# Inflation, AI Weather, and Concierge Medicine Trends

**Podcast:** Marketplace
**Published:** 2026-02-14

## Transcript

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An encouraging inflation report to end the week, plus the rise of concierge medicine, and AI comes to your weather forecast.
From American Public Media.
Today's delayed consumer price index report from the Labour Department shows prices rose just two point four percent on an annual basis in January, down from two point seven percent the previous month, and way down from the peak of more than nine percent in twenty twenty two.
But as usual, the devil is in the details, and here to dive in with us are Catherine Rampel at the Bulwork and MS Now, and also Greg Ip at the Wall Street Journal.
Hi, you two.
Hey, Amy.
Hello.
All right, Greg, let's start with your takeaways from that inflation report.
Good news?
Well, yeah, I'd say that it is a good report.
Uh the inflation rate of 2.4%, uh certainly a lot lower, as you're saying, than it was a few years ago.
And uh economists like to take out the energy and food portions, not because they don't actually think those are important, but because they're very volatile.
And if you do that, you come with the come up with an inflation rate of only around 2.5%, which is the lowest for that number since 2021, just after the pandemic.
But as you said, the devil is in the details.
If you look below the surface, you deal you do still see some signs of tariff inflation in things like appliances and uh uh and other imported goods.
And also, this may come as a surprise to some people, but that's actually several different ways to measure inflation.
And the Federal Reserve has its own preferred inflation gauge.
And when you actually see how today's report affects though that alternative gauge, it suggests inflation might actually be still stuck at around 3%, which is too high for the Fed, which prefers an inflation rate of 2%.
Catherine, what about you?
What are you seeing in this report?
What stood out to you?
Uh a lot of the same highlights that Greg just mentioned.
So, yep, good news that core so-called core inflation stripping out volatile food and energy prices fell to its lowest level in five almost five years.
It's a little bit hard to know how much to take this report at face value because there's still probably some distortions from the um the recent government shutdown, of course.
Um as Greg points out, there's also evidence that tariff uh tariff costs may be increasingly passed along to consumers.
We've had a few different reports recently from uh CBO and I think the New York Fed research team uh finding that consumers are paying most of the tariff costs and you see that in some of the numbers today.
I think Greg mentioned um uh appliances maybe but you also saw you know appliances furniture I think new cars all saw pretty sharp price increases in January probably related to the fact that uh companies are having to pass along their costs since they can no longer keep absorbing them indefinitely from from tariffs.
Right and and Jerome Powell, the Fed chair uh for now talked about this last month saying that the expectation is we'll see the effects of tariffs flowing through goods prices peaking and then starting to come down over the course of this year.
Greg, how near to the peak do you think we are?
And is it surprising that these uh the tariffs haven't shown up more in price increases.
I think we're actually uh right around the peak um and that uh as you suggested, as Powell predicts, that we're gonna see less and less of that effect as the year unfolds and uh you're right, the tariff impact on inflation has been less than most people would have thought about a year ago.
I think the average forecast back then was we'd get about a percentage point of tariff inflation.
And in fact, we only got about a half a percentage point.
And the good news is is that we're probably not going to see tariffs going up any longer.
In fact, there is uh increasing efforts by the Trump administration to pair back tariff increases by cutting deals with particular countries, by reducing them on especially sensitive products.
There were reports this week that they're looking to narrow, for example, tariffs on steel and aluminum.
And so as the tariff increases that we had last April, May, June recede into the past, they start to also drop out of our inflation numbers.
And that would be good news for the inflation rate coming down as we get towards the end of this year.
Catherine, can we talk about uh shelter inflation housing for a moment?
Because that's a big component of CPI.
It was up 3% annually in January.
Um, but it has been decelerating, and we know that there's a lag uh you know between rents and and home payments falling and that showing up in the CPI.
What is happening with housing affordability right now?
Well, it depends a little bit on how you define affordability, right?
As affordability about uh price growth month over month, let's say, or even year over year, or is it uh how much accumulated growth we have seen over a period of time, basically the level.
