Health Reform at 2: Why American Health Care Will Never Be the Same

Most attention has been on the Supreme Court fight over The Affordable Care Act’s mandate to expand health insurance to 30 million more Americans. But what’s overshadowed is what the rest of the law is doing to change the business model for health care:

“The program launched in June 2009 with a checklist of quality metrics. To earn a bonus, surgeons would, among other things, need to ensure that antibiotics were administered an hour before surgery and halted 24 hours after, reducing the chances of costly complications.

“Only three doctors hit the metrics that first month, but their bonuses caught the attention of others. ‘There was a lot of, “Why are those doctors getting more, and I’m not?”‘ Zucker says. Eight doctors got bonus payments in July; two dozen got them in August. Compliance with certain quality metrics steadily climbed from 89 percent to 98 percent in three months.”

Source: Washington Post
Published: Mar 23, 2012
Length: 9 minutes (2,295 words)

CIA Divorces: The Secrecy When Spies Split

When your wedding doubles as a covert operation. A look at the complications of CIA marriages, and how secrets often lead to separation:

“The Fredericksburg woman divorcing her husband laid out all the messy details, including the most secret of them all. Her husband, she wrote in now-sealed court documents, is a covert operations officer for the Central Intelligence Agency. His CIA job, she said, poisoned their five-year-old marriage.

“‘[He] used me and our daughter . . . to run cover for his undercover operations . . . I never felt safe, never knew who people were or why they were interested in us or why they were photographing us,’ wrote the woman, who is in her 30s, in December. ‘As a result of [his] different assignments I never had a good support network of people I could trust or rely on to help out.’ And, she claimed, her spy-husband had little interest in household chores. ‘[He] never so much as washed or folded a load of laundry, swept or mopped one floor, or changed one dirty diaper.'”

Source: Washington Post
Published: Mar 13, 2012
Length: 8 minutes (2,163 words)

For Tablet Computer Visionary Roger Fidler, a Lot of What-Ifs

Roger Fidler was a head of innovation for Knight-Ridder who convinced his company to let him set up a lab in the early 1990s to explore the creation of tablet computers. They were next door to a lab owned by Apple:

“Fidler smiles through a scruffy gray Jobsian beard. He has known the answer for a long time. In 1994, while running a lab dreaming up the future of newspapers, Fidler starred in his own video demonstrating a prototype he cooked up that was remarkably like the iPad — black, thin, rectangular, with text and video displayed on-screen.

“A narrator described technology that at the time sounded like science fiction: ‘Tablets will be a whole new class of computer. They’ll weigh under two pounds. They’ll be totally portable. They’ll have a clarity of screen display comparable to ink on paper. They’ll be able to blend text, video, audio and graphics together. . . . We may still use computers to create information but will use the tablet to interact with information — reading, watching, listening.'”

Source: Washington Post
Published: Mar 9, 2012
Length: 11 minutes (2,926 words)

David Sharrett’s Family Still Wants Justice for Friendly Fire Death in Iraq

A family discovers new details about their son’s death in Iraq, and wonders why the U.S. lieutenant responsible was not punished:

“A year after Dave Sharrett II died, his parents, Vicki and Dave Sr., were nearly at peace. They had come to accept the Army’s explanation of how it all happened in the ‘fog of war.’ They were confident in the Army’s promises of transparency and accountability for the lieutenant who fired the fatal shot.

“Then came the third knock on the door.

“After a memorial service for their son at Fort Campbell, Ky., in February 2009, soldiers who fought alongside him paid a surprise visit to the Sharretts. In a cramped room at the Holiday Inn Express, the soldiers used words such as ‘cover-up’ and ‘lies.’ They brought video recordings shot from aircraft high above the chaos that showed how Dave Sharrett II and two other American soldiers were killed.”

Source: Washington Post
Published: Feb 27, 2012
Length: 21 minutes (5,308 words)

What Makes a Perfect Spy Tick?

