Word: ideas
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Aware that the idea of "rationing" health care would prove controversial in the U.S., advocates of reform - from the American College of Physicians to the advocacy group Center for Medicine in the Public Interest - have suggested a system of review that doesn't take into account the cost of new treatments. This would help doctors decide a course of treatment, as currently they have no way of comparing the efficacy of different drugs for the same condition. But it could also raise prices. "In a free-market economy the manufacturers may use the effectiveness review to charge higher prices...
...Richard Holbrooke, the U.S. envoy to the region, is working on a media plan for Pakistan. It aims to develop the government's ability to disseminate information via new technologies such as cell phones. The idea is not to promote propaganda but to facilitate public-service messages, like emergency information or registration for refugees. The plan also allows for training government officials to become more open press officers, and to fund independent radio stations to counter those run by extremists. All this is good, but it's not enough. Pakistan's press needs to take a hard look at itself...
...track bin Laden. Capable of flying for up to 40 hours without refueling, the drone was a "brilliant intelligence tool," recalls Hank Crumpton, then the CIA's top covert-operations man in Afghanistan. Although the CIA was keen to weaponize the drone early on, the Air Force resisted the idea until 2000. Even then, firing the weapons was another matter. Crumpton remembers watching someone he is convinced was bin Laden on a video feed from a Predator in late 2000. "The optics were not great, but it was him," Crumpton says. But back then, "there were too many political, legal...
...impossible for American intelligence to understand the North's military, the people who keep Kim in power. Military officers are rarely let out of the country, and when they are they travel in pairs, preventing any possibility of making contact. To give you an idea just how impenetrable the military is, North Korea is the only country in the world that can execute large deployments while maintaining radio silence. If it can enforce discipline like that on the military, it's not surprising that it has no problem keeping its nuclear secrets. (See TIME's photo-essay "North Korea Goes...
...have the same problems with Iran, having no idea how close it is to a bomb. Since the Shah, the American intelligence community every four years incorrectly predicted Iran would get the bomb in the next five years. Today, even if Iran were to submit to complete international inspections of its civilian nuclear facilities, the suspicion would always hang over us that Iran has kept a secret nuclear-weapons program run by the military...