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The financial experience of health care can be confusing and painful. What if all the bills, codes and payments behind every service didn't drag down care but instead cleared the way for the best care? Zealous is helping insurers nationwide to modernize the financial experience so care can flow, providers can treat without financial bottlenecks, payers can optimize care quality and cost, and patients can get better without financial uncertainty. Learn what Zealous can do at Z e l I s.com Serious about investing? You need to know about public.com that's where you can invest in everything Stocks, options, bonds, crypto. You can even earn some of the highest yields in the industry, like the 6% or higher yield you can lock in with a bond account. Public is a FINRA registered SIPC insured platform that takes your investments as seriously as you do. Fund your account in five minutes or less at public.commorningreport and get up to $10,000 when you transfer your old portfolio. That's public.commorningreport paid for by Public Investing. All investing involves the risk of loss, including loss of principal. Brokerage services for U.S. listed registered securities options and bonds in the self directed account are offered by Public Investing, Inc. Member FINRA and SIPC. Cryptocurrency trading services are offered by Bakkt Crypto Solutions, LLC. Complete disclosures available@public.com Disclosures the Slow Economic Shockwaves of Government Layoffs From Marketplace I'm Sabri Benishore in for David Brancaccio. Current and former workers at the U.S. agency for International Development are being allowed into USAID headquarters in Washington, D.C. today for a second day for 15 minutes to pack up their belongings. But the federal government's layoffs are being felt across the country, not just in D.C. merchant Marketplace's Nancy Marshall Genzer talked to a USAID contractor in Oklahoma about what's happening there. 47 year old Patricia Gross has worked as an independent government contractor, a gig worker, since 2018. She, her husband and three young sons live just outside of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Nonprofits hired her to write applications for federal grants, mostly from USAID and the Agriculture Department. Now the nonprofits are out of work and so is Gross, so the family is dependent on her husband's salary. I think like right now we're okay, but I mean it's concerning. Last year I did really well and we bought a house last summer based on my income, you know, increasing our family income, gross says. She made about $75,000 last year. She has a side gig helping people write their resumes. She only made about $1,000 doing that in 2024. Now former resume clients are back. They're federal workers or contractors who are also out of work. Grant Gross says her heart breaks for them, but there's no time to waste. The advice I've been giving my clients is that people are mourning now and if you wait a month, everybody is going to start really looking for a job, and there's not that many jobs out there. Gross herself applied for a few jobs last weekend on LinkedIn, but she got messages back telling her, sorry, the position's been canceled. I'm Nancy Marshall Genser for Marketplace. The US is a consumer driven economy. Consumers account for almost 70% of US GDP. And when enough consumers agree on something, they have been able to turn that economic power into social or political power, most famously with boycotts. Boycotts gained fame in the US in the 50s and 60s as part of the civil rights movement. One campaign that's gained some traction on social media recently calls for an economic blackout today, a total boycott of all consumer spending by Americans to protest the influence of billionaires, corpor and political parties. The idea originated with a little known activist group called the People's Union usa. Marketplace's Mitchell Hartman has more. People's Union founder John Schwartz posted on Instagram that he doesn't expect most Americans to boycott all retail today. The majority of them are still going to shop on this Friday. That's not the point. The point is that those who don't are choosing to stand together and build momentum against big corporations and the politicians who support them. But, says management professor Braden King at Northwestern's Kellogg School, lots of consumers will say they're going to boycott. Very few consumers do. King says boycotts rarely have a lasting economic impact. Even if, let's say, 5% of consumers are going to boycott, that would be a huge number. They'll probably, you know, if they need to buy something, just go and do it the following day. And so it wouldn't really show up the revenue numbers. A national consumer boycott could still make a difference, says sociologist David S. Meyer at UC Irvine. It's an opportunity to talk about a whole variety of grievances, and it gives people something to do, like get involved. People who decide to boycott are more likely to call their congressional representative to go out to a demonstration and vote against politicians who back social and economic policies they don't like. I'm Mitchell Hartman for Market. If you want to be savvy about the economy, the Marketplace newsletter is just what you need. Every Friday you'll get explainers and analysis that make sense of everything from the moving markets to grocery prices. No jargon, no hype, just smart takes delivered to your inbox. Sign up today@Marketplace.org subscribe Amazon yesterday unveiled its first ever quantum computing chip. This follows similar announcements from Microsoft and Google. Research into quantum computing used to happen mostly at academic labs, but private sector investment in quantum computing has grown tenfold in the past decade. Marketplaces Daniel Ackerman looked into why tech firms are spending so much on a technology that hasn't yet actually proven its commercial viability. Your everyday computer runs on bits. A quantum computer runs on quantum bits, or qubits, and these qubits harness the behavior of subatomic particles, which, says MIT research scientist Andrew McAfee, can make them a pain to work with. You have to kind of coax them into being, and you've got to wrangle them in these very weird conditions. For instance, he says, MIT has a quantum computing lab on campus that is the coldest place, period. In other words, down closer to absolute zero than any other place in the universe we know about. And the reason is to kind of convince qubits to hang around a little bit longer and come together in ways that that we can harness. On the most basic level, an ordinary computer bit is like an on, off switch. It either represents 1 or 0. Qubits work differently, says Heather West, a research manager at idc. Qubits rely on quantum properties that allow them to hold the values of 0, 1, or any value in between, she says. Quantum processors could do calculations that are functionally impossible with today's computers. That will allow for scientists and engineers in the long run to be able to solve complex problems that have eluded them. Quantum computers could speed up things like drug discovery, material science, or the pricing of risk in the insurance industry. But Amy Webb, CEO of Future Today Institute, says it could take years to get there. This is a field that really has a very long horizon ahead of it in terms of research and development, scaling and getting these concepts into market. And that can be tricky for companies seeking investor dollars because investors have ever shortening expectations for when they're going to see a return. But quantum computing is likely to become so valuable, says Andrew McAfee of MIT. It makes sense for tech firms to spend on it now, at least the firms with deep enough pockets that allows them to extend their timeline beyond, you know, next quarter or what we're going to put in the annual report next year. Because, McAfee says, for whoever manages to scale quantum computing. The returns will be there eventually. I'm Daniel Ackerman for Marketplace, and in New York, I'm Sabri Benishore with the Marketplace morning Report from 8pm American Public Media. Consumer confidence had its sharpest monthly decline since 2021, which means we're all in our feels about money. And while uncertainty is the only constant these days, it's also a great reason to get serious about understanding personal finance. I'm Janelie Espinal, host of Financially Inclined, a podcast from Marketplace that makes learning about money simple. Learn about practical skills like negotiating job offers, dealing with money and friendship and love, entrepreneurship and student loans. Get serious about your money and build a life you've always dreamed of. Listen to Financially Inclined wherever you get your podcast.