he will reach out to Latinos who want more from the key city agency, and offered a cautious endorsement of Colorado’s joining the Medicaid expansion to cover more uninsured. Arthur Gonzalez, currently chief of a public- health system for Minneapolis in Hennepin County, said he has always looked carefully at the demographic mix of communities where he works. In Southern California, where he also was a hospital chief, he worked on finding more direct- care providers who were bilingual, rather than relying on a translation system, Gonzalez said. He also said health agencies can work on two problems at once — economic disadvantages and improving health care for minorities — by recruiting local minorities into nursing and other medical jobs. Before Gonzalez was announced, some Latino leaders argued that Denver Health wasn’t listening to the city’s large Latino minority and had often overlooked Latinos for top leadership. They said any replacement for retiring Dr. Patricia Gabow must focus on Latino needs. Gonzalez is not bilingual, though he was until age 8, he said. In high school, he took Latin. “If Julius Caesar Read more text