Word: reforming
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...Medicare Commission When Obama began his push for reform, he asked Congress to create an independent commission to regulate Medicare costs. Medicare, which spends more than $450 billion a year, is such a huge health care player that any changes it makes can lead the way for reforms in the private market. As originally envisioned, the new agency would essentially take over Congress's current authority to set Medicare payment rates for hospitals, doctors, nursing homes and other health care providers. It would use a process like the military-base-closing commission, whose recommendations automatically go into effect unless Congress...
...these shortcomings be reversed? White House officials and health reform advocates say they are trying. "We're not done yet," says DeParle. The question is whether the final weeks of horse-trading will move the bills toward transforming the health care system - or simply making it bigger...
...decades of relative poverty, its latest stimulus-supplemented gambit is to devote billions to try to fix the nation's very worst schools. After having directed almost $50 billion toward saving teacher jobs and $4 billion toward its Race to the Top program, in which states vie for reform-oriented funding, the department just made available applications for districts to compete for $3.5 billion earmarked for turning around failing schools. As part of the application, each state identifies its most "persistently lowest-achieving schools." The submission deadline for this race to the bottom is Feb. 8. (See pictures...
While enthusiastic about the district's reform plans, Boasberg is the first to admit that some of its turnarounds - and, by extension, some of the turnarounds across the country - will not succeed. "If we had a magic formula for school success, we wouldn't be lagging behind other countries like we are right now," he says. "We have to be prepared that some of these efforts will fail, but I'm confident that on the whole, they'll do far better than what they are replacing...
...even that clear what makes a turnaround a turnaround. "There's no agreement on how bad a school has to be in order to qualify," says Andy Smarick, a former deputy assistant education secretary who is a visiting fellow at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an education-reform think tank. "There's no agreement on how long it has to sustain that level of excellence. There's no agreement on whether it means the entire population of students or just certain subgroups. Does it mean having a school go from an F to a C or from...