Free Republic

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - The University of California paid 2,275 employees more than $200,000 last fiscal year, up 30 percent over two years, even as the system continued to cut student services and increase fees, a newspaper reported Monday. The salary hikes, revealed during a review of payroll records by the San Francisco Chronicle, occurred as the school raised student service fees 79 percent. UC has recently frozen pay hikes for lower-paid workers, such as custodians. "This is a huge inequity," said Norah Foster, a library assistant at the University of California, Berkeley, and executive board member of the Coalition...

Around the country this summer, at least half a dozen hospitals have closed obstetric wards, others have curtailed trauma services, and a string of rural clinics have been temporarily shuttered as a result of soaring costs for medical malpractice insurance. Mercy Hospital in West Philadelphia closed its maternity ward on Friday, and the Largo Medical Center, near Tampa, Fla., plans to do so in December. The roots of the crisis are complex. The insurance companies, President Bush and the American Medical Association largely fault the rising cost of awards in malpractice lawsuits. From 1995 to 2000, the average jury award...