Word: problem
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...very nearly was Hunter's time. A video-game repairman when not delivering elbow smashes in Greenville's Southern Carolina Wrestling arena, Hunter, 27, began to feel sick back in mid-August, went to his family doctor, had tests and was told he had a liver problem. He checked into Greenville Memorial Hospital, where his enzyme levels were monitored...
...didn't ask that Hunter be sent to Chapel Hill, N.C., in the first place and why PHP's "authorization" was not a simple solution to the problem say a lot about managed-care coverage. O'Connor was unaware that his own company had a liver-transplant contract with UNC because it was really not his company that held such contracts in the first place. In the managed-care business, general-health insurers like PHP often farm out high-cost specialties like organ transplants to secondary insurers who "carve out" coverage of these procedures and do separate deals with hospitals...
...Another problem is the endless updating of electronic technology, which makes many a computer supposedly obsolete just when its user has finally learned how to handle it. "I think the technology gets churned too frequently," says Alan Blinder, former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve. "Every time we have to learn a new system, there is a decline in productivity...
Stanford economist Timothy Bresnahan argues that this is more a problem with PCs than with large business computers, where upgrades are handled by professional managers. But changing systems can be a serious problem for medium-size businesses too. Insurance Management Associates, a commercial insurance brokerage firm, has just laid out more than $1 million to install a new computer operating system. In the Denver office alone, says president Robert Cohen, "we had 2,500 hours of training for 70 employees and kept the business running while handling the usual glitches and two-hour breakdowns, as well as the three days...
...model used to measure the prevalence of other addictions--compulsive overeating, for example--is applied to this one, there could be as many as 15 million computer addicts. "The problem is far more common than people are willing to acknowledge in terms of loss of productivity or damage to the economy, as well as harm on a personal level," says Dr. Donald Black, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Iowa College of Medicine. Black, having already studied pathological gamblers and compulsive shoppers, has begun a study of compulsive computer users, since observing that some of the people...