Word: musts
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...private insurers have picked up a giant chunk of hospital-doctor bills. In 1965 Congress chipped in, providing Medicare payments for those over 65 and Medicaid assistance for the poor. There are still gaps in the coverage: the 20% or so of the bill that the typical Medicare patient must pay can be a severe burden; the long illness that exhausts inadequate insurance benefits is a terror to the middle class. Nonetheless, the system of "third-party payments" has become so comprehensive that patients today pay directly a mere 6% of hospital bills and 39% of all physicians' fees...
...given day. Then the hospitals must charge more than ever to cover the cost of maintaining those empty beds. A case in point: New York City spent $200 million on its ultramodern 510-bed Woodhull Hospital in Brooklyn, then found it had a city wide surplus of some 3,000 beds. But since the city would have to spend $20 million a year to mothball the "dream hospital," it plans to put it into operation eventually, at a cost now estimated as high...
...Hospitals are inherently expensive places. They must maintain elaborately equipped facilities?emergency rooms, for example?24 hours a day, even though those facilities are used only sporadically. They are labor-intensive: the general ratio is 2.64 employees for every hospital bed. Aggressive unions have forced hospitals to raise the once depressed wages of their nonprofessional people (cooks, cleaners, clerks) so sharply that, for example, wages and benefits now take 70% of the budget of New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center, vs. 35% only 20 years ago. The introduction of expensive machinery raises rather than lowers labor costs. For example...
...Doctors feel they have a right to charge high fees?their median income is a towering $65,000 a year?to make up for the long training they must undergo and the 80-hour weeks that many say they put in, and to compensate them for bearing the responsibility of making life-and-death decisions. Says one Boston specialist with an international clientele: "Remember that when a doctor has finished seven or eight years of schooling, two or three years of internship, two or three years of specialization, by then he is married, starting a family and an expensive practice...
...case of the underdog," Ford Madox Ford became her literary mentor and, ironically, a model for the contemptible men in her stories who invariably prey on fragile, Rhys-like heroines. Rhys, who was writing her memoirs when she died, observed: "If you want to write the truth, you must write about yourself. I am the only real truth I know...