Word: lowing
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...number of contracts signed by buyers ticked up in January, and has been rising ever since. The problem, though, is that almost all of the activity is among the lowest-priced homes. In May, sales of houses under $300,000 (for the D.C. suburbs, that's low-priced) jumped 41%, as compared to the same month last year. Sales of houses $300,000 and above, meanwhile, dropped by 26%. The super-high-end is particularly grim. At the rate houses worth more than $700,000 have been selling, it will take three-and-a-half years...
...People are scared, they aren't buying the big stuff," says Pat Hiban, a real estate agent at Keller Williams in Howard County's Ellicott City. "The sweet spot is in the low range." In 2005, Hiban's team sold 10 houses worth more than $1 million dollars. So far this year, they haven't sold any. That's why Hiban, like agents across the country, has retooled his business to target homebuyers of more modest means. "I'd rather have five sales for $200,000 than to sit and wait for $1 million," says Hiban, who now markets...
Obama has already taken several whacks at waste in energy and health care. His stimulus had more than $20 billion for energy-efficiency measures designed to slash electricity use in low-income homes, on military bases and in all kinds of government buildings, while his fuel-efficiency standards for vehicles are expected to save billions of gallons of gasoline; he's also providing government financing for electric cars, and his cash-for-clunkers program is another assault on gas guzzlers. The stimulus also included $19 billion for computerizing the medical industry, which could reduce duplicative tests and office visits, plus...
...Incentives aren't everything either; wasting energy costs us money, but we do it all the time, and so do our factories and other ostensibly profit-maximizing businesses. Health care usually costs us money too, and even when co-payments are low, visiting the doctor is time-consuming and inconvenient, and staying in the hospital can be downright dangerous. Still, Dartmouth has documented enormous regional variations in medical care that produce virtually no variation in medical outcomes, a testament to our tolerance for overtreatment...
...medicine, the idea would be to reward quality rather than quantity, to give providers incentives to keep us healthy and reduce unnecessary treatments, to encourage doctors and hospitals to promote a culture of low-cost, high-quality care. One reason the Mayo Clinic already provides low-cost, high-quality care is that it keeps its doctors on salary, insulating them from fee-for-service inducements to overserve; unfortunately, Mayo is hemorrhaging cash on its Medicare patients, because the current system penalizes responsibly conservative care. Doctors don't get paid for thinking about a case or returning a phone call...