Chefs, Butlers, Marble Baths: Hospitals Vie for the Affluent
By NINA BERNSTEIN
The feverish patient had spent hours in a crowded emergency room. When she opened her eyes in her Manhattan hospital room last winter, she recalled later, she wondered if she could be hallucinating: “This is like the Four Seasons — where am I?”
The bed linens were by Frette, Italian purveyors of high-thread-count sheets to popes and princes. The bathroom gleamed with polished marble. Huge windows displayed panoramic East River views. And in the hush of her $2,400 suite, a man in a black vest and tie proffered an elaborate menu and told her, “I’ll be your butler.”
Published on Friday, January 20, 2012 by Common Dreams
Maine's Tea Party Governor: 'Slash Health and Human Services or I'll Close Schools'
Republican Governor of Maine and Tea Party favorite, Paul LePage, angered many residents of the northeast state Thursday when he said that if the legislature did not pass his proposed cuts to the Department of Health and Human Services' budget, he would order a statewide closure of public schools on May 1 of this year.
The Portland Press Herald reports:
The governor on Thursday held a town hall meeting in Lewiston after a day touring the region as part of his 12th Capitol for a Day event.
The Sun Journal reports that LePage, describing the DHHS budget gap as a "runaway train," told the audience that if the Legislature didn't ratify his proposed budget he would be forced to close the state's schools. It's unclear what authority he has to take such a measure.http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/01/20-3?print
Now Departed From The Centers For Medicare And Medicaid Services, Berwick Receives High Marks For His Tenure At Agency
Is U.S. Health Spending Finally Under Control?
By UWE E. REINHARDT9:36 a.m. | Updated to correct reference to lines in Chart 3.
Uwe E. Reinhardt is an economics professor at Princeton. He has some financial interests in the health care field.
“Growth in U.S. health spending remains slow in 2010” was the headline of a news release on Jan. 9 by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, part of the Department of Health and Human Services. At an increase of 3.9 percent over national health spending in 2009, “the rates of health spending growth in 2009 and 2010 marked the lowest rate in the 51-year history of the National Health Expenditure Accounts,” the release said.
The news was quickly picked up and disseminated by news organizations, including The New York Times.
What is one to make of this development? Is it evidence that we have finally “broken the back of the health care inflation monster,” as former Secretary of Health and Human Services Margaret Heckler famously put it in 1984. That was just after the Reagan administration had introduced the current prospective case-based payments for hospital inpatient care but two years before the health care inflation monster returned with a vengeance.
The charts below provide a longer-run perspective on health spending in the United States. They are all based on the rich data tables released annually by the Office of the Actuary of the Centers for Medicare and Medicare Services.
The charts below provide a longer-run perspective on health spending in the United States. They are all based on the rich data tables released annually by the Office of the Actuary of the Centers for Medicare and Medicare Services.
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