Readers of the disease management blog may have begun to suspect a bias in favor of the industry. That may be true, especially since I've assembled another Top Ten List that mostly has nice things to say about it. It was certainly more fun thinking about a new list than trying to decipher today's credit crunch, yield spreads and interest rate brouhaha. So here is my list of reasons why we're comforted by the stable employment prospects of this corner of the healthcare industry.

10 Performance guarantees were around long before it occurred to the folks at CMS that they should stop paying for mistakes.

9 Access to capital.

8 Life prolonging exercise! Flatter stomach! Conditioning! Sign me up.

7 Nurses have a choice: work that professionally rewarding evening shift in the local, low margin, high volume hospital or work mostly 8-5 and maybe even from home. Duh.

6 Upside growth potential.

5 Never mind the dysfunctional Feds, it's the States that may be the next successful staging ground.

4 Plenty of room for more creativity in program design. My friend, Vince Kuraitis over at the e-caremanagement blog, has an excellent discussion on the many forces of change that have big implications for the industry.

3 There is lots of competition over both price and quality. The industry is a long way from becoming commoditized.

2 More transparency means even better competition.

1 What do those Captains of Industry, those Wall Street Titans and the no-nonsense folks on the Boards of Directors know that the peer reviewed literature seems to have missed?