- Soaring cost of healthcare sets a record, By Noam N. Levey, February 4, 2010, Los Angeles Times: “In a stark reminder of growing costs, the government has released a new estimate that healthcare spending grew to a record 17.3% of the U.S. economy last year, marking the largest one-year jump in its share of the economy since the government started keeping such records half a century ago. The almost $2.5 trillion spent in 2009 was $134 billion more than the previous year, when healthcare consumed 16.2% of the gross domestic product, according to an annual report by independent actuaries at the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, or CMS, scheduled for release Thursday. The nonpartisan accounting agency also projected that as early as next year, the country could mark another milestone as government picks up more than half of the nation’s total healthcare tab for the first time…”
- Public health tab to hit milestone, By Peter Landers, February 4, 2010, Wall Street Journal: “For the first time, government programs next year will account for more than half of all U.S. health-care spending, federal actuaries predict, as the weak economy sends more people into Medicaid and slows growth of private insurance. The figures show how federal and state spending is taking a bigger role while Congress hesitates over a health-care overhaul. Government health programs are a growing burden on the federal budget, which is running annual deficits of more than $1 trillion, and rising health costs continue to batter private industry. By 2020, according to the new projections, about one in five dollars spent in the U.S. will go to health care, a proportion far beyond any other industrialized nation…”
Day: February 4, 2010
Extreme Recruitment Foster Care Program
A determined quest to bring adoptive ties to foster teenagers, By Erik Eckholm, January 30, 2010, New York Times: “After a day of knocking on doors chasing fleeting leads, Carlos Lopez and his partner finally heard welcome words: Yes, a resident confirmed, the man they were seeking lived in this house and would be home that evening. Mr. Lopez, a former police detective, now does gumshoe work for what he calls a more fulfilling cause: tracking down long-lost relatives of teenagers languishing in foster care, in desperate need of family ties and in danger of becoming rootless adults. That recent day, he was hoping to find the father of a boy who had lived in 16 different foster homes since 1995. The boy did not remember his mother, who had long since disappeared. Finding an adoptive parent for older children with years in foster care is known in child welfare circles as the toughest challenge. Typically, their biological parents abused or neglected them and had parental rights terminated. Relatives may not know where the children are, or even that they exist. And the supply of saints in the general public, willing to adopt teenagers shaken by years of trauma and loss, is limited…”
Temporary Housing in Haiti
Rebuilding effort in Haiti turns away from tents, By Damien Cave, February 3, 2010, New York Times: “Shifting tactics in the race to shelter an estimated one million Haitians displaced by the earthquake, aid groups on Wednesday began to de-emphasize tents in favor of do-it-yourself housing with tarpaulins at first, followed by lumber. Mark Turner, a spokesman for the International Organization for Migration, said that a move toward ‘transitional shelters’ – built eventually with lumber and some steel – would give people sturdier structures and more flexibility. ‘Tents really have a shelf life of not much more than six months,’ Mr. Turner said. In contrast, he added: ‘You can stand up in a shelter that you build. You can start a business there.’ Officials from the migration agency said they were hoping to give people the means to create temporary housing, and the power to build where they wanted. They acknowledged that it could be five years before most people moved back into houses, which means that under the current best-case situation, Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital, will soon be blanketed with hundreds of thousands of simple structures that designers describe as ‘garden sheds’ and others see as shanties…”