And I'm sure people will be glad to know that price growth is decelerating, but it's still growing, you know, quite a bit above where presumably um renters would like it to be.
If you're a homeowner, um and you want those imputed rents, presumably to be increasing.
But if you are a renter or if you are a prospective buyer, 3% price growth is still quite um quite painful.
Um so, you know, it would be nice if we see some further deceleration if we see it get down to you know closer to the Fed's target for overall inflation.
Um we may yet see that.
It depends a little bit, of course, on what happens throughout the rest of the economy and what happened, you know, in part because if you have inflation overall persistently high, that's gonna make it harder for the Fed to cut interest rates and therefore harder for um mortgage rates to come down because they are still quite high, I know, because I have to refinance soon.
Um yeah, so I guess we'll see what happens.
Um, but it's a move in the right direction.
All right, moving on from inflation.
Uh Greg, we also had that better than expected jobs report from January this week.
What does that tell you about the strength of the economy right now?
Yeah, well, there's kind of two pieces to that jobs report.
Now, the first piece of that is that um we actually revised a lot of the data from prior years, and we discovered that for the last year and a half, two years, the job market has been way weaker than we first thought.
For example, last year, we only created around 15,000 jobs per month, which I think might be the lowest rate of job creation in any year in decades outside of recessions.
But the good news is that the latter last month, January, was actually a pretty good month where we created 130,000 jobs.
So even though we've been in this period of very soft to stagnant hiring, there's a few hints out there that things might be picking up.
So I suppose you could say it's a glass half empty, half full story on the job market.
And real quick, Catherine, before we go, wage growth outpacing inflation.
How are you know consumers generally faring right now?
Well, if you ask consumers, they say they're doing very, very badly.
If you look at consumer sentiment numbers.
But yes, uh, those data amongst others are more encouraging.
Well, both the fact that they are getting more jobs and that there is uh you know stronger wage growth, which is part of the reason why I sort of qualified my affordability answer, because what really matters whether or not consumers, you know, will articulate it this way is what's happening to prices relative to what's happening to their wages.
Basically, what's happening to real wage growth that affects what they can literally afford.
Uh so yes, good news uh that we are seeing some some strength in um in wage growth.
Uh will it be enough to perk up consumers, voters' views of the economy?
Uh I'm not so convinced.
We'll we'll watch for that.
All right, Catherine Rampel is at the bulwark at MS Now.
Greg Ipp with the Wall Street Journal.
Thanks both so much and have a great weekend.
Thanks for having me.
On Wall Street, a mixed trading day on this Friday, the 13th.
We'll have the details when we do the numbers.
Scientists and environmental advocates, though, say it's a gift to fossil fuel companies.
It will make people sicker and less safe.
The EPA's argument is by no longer considering the human harm caused by emissions, taxpayers will save 1.3 trillion in energy and transportation.
Cars will be $2,400 cheaper to make, according to the agency, and taxpayer money won't go toward regulating the industry.
Environment and politics professor Dana R.
Fisher at American University is not convinced.
She says, regardless of the EPA's new policy, human harm is still happening.
More planet warming emissions makes more extreme weather, like worsening fires, floods, and heat waves.
That not only costs people in terms of loss of labor because people can't work outside or they can't work as effectively, or when they do work outside, they get sick, but it also will cost lives.
She says she doesn't want to put a dollar amount on that.
But even if we only focus on transportation, there are hidden costs to the cheaper cars too.
UCLA environmental law professor Ann Carlson is the former acting administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
If consumers are purchasing more less fuel efficient vehicles, then we're using more gasoline.
Which means higher gasoline costs.
And as other countries look to buy more efficient and electric cars.
On top of that, the cheaper cars might not come at all.
Akshay Jaw teaches economics and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University and says companies are facing what he calls regulatory whiplash.
Companies are making long-run investment decisions, not based on what policy is today, but based on what they think policy might be over the next 10, 15, 20 years.
Same goes for power plants, Jaw says, especially since new clean energy is cheaper anyway.
I doubt anybody's gonna build a new coal plant just based on this change.
Because by removing regulations, you create uncertainty.
