Thats Herms fault, currently.
Woody did his part, doling out big cash for Chrebet, Martin, Testaverde, and Mawae.
Herm does look clueless this week. However I, for one, don't consider shelling out big bucks for Testaverde to be a stellar move.
Robert Wood Johnson built health care giant Johnson & Johnson. In 1972, his $1.2 billion bequest funded the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF). One of the nation’s 10 largest philanthropies, RWJF controlled nearly $7 billion in assets at the end of 1997. This included $4.4 billion of Johnson & Johnson stock, about five percent of the company’s outstanding shares.
Judging by its grants, the foundation’s mission appears to be the promotion of policy initiatives that create the institutional framework required to replace private medicine with government-controlled managed care. Despite growing evidence that aggressive American-style medicine produces faster and more complete patient recoveries, RWJF’s president, Steven A. Schroeder, M.D., thinks the United States should emulate Europe and Canada. In the foundation’s 1994 annual report he wrote:
"We simply have overdeveloped our medical capacity…. Compare the lavish lobbies of a typical U.S. hospital with its utilitarian European counterpart and you will appreciate how much we have invested in medical care. Orange County California, has more imaging machines for its 2.4 million people than all of Canada for its 27 million people…. We lead the world in performing expensive diagnostic and therapeutic procedures, such as magnetic resonance imaging, coronary artery bypass surgery, hemodialysis, and organ transplants. These supply factors contribute to both medical inflation and intensity of services…. Our surfeit of medical technology means that insured patients in the United State seldom have to wait for care, urgent or elective."
In Schroeder’s Canadian paradise, sick people die waiting for care. In May 1999, Ontario removed 121 patients from the waiting list for coronary bypass surgery on the grounds that their long wait for treatment had made them too ill to survive it, according to the Fraser Institute report, Canadian Health Care: A System in Collapse. One day last January, 23 of 25 Toronto emergency rooms were closed to new patients.
In 1989, public outcries over treatment delays forced British Columbia to begin sending patients to U.S. hospitals. By 1998 the median wait for urgent cardiovascular surgery was still 6.6 weeks, five weeks longer than doctors felt safe.
That millions of Americans would rather pay more to wait less — an entirely reasonable response to illness — fails to impress Dr. Schroeder. One cannot, he has written, "just put the data out there and assume that people will make the right choice." Because market outcomes reflect people’s choices, RWJF has spent millions on policy initiatives designed to replace the market with government.
According to Schroeder, the Foundation’s experience with re-engineering health care in Washington state taught it that "a foundation grant that represented only a small portion of an institution’s budget could not overcome strong market forces of institutional self-interest to reshape a major health care institution…. Strong incentives — financial or political — were needed to ‘force’ cooperation on what were otherwise competing and successful institutions…" (Health Affairs, Summer 1992, as quoted by Jane M. Orient in testimony before a Pennsylvania state legislature committee). Schroeder advocates public/private partnerships to "force cooperation," and feels that "[t]he key to public/private partnerships is to induce the private sector to ‘play’ on terms that are acceptable to the public sector."
In other words, forget choice. When it comes to health care, Schroeder knows best.
http://www.capitalresearch.org/publications/foundation_watch/2000/0011a.htmGrant received to study binge drinking
LSU has received a nationally sought-after grant worth $700,468 over five years to study binge drinking among the nation's college and university students. The grant will enable LSU to work toward a solution to the national problem of binge, or "high-risk," drinking.
LSU is one of only four universities in the U.S. to receive the grant in 1998 and one of two to be funded at this level.
The grant program, "A Matter of Degree: The National Effort to Reduce High-Risk Drinking Among College Students," works to curb binge drinking by changing norms, attitudes, policies and practices affecting students and their drinking habits on and off campus.
The grant is funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation of Princeton, N.J., and is administered through the Office of Alcohol and Other Drug Abuse at the American Medical Association, headquartered in Chicago. Six other universities received similar funding in 1996. The universities involved in the project are working with local community organizations, as well as statewide and national groups to address the problem.
http://www.lsu.edu/university_relations/lsutoday/980828/pageone.html
nanny state