Word: carefulness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...often this pile of medical money has not bought better care or increased access. Instead, it has fueled a profoundly wasteful and inefficient system. "Thirty percent of what we do in health care is of no apparent benefit," says Marion Ein Lewin, of the National Academy of Sciences' Institute of Medicine. A Rand Corp. review of carotid endarterectomies, operations aimed at clearing blocked neck arteries, found nearly a third of the procedures "inappropriate." Similar questions have been raised about heart bypass operations and pacemakers. The next Administration must put a premium on value and coordinate a nationwide re-examination...
...rise of less than 4% during that same period. Congress should weigh such numbers as it considers revising Medicare fee schedules. Nor are the patients blameless: Americans must come to learn that more expensive machines and elaborate procedures are not always better and that their demands for risk-free care risk pricing medicine beyond everyone's reach...
...estimated 300,000 Americans annually. That is 15% of the deaths in the country, far more than are caused by heroin, cocaine or other illegal drugs that have aroused such concern. Nonsmokers -- more than two-thirds of the population -- subsidize cigarettes through increased Medicare and Medicaid payments to provide care for victims, as well as through stiffer private insurance premiums that reflect smokers' high rates of heart disease, cancer and emphysema. The congressional Office of Technology Assessment estimates that the health and lost-productivity costs of smoking total $65 billion a year...
Federal excise taxes on cigarettes are about 16 cents a pack. For every additional penny levied on the 29 billion packs smoked yearly, the Government would raise $290 million. Doubling the tax -- call it a user fee -- would yield an additional $4.6 billion that could be earmarked for health care. That revenue would be only half the benefit. Kenneth E. Warner, a professor at the University of Michigan's School of Public Health, estimates that doubling the cigarette tax would cut the population of teenage smokers by 17%, protecting more than 800,000 young Americans from cigarettes. Governments...
Catastrophic health care was only the first problem addressed in assisting the chronically ill who desperately need help in paying for nursing-home and home health care. As the population grays, those demands will grow. But paying for programs projected to cost $30 billion to $50 billion a year will take sizable increases in taxes on payrolls, gifts and estates. Moreover, ; Washington will need both compassion and political gumption to achieve so- called generational equity. The sometimes stentorian American Association of Retired Persons ably represents America's elderly, but it should not be allowed to drown out the softer voices...