And less certainty means companies might wait to make these investments that would save consumers money.
I'm Kayleigh Wells for Marketplace.
Maybe you've noticed.
And one reason is that a growing number of them are going into concierge medicine, meaning they charge patients a flat fee, a couple thousand dollars a year or more, to be part of their practice.
These doctors are still a minority, but between 2018 and 2023, the number of practices charging an annual fee almost doubled, according to a study from Harvard.
Concierge doctors still bill insurance too, but charging that annual fee means they can afford to see fewer patients and give the ones they do see more time and attention.
Marketplace's Samantha Fields has our physicals with patients.
But a lot has changed since then, and not in a good way.
Patients you're taking care of now tend to be older, sicker, they take more time.
Yet primary care doctors have less time now.
One big reason for that is reimbursement rates have declined over the years.
So doctors make less money now per patient than they used to.
And so there's more pressure to see more patients who are more complicated.
And so it tends to lead to a lot of burnout amongst providers.
That is what ultimately drove Sidlecki to go concierge two years ago.
He was burned out, seeing about 25 patients a day at his private practice near Richmond, Virginia.
And then his partner retired, which left him as the only doctor.
It wasn't sustainable.
Shantanu Nundi, a primary care doctor near Washington, D.C.
is not concierge, but says he hears versions of this from colleagues all the time now.
I get this phone call at least monthly from people, you know, who are saying, hey, like, what do you think about concierge medicine?
Should I consider it?
Almost everyone he knows who is considering it is just hitting a wall in traditional practice, overwhelmed by the relentless pace, paperwork, and insurance demands.
But he says doctors are also torn about turning to the concierge model.
I think on one end, they want to do it for the right reasons, which is, hey, I want to just get back to taking care of patients.
And on the other side, they're going to be taking care of a lot less patients.
And doesn't that mean that more patients aren't going to have doctors?
There's already a shortage of primary care doctors in the U.S., particularly in rural areas.
And so absolutely, there's a theoretical risk that as more doctors go into concierge medicine, that means that the burden on the remaining physicians is higher and higher.
And that it's harder for patients who can't afford the fees or don't want to pay them to find a new doctor.
When Katie Wang got an email a few years ago that her longtime primary care doctor in New York City was going concierge, she was disappointed.
But she didn't really want to shell out $2,000 a year to stay either.
Then she found a lump in her breast.
The lump was significant.
Wang had breast cancer.
So she paid the $2,000 and stuck with her doctor.
And she says she's actually seen a big difference since the practice went concierge.
I mean, huge, huge difference.
You know, previously it would be 10 minutes, maybe in and out kind of a thing, you know.
Now she has more time to spend with me.
So to me, it was completely worth it in that regard.
Like I feel like I'm getting much better care.
That's possible with concierge practices because doctors have many fewer patients.
Before Dr.
John Sidlecki switched his practice over, he had 3,800 people on his roster.
Now he's down to 600.
Morally, you still want to take care of all these folks who have trusted you and pay to come see you and you get to know them and their families.
And so that's the difficulty in the decision when you have to sever some of those relationships.
He also worries about how many doctors are going concierge near him in Richmond and the pressure that puts on an already strained healthcare system.
But for Sidlecki personally, it was the right choice.
No question, I would absolutely do it again.
I am more rested, I am not as stressed.
I am absolutely practicing medicine the way I feel it should be practiced than the way I want to practice.
Spending more time and taking better care of patients.
So it's an ongoing conversation between all sort of elements of the weather system.
All systems go, but first let's do the SP 500 added a mere three points to end at 6836.
For the week, the Dow slipped one and two tenths per cent.
The Nasdaq lost two and one tenth percent.
The SP 500 subtracted one and four tenths per cent.
Kaylee Wells talked about the EPA scrapping emissions regulations.
Well, General Motors Company grew one and four tenths percent.
Ford Motor Company picked up one and nine tenths percent.
But electric car maker Rivian Automotive, on the heels of a sunny fourth quarter earnings report soared twenty-six and six tenths per cent.
You're listening to Marketplace.
Could it get rained out?
