Word: exceptional
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Originally designed to shield employee benefit plans from frivolous but potentially crippling lawsuits, ERISA evolved over time to protect HMOs from liability suits by anyone--except Medicare and Medicaid recipients, church officials and government employees like Goodrich. Others can go to court, but at most they are entitled to recover the cost of the care that their HMO refused to reimburse. Not much consolation...
...drinking or smoking on board and a zero-tolerance drug policy enforced with random testing. Even a crew bent on mayhem would have trouble scheduling it. The tows run 24 hours a day, and for the length of their 30-day shifts, the boatmen never touch dry land except to take a boat through a lock...
That doesn't mean they don't have their discontents. Their work, the constant unstitching and restitching of 200-ft. barges into the tow, can be tedious when not frenzied. Their month-long absences are like those of truckers, except that calls home over ship-to-shore phones are prohibitively expensive. Recounts Grainger pilot Kip Brown: "Three days after my daughter was born, I caught a boat in St. Louis for 60 days. My wife didn't stand for too much of that. The second marriage, two sons, pretty much the same. I got one now I just married...
...chance kicks off sweeps month, the networks will run a record number of these so-called shockumentaries. It's not just Fox, which has ruled the genre, but also ABC, NBC, UPN and even PBS (Nova has a four-parter called Escape! Because Accidents Happen). Most of these shows (except the Nova series) come from four Los Angeles producers: Bruce Nash, Erik Nelson, Brad Lachman and Eric Schotz. They carry out the networks' belief that the only TV young men will watch is extremely violent events shown two or three times in slow motion. When Jerry Springer's "Mom, Will...
...Except what if those people are too busy to care? A man who takes his faith so seriously that he once washed a departing staff member's feet as a gesture of thanks, Brownback has an idea about what his constituents are praying for these days: "They just want it over with," he says. And however it turns out, they tell him, it will have no effect whatever on their lives. "That," he says quietly, "is an amazing thing...