Word: systemic
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Medical billing, for both hospitals and doctors, is accomplished via a system of codes, which is already so complicated that there are special schools for it, granting degrees not just in coding but in special branches of coding. Coding boils down to assigning specific numbers to every problem (diagnosis codes) and other numbers to every treatment (treatment codes). Though the lists, in my field of orthopedics anyway, are woefully inadequate to capture how we actually think about or treat patients, they are still ponderous and complex. From common cold to brain tumor, open heart surgery to handing over...
...Past studies have suggested that people metabolize alcohol more slowly as they age and it takes them longer to clear alcohol from their system; alcohol may also alter brain chemistry differently in older folks. (That's why Nixon warns people against going out drinking with their parents. "You'll embarrass both of you," she says.) But the discrepancies in impairment between age groups in the current study were not attributable to differences in metabolism. Despite self-perceived differences in intoxication, actual increases in blood-alcohol content happened at similar rates in both age groups - which may be due in part...
Brazil still faces huge challenges; its education system is dysfunctional, its political system squalid, corruption endemic. But consider: 53% of Brazil's 190 million people now occupy the middle class, up from 42% in 2002. This increased social mobility happened at the same time the country's main stock index soared some 480% before last fall's downturn. Lula seems to have cracked Latin America's chronic conundrum: how to expand underachieving economies while reducing epic inequality. In so doing, he's created a model that's "an insurance ticket, not a lottery ticket," says Marcelo Neri, head...
...involved beaches, soccer or Carnaval. "Brazil always suffered externally because of its internal poverty," says Lula's foreign-policy adviser, Marco Aurelio Garcia. The nation's founding monarchy, which lasted until 1889, insulated the country from the region's 19th century upheavals but also spawned a quasi-feudal class system that led to the inequalities that persist today. In 2000, fewer than 3% of Brazilians still owned more than two-thirds of the arable land, and the divide between the rich southeast and destitute northeast, where Lula was born, was as stark as ever...
...argues his antipoverty crusade fueled the economic growth. It's a chicken-and-egg debate, in which both sides are right. What matters is that social stimulus programs like Bolsa Família have been matched by fiscal measures like a reform of Brazil's engorged civil service pension system. "It's called doing things right," says Lula. "Allowing the rich to earn money with their investments and the poor to participate in economic growth...