| Novel plan helps hospital eliminate pricey tests
SEATTLE -- Virginia Mason Medical Center has made unusually aggressive moves in the past two years to cut health-care costs. Consulting with the big insurer Aetna Inc. along with Starbucks Corp. and several other big local employers, the hospital revamped how it treated some expensive ailments, cutting down high-tech tests and high-end specialists. But a troublesome pattern emerged: The more cost-effective it became, the bigger financial hit the medical center took. "Everyone gained but Virginia Mason," says its chief of medicine, Robert Mecklenburg. A novel solution, crafted with the help of the big employers, ultimately let Virginia Mason share in some of the savings it created -- by paying the medical center more for some cheaper treatments. It offers a lesson in dealing with one of the most confounding elements in America's health-care crisis: a perverse system of payments that rewards doctors and hospitals not for how well they treat patients, but for how much they treat them.
Oceanside fits Chargers' game plan
As president of the San Diego Chargers, you play the toughest position. Watching the tragedy of errors against the New England Patriots must have given you near-fatal heartburn. (Me, I still can't eat solid food. Just beer and Jell-O.) It can't be easy refereeing the feud between your general manager and coach. (Just a thought: Hire Dr. Phil for a day to shrink their extra-extra-extra-large egos.) Plus, finding a stadium location in San Diego County, as you've said you ardently desire to do, will require a genius game plan. That's why I'm writing, Mr. Spanos. I can attest that Oceanside is fired up over the team possibly moving to Junior Seau's hometown. City Councilman Jack Feller estimates that a nonbinding advisory vote on an O'side stadium, if it were to be held today, would win with 60 percent.
Opinions: Nat-ural Wisdom: A new approach to literary criticism
“deconstructivism," best talked about in terms of what it is not, rather than what it is; and the various “-isms" relating to creating heroes of all the women, minorities, and especially women-minorities in a work of literature, just to name a few. But I propose a new -ism: Anti-textualism. In this “-ism," you assume that the author didn't really mean what the author actually meant, and support this argument with reasons that not only lack textual evidence but heavily reflect personal preferences, biases and even prejudices. Essentially, you don't let the idea of “textual evidence" get in the way of understanding a work. For instance, take John Steinbeck's masterpiece, The Grapes of Wrath. Hailed by many as “The Great American Epic," it has received a great deal of praise in high literary circles for its stark depiction of the suffering of the Great Depression.
An entirely impressive first half
DALLAS - Dinner before appetizer? That seemed to be the order of the mostly pleasurable concert by the Dallas Symphony Orchestra on Thursday night at the Meyerson Symphony Center. In place of the customary overture, German guest conductor Jun Markl dug right in with Brahms' autumnal Third Symphony. This might be the most immediately gratifying of the composer's four symphonies, but subtlety always counts for a lot in Brahms, and Markl worked hard to produce as many dynamic and expressive nuances as possible from the orchestra. His brisk tempos, particularly in the romantic third movement, avoided any risk of stodginess. There was an ulterior motive at work in starting with the Brahms: It accommodated the brilliant French pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet for a pair of virtuosic, although musically uneven, concertos -- Ravel's Concerto for Left Hand and Liszt's Totentanz, which were separated by the intermission.
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