Word: comforting
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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That is no comfort to doctors and patients. For-profit plans are reacting to the recent slippage in net by negotiating huge mergers. Some analysts predict that the 30-odd managed-care insurers that compete today in California will be concentrated into seven to 10 by 2005. Such giant combines might be able to hike premiums while squeezing spending on patient care even tighter in an effort to rebuild their margins--and continuing to let their chief executives pile up personal fortunes in salary and stock. One survey found that the salaries of HMO chiefs averaged 62% higher than those...
...campus as diverse as Harvard's, is overwhelmed by the realization of just how big the world is, and how many different ways there are of living and of seeing things. One of the natural reactions to this sensory overload is to draw back in fear, and to comfort oneself by assuming that one's way of living and thinking are the only proper ways, and that different lifestyles are in some way inferior...
...Besides massaging long-time customers, Nordstrom is trying to attract choosy new ones by paying more attention to refreshing its fashions. Pete Nordstrom argues that last year's shifts in placement have made it possible for the company to respond more swiftly to the latest trends. And he takes comfort from what happened in the early 1980s, when Nordstrom shook up customers by bringing in Liz Claiborne lines and moving other brands around. Although disruptive at the time, those moves helped set the stage for years of robust profit growth...
...political borders, now ruthlessly wipes out slow-footed firms. In order to survive, companies give their first allegiance to efficiency and profits, not to their employees or the communities in which they live and work. In the long run, more wealth is created for everyone, but that is cold comfort for the skilled industrial worker or middle-aged manager who has just been declared "redundant...
...clones too many--or, more to the point, clones too close to human for comfort. Politicians--with one eye on re-election and another on the polls (a TIME/CNN survey reported that 3 out of 4 Americans believe such research is "against the will of God")--wasted no time. The President, proclaiming that "each human life is unique, born of a miracle that reaches beyond laboratory science," banned the use of federal funds for human cloning, while Republican Representative Vernon Ehlers of Michigan introduced not one but two anticloning measures...