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In The News

Despite managed health care and hospital closings, medical costs in Massachusetts are still 30 percent above the national average, according to a report by SPH Professor Alan Sager and Deborah Socolar, an SPH research analyst. "These findings say that managed care, HMOs, price competition, and hospital closings have not lowered Massachusetts health-care costs," says Sager in the Boston Globe October 3. The analysis, done through SPH’s Access and Affordability Monitoring Project, reignites an argument that pits the University’s researchers and health-care providers against the Massachusetts Hospital Association. Sager warns, "This on top of the best economy in the world. What will happen when we slip into a recession?" He advocates price controls for prescription drugs and improved hospital management, among other strategies.

Lawyers for two Cold War spies suing the CIA say their case has been bolstered by a surprising admission from the agency that some defectors may have been given cash for life. The spies, a former foreign diplomat and his wife, claim that the United States promised them a permanent yearly stipend for information about their undisclosed homeland, but that the CIA cut it off in 1997. In a recent Associated Press story, Arthur Hulnick, a lecturer in international relations at CAS, expresses strong doubts that they were promised permanent

financial security by the federal government. "What he got was freedom," says Hulnick. "Now he wants the agency to bail him out. These people tend to complain about what the agency hasn’t done for them, forgetting what it has." The case is scheduled to go to trial next summer.

If the recall of 6.5 million tires were not a big enough problem for Firestone, employees may face uncertainty about who will be running the company in the days ahead. Yoichiro Kaizaki, president of parent company Bridgestone Corporation of Japan, recently

declared a management reshuffle. "It puts everyone on tenterhooks, because they don’t know what their role is going to be in the

future," says SMG Associate Professor C. B. Bhattacharya in the September 29 New York Times. Crisis management experts say that promising a shake-up without taking immediate action is a bad idea because it undercuts authority and morale.

"In The News" is compiled by Alexander Crouch in the Office of Public Relations.

2 March 2001
Boston University
Office of University Relations