Word: problem
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Obama laughed. He knew better than anyone else that it would take some mighty brainpower--and luck and political genius--to get this next stage right. Orszag had been working the problem for months, leading a four-hour meeting on his birthday, Dec. 16, in Chicago, at which Obama showed up with a vanilla cake. Orszag, Summers, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and Orszag's deputy Robert Nabors agreed that there was no avoiding a deficit this year of about $1.5 trillion, including the bank bailout and the stimulus bill. They were prepared to swim even deeper into the red next...
...everyone knows that while eliminating earmarks and cutting fat sounds good and plays well, it cannot alone address the deficit problem when discretionary spending amounts to less than 40% of the total budget. The only chance Obama will have to build confidence in the economy, even as he digs a deeper deficit hole in the next two years, is to convince Americans and the world that he's laying the foundation for long-term budget control through entitlement reform and, in particular, curbing the cost of health care. Total U.S. health-care spending in 2007 rose to $2.2 trillion...
...Characteristically, the Propeller-Heads think they can tackle this problem in part through better data processing. First, a massive investment in health-information technology will track how America's health-care dollars are being spent. Next, a $1.1 billion government study, funded as part of the stimulus package, will take that information and figure out which treatments get the best outcomes for the least money. Which makes more sense for a clavicle fracture: a simple sling and waiting six weeks or surgical repair with a stainless-steel plate? The final step could be to create a federal health-care board...
...next-next generation of digital downloads, that will take a while - maybe quite a while. Bandwidth is still a problem; visual quality lags behind that of standard DVDs. What Blu-ray offers could be matched or exceeded by the Internet within a decade, but we believe tech maven David Carnoy, who writes on the authoritative website CNET, "Digital downloads will not eliminate the need for discs anytime soon...
...goes up. Perhaps most alarming, repeat C-sections increase a woman's chances of developing life-threatening placental abnormalities that can cause hemorrhaging during childbirth. The rate of placenta accreta--in which the placenta attaches abnormally to the uterine wall--has increased thirtyfold in the past 30 years. "The problem is only beginning to mushroom," says ACOG's Zelop...