Word: ruinous
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...only real precedent for a federal intervention is Congress's decision in 1972 to pay 80% of the ruinous cost of kidney transplants and dialysis for anyone whose kidneys fail. Congress expected to pay nearly $140 million for 5,000 to 7,000 dialysis patients. The first year's bill came to $241 million for 10,300 patients. In a decade, the number of patients has soared to 82,000?including dying cancer victims and nursing-home octogenarians?at a cost of $2 billion, which accounts for 10% of all Medicare payments for physicians...
...Cappadocia illustrated the same truth. What you need of such a weird spectacle is one good view of it, and this I had ... The uneasy moonscape stretched away on every hand, and, below me, clinging to the roots of the fortified pinnacle of rock I stood upon, were the ruinous mud huts of the old village, their terraces heaped with melons yellow and green. Fantastical that landscape is, the tufa towers riddled with painted churches, like the sandcastles of giants' children, and I was amazed by it; but amazement is pretty soon exhausted...
...Government Act was more willful and serious, of course, than the infraction Ferraro may have committed: he might be compared to someone who hides income from the IRS, she to someone who files a tax return but makes an undeserved claim. Still, the perception of impropriety can be as ruinous as the real thing...
Makers of the software for personal computers have also been suffering from slower than expected sales, ruinous competition and an excess of copycat products. Among the victims are two industry giants. VisiCorp, marketer of VisiCalc, a pioneering business program, has shelved plans to create its own software, cut its work force to 72 from a peak of 250 and sold the licensing rights for its troubled VisiOn package to Control Data. Another former pacesetter, Digital Research, has backed away from its ambitious move into the retail market and is focusing again on programs that are built into computers...
...rich nations as guilt offerings for a crime they did not commit, and characterizes Third World groups generally as parasites organized to such dry their former colonial masters. This and is used Bauer writes, to lengthen the time poor nations can spend in economic fantasyland, unaware of the ruinous consequences of their socialistic policies...