The evolution of how we recruit and train spies—starting with the OSS in the 1940s—and our changing expectations of what the job entails and what motivates those who sign up:

“I remember him saying something like: ‘This is the only thing in the Army that you can volunteer for and then get out of if you change your mind.’ That’s because we had signed up for something illegal, even immoral, according to some people, he said.

“It was called espionage. We were not going to be turned into spies, he explained, but ‘case officers’ — the people who recruit foreigners to be spies. Put another way, he went on, we were going to persuade foreigners to be traitors, to steal their countries’ secrets. We were going to learn how to lie, steal, cheat to accomplish our mission, he said — and betray people who trusted us, if need be. Anyone who objected, he concluded, could walk out right now.

“He looked around. One man got up and left. The rest of us, a little anxious, stayed put.”

Author: Jeff Stein
Source: Washington Post
Published: Feb 9, 2012
Length: 12 minutes (3,249 words)

The New Public Face of American Assisted Suicide

Lawrence Egbert, a retired anesthesiologist from Baltimore, has been present for 100 suicides in the last 15 years. But he is more reluctant in his leading role, in contrast to the late Jack Kevorkian:

“I ask Egbert how much helium it takes to kill a person. ‘I don’t know,’ he says. He recommends buying 50-liter tanks. ‘I know we have two tanks, and we run them to zero. Until they stop hissing. … It’s better to have too much than too little.’

“I find myself staring at one of the hoods, turning it over and over, trying to comprehend how someone could spend the final moments of life with this thing over his head. I tell Egbert that the hoods make me feel uncomfortable.

“He responds in a reed-thin voice, with the manner of a country doctor: ‘I hope so.'”

Source: Washington Post
Published: Jan 20, 2012
Length: 23 minutes (5,871 words)

A Family Learns the True Meaning of ‘in Sickness and in Health’

The story of a woman, the husband she vowed to care for, and how their relationship changed after his severe brain injury:

“On a Saturday morning in the spring of 2010, Page had arranged for Robert to come home from Sunrise for breakfast. She had asked Robert’s brother Will to drive down from Annandale to be with them and sent the girls out for the morning with Allan Ivie, a friend from childhood who had come back into her life. She had consulted with Robert’s doctors and her minister. She cooked up some eggs. She was nervous as she sat down at the big oak table next to her husband of 16 years.

“Then she had a conversation with Robert she had never imagined she could have.”

Author: Susan Baer
Source: Washington Post
Published: Jan 5, 2012
Length: 22 minutes (5,584 words)

How a Letter on Hitler’s Stationery, Written to a Boy in Jersey, Reached the CIA

At CIA headquarters in Langley, one of the newest artifacts in the agency’s private museum is a message from a father to his 3-year-old son. The gold-embossed letterhead features a swastika and the name Adolf Hitler.

“Dear Dennis,” the seven-sentence letter begins. “The man who might have written on this card once controlled Europe — three short years ago when you were born. Today he is dead, his memory despised, his country in ruins.”

Source: Washington Post
Published: Oct 31, 2011
Length: 6 minutes (1,636 words)

Love for Wounded Soldier Upon Return from Afghanistan

Rebecca’s college roommate worried that Rebecca was mistaking empathy for romantic love and would find herself in a relationship that she could not end. “Who could break the heart of an Army officer who lost both his legs?” Sabrina recalled thinking.

Author: Greg Jaffe
Source: Washington Post
Published: Oct 8, 2011
Length: 16 minutes (4,148 words)

CIA Shifts Focus to Killing Targets

In the decade since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the agency has undergone a fundamental transformation. Although the CIA continues to gather intelligence and furnish analysis on a vast array of subjects, its focus and resources are increasingly centered on the cold counterterrorism objective of finding targets to capture or kill. The shift has been gradual enough that its magnitude can be difficult to grasp. Drone strikes that once seemed impossibly futuristic are so routine that they rarely attract public attention unless a high-ranking al-Qaeda figure is killed. #Sept11

Source: Washington Post
Published: Aug 30, 2011
Length: 9 minutes (2,413 words)