job growth in healthcare and social assistance positions during Romney's term, the strongest growth during that time of any sector. Romney also personally intervened to help attract to the state, or maintain within the state, several large employers, such as Bristol-Myers Squibb and the Gillette division of Procter & Gamble. However, some business leaders said Romney's policies that increased fees and corporate tax revenue drove up business costs and may have weakened job growth. On average, unemployment rates were slightly worse in the rest of the nation than in Massachusetts for the first three years of Romney's term. By his final year in office, the state was struggling to keep pace with the rate of falling unemployment nationwide. Massachusetts' national ranking leapt from the 29th highest in unemployment when Romney took office to the 18th by the end of his term. Unemployment in Massachusetts rose during Romney's first year from a rate of 5.6 percent in January 2003, when he took office, to a peak of 6.0 percent in mid-2003. It then steadily declined over the remainder of his term, ending at 4.6 percent in January 2007, his last month as governor, for a net improvement in unemployment of 1.0 percent. Much of the improvement in unemployment during Romney's first three years in office reflected the loss of working-age adults from the labor force, many of them having left Massachusetts for other states during the period. Massachusetts experienced one of the highest levels of net out-migration of any state during Romney's term. Health care Romney was at the forefront of a movement to bring near-universal health insurance coverage to the state, after a business executive told him at the start of his term that doing so would be the best way he could help people and after the federal government, due to the rules of Medicaid funding, threatened to cut $385 million in those payments to Massachusetts if the state did not reduce the number of uninsured recipients of health care services. Despite not having campaigned on the idea of universal health insurance, Romney decided that because people without insurance still received expensive health care, the money spent by the state for such care could be better used to subsidize insurance for the poor. After positing that any measure adopted not raise taxes and not resemble the previous decade's failed "Hillarycare" proposal, Romney formed a team that beginning in late