Leonard D. Schaeffer, a panel member who founded the insurance company WellPoint and is a professor at the University of Southern California, said the committee’s most “radical conclusion” was that there should be a more pronounced shift away from fee-for-service medicine, which promotes an emphasis on medical interventions in part by reimbursing doctors based on procedures rather than for talking with patients.
Tag: featured
F.T.C. Wary of Mergers by Hospitals (Lancaster General take note)
Hospitals often say they acquire other hospitals and physician groups so they can coordinate care, in keeping with the goals of the Affordable Care Act. But the agency, the Federal Trade Commission, says that mergers tend to reduce competition, and that doctors and hospitals can usually achieve the benefits of coordinated care without a full merger…
Rethink executions
It’s already well-established that death row is inordinately more expensive than the more reasonable alternative of sentencing the worst criminals to life in prison without parole. The cost of interminable appeals, much of it borne by taxpayers on behalf of indigent defendants, runs into the millions for every death-penalty case…
Corbett must take charge and Wolf shouldn’t be too cute at first debate: analysts
HARRISBURG PATRIOT-NEWS: …[Tom] Corbett needs to be “aggressive and evocative” while finding a message that will make voters rethink his tenure, said G. Terry Madonna, director of the Franklin & Marshall College Poll and professor of Public Affairs at Franklin & Marshall College.
‘City Day’ holiday in Moscow
Moscow’s City Day is an annual city festival celebrated on the first Saturday of September. There are folk festivals and concerts all over the city. City Day was celebrated for the first time in 1847 on the 700th anniversary of the city. A hundred years later, in 1947, Stalin ordered the celebration of the 800th anniversary of Moscow in a big way.
LETTER to a senator objecting to training of 5000 Syrian soldiers
Once we arm such a Syrian force we will be forced by political considerations to employ them in Syria, and once they are in Syria we will be unable for political as well as military imperatives to permit them to be decimated or destroyed.
Shame on the NYT and others for sensational and misleading headlines
The print edition headline is “U. S. General open to ground force as ption in Iraq” with a sub head “Joint Chiefs chairman raises apossibility Obama rejects.”
Did casino gaming live up to the promises and hype?
Casino gambling could deliver noticeably bigger tax relief if so much of the money didn’t go to subsidize Pennsylvania’s horse racing industry…
Tainted water in Pennsylvania, Texas from leaky gas wells, not fracking itself, study says
“We found the evidence suggested that fracking was not to blame, that it was actually a well integrity issue,” said Ohio State University geochemist Thomas Darrah, lead author of the study.
‘A National Admissions Office’ for Low-Income Strivers
The pamphlet was from a nonprofit organization called QuestBridge, which has quietly become one of the biggest players in elite-college admissions. Almost 300 undergraduates at Stanford this year, or 4 percent of the student body, came through QuestBridge. The share at Amherst is 11 percent, and it’s 9 percent at Pomona. At Yale, the admissions office has changed its application to make it more like QuestBridge’s…
Why does Intell suppress news concerning motorcycle deaths?
…the Intelligencer Journal New Era articles continuously, and apparently purposefully, fail to report whether the injured or killed was wearing crash helmet.
Capitolwire: Wolf, the vehicle for voters to express dissatisfaction with Corbett.
Wolf is “very vanilla,” said long-time political observer from the Democratic side, PR consultant Larry Ceisler. But “he becomes a very convenient vehicle for the dissatisfaction with Tom Corbett.”
Intell editorial identifies with the aggressor
Let us set forth a strictly hypothetical situation.
Let us set forth a strictly hypothetical situation: A teacher assistant at Franklin & Marshall is swimming at the field house and, upon returning to the men’s locker room, encounters a retired philosophy professor messing around, apparently inappropriately, with a boy.
PSU-Sandusky cover-up continues
Losers in this cover-up are Penn State student-athletes, all PSU students, alumni, the memory of Joe Paterno, the surrounding community and certainly all who deserve to know what went on.