Typically, you're not gonna get a reliable forecast more than seven to ten days out.
However, AI might have something to say about that.
Tim Fernholz wrote for Bloomberg about how researchers and tech giants are developing new forecasting tools that could change the game.
Tim, welcome to the program.
It's lovely to be here.
Thanks for having me.
So before we get to AI, talk about how weather forecasting traditionally has worked.
So I won't say traditionally because it's actually it's been an expanding field for the last few decades.
But in contemporary times, we basically have a government-run system that collects data from all kinds of sensors all over the world, weather balloons, buoys, every commercial plane in the United States coming down and sharing its measurements with the National Weather Service.
And the National Weather Service has a huge supercomputer and it plugs all of that information into it and it goes through these scientific models that meteorologists have spent generations building and spits out a forecast.
And it's a very complex and expensive process, and it's been refined and refined, and now we have pretty good weather forecasts out, say 10 days.
So enter AI, how is that changing?
So now we have deep learning software models where we can feed data from the weather agencies into them and ask them to do forecasts.
And it turns out they're actually able to predict the weather better than the traditional way we have done it.
And then in particular, these models are very good at doing things like tracking hurricanes, tracking cold fronts that are trickier for the traditional models to do.
And so scientists are trying to figure out why exactly they can do this, because you have to sort of understand why it works in order to implement it in a useful way.
Yeah, it was kind of wild to me to read that they don't really understand what's happening.
Is that worrying?
Or is as long as it works, is it okay if the people don't really understand how the AI is doing this?
Uh well, you hear two approaches to that.
One is if it works, it works and we should use it.
But what is interesting is that if we understand how it works, we can use it to learn more about the atmosphere itself.
These technologies are very new.
Only in 2022 did we first start to see these models coming out.
And they are an opportunity to learn.
And like a lot of artificial intelligence models, you know, they create a very complex way of managing data that's sort of hard to peer into at first.
And just like with the LLMs and other forms of this technology, there's a lot to learn about what actually is happening.
And then can we take that and use that to learn more about science?
So this is obviously potentially life-saving uh money-saving technology.
What do you think about private companies being the ones to really innovate here?
Well, it's certainly part of the trend we're seeing.
Um, so many of the advances in deep learning technology are coming from the private sector because it takes a huge amount of money to train these models to get the data centers all going.
But once they are trained, they're actually incredibly cheap and portable.
And so there is a sense in the meteorology community that this is going to democratize access to weather forecasts.
And it's also important to say that right now, these models, while they are outperforming their government equivalents, they're still dependent on the data that is generated by the governments.
So for now, there's a very intense symbiosis between both sides.
So where are we now in terms of the rollout of this technology?
And my is my you know weather forecast on my phone incorporating AI yet?
If you're using Google, uh yes, it is.
Google has been feeding data from its weather model into some of its products.
If you are uh in Europe, you may see it in your daily forecasts because the Europeans are much further ahead of the United States.
Um, but even in December, the National Weather Service rolled out some AI models of its own that are going to start contributing to forecasts.
How much better do you think this can get in the near term?
I mean, could I know if my daughter's soccer game is gonna be on, you know, in two weeks?
The most important question.
Um, yeah, so I it's it's hard to say how quickly this will take effect.
But what these experiments reveal is that there is a lot of potential to extend weather forecasting out to perhaps even a month in the future.
They haven't quite figured out how to do it yet, but they can see the potential path towards it.
And so as these models continue to be refined, they will point us towards better forecasts, but they will also perhaps point us towards where we need to invest more in data collection to improve the data we're putting into them to get better forecasts, and also where we can tweak the traditional models to get better results from them.
So it's an ongoing conversation between all sort of elements of the weather system and how we improve uh the forecasts we're getting.
Tim Fernholtz had the story for Bloomberg.
He's now a reporter at TechCrunch covering AI in space.
We'll definitely have to follow up with you about that.
Tim, thanks so much.
You're very welcome.
Thanks for having me.
Though ICE and Customs and Border Protection, the targets of these proposed reforms, can continue operating thanks to billions of dollars from last summer's Republican tax and spending law.
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