Word: raying
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...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, if a hospital buys a CAT (computerized axial tomography) scanner, a kind of super X-ray machine, it must also hire highly trained, highly paid technicians...
...order every test that a patient could conceivably need. In part, that is done to reassure patients or to protect themselves against malpractice suits. Says Dr. E. Kash Rose, senior radiologist at Queen of the Valley Hospital in Napa, Calif.: "One study showed that 80% of skull X rays were unnecessary for care and treatment of patients. Rib X rays are done purely for the mental relief of the patient rather than for medical reasons. The treatment is exactly the same" whether the X ray discloses a fracture...
...poor. In addition, it would give those unprotected by company or public plans a chance of buying insurance at a "reasonable" cost, although that figure has not yet been determined. This insurance, subsidized by the Government, would provide a "core benefit package," including hospital and physician services, X-ray and lab tests, and would also probably provide some kind of catastrophe coverage. Cost of the total Carter plan to the Government: $15 billion a year. Employees and employers would pay $5 billion...
When the X-ray machine was introduced in 1896, it was as if Hamlet's desire that "this too too solid flesh would melt" had become eerie reality. Public and physicians alike went wild. Gentlemen bought X-ray photographs of objects concealed in boxes, and fashionable ladies had X-ray portraits taken of themselves as gifts for friends and lovers. But it was physicians who were most intoxicated with the new device's possibilities. Without manual probing, they could now evaluate the extent of bone fractures and precisely locate where foreign bodies were lodged in tissues...
Seventy-six years later, the computerized axial tomography, or CAT, scanner, hailed as the greatest advance in radiology since the discovery of X rays, appeared on the medical scene. Combining X-ray equipment with a computer and a television cathode-ray tube, this revolutionary diagnostic device can visualize cross sections of the human body to detect, among other disorders, tumors, blood vessel damage and bile duct obstructions. But whereas an X-ray machine cost $50 in 1896, today's CAT scanner may run to $700,000 or more...