HHS Secretary Alex Azar has a demand for the pharmaceutical industry: “Prices must start coming down.”

With high demand and high salaries, healthcare jobs took 44 spots of the 100 best jobs for 2019, as ranked by U.S. News.

President Trump summoned top officials for a meeting at the White House on Jan. 8, Politico reported. The meeting comes as major drugmakers raised prices at the start of the year, prompting a Twitter response from the president.

Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital, the largest public hospital in the city, sticks patients with sky-high medical bills because it does not partner with any private health insurance plans, Vox reported.

Cigna and Tenet announced “good news” on Jan. 1 after reaching an agreement on a new commercial contract. The previous contract between Cigna and Tenet was scheduled to end on New Year's Day, after both companies struggled to come to a new agreement over nearly a year of negotiations.

A new federal policy took effect on Jan. 1 that requires hospitals to post standard prices online. However, the rule, which intends to boost transparency, may be causing more confusion than clarity for patients, according to reports.

The healthcare industry took the lead as the largest employer in the United States in 2018, with high rates of job growth continuing through the end of the year, according to recent data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Health insurers have been inflating cost estimates for providing prescription-drug benefits to more than 40 million Medicare beneficiaries, allowing them to cash in $9.1 billion in extra payments from 2006 to 2015, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal.