What have been the biggest stories in business/financial news over the last year? Quite synchronistic of you to ask: I was just about to address the point. Breaking the answers down by month as usual, is tricky this year, since one of the big stories -- involving Elon Musk and Twitter, seemed to pop up in headlines in every month from April onward. I've crammed all the twists and turns of that saga into the single April entry. There are two other key things to know about this list before you dig in. First, it is a very U.S. centric list. More so than the earlier items in this series. Second, the war in Ukraine has left a big mark on it. Indeed, every item on the list that follows is either US based or Ukraine War related. There are s even of the former and five of the latter. This selectivity is of course absurd. There was lots of rest-of-the-world finance news that had little to do with the Ukraine war. In the United Kingdom, for example, Liz Truss had ...
Posts
In August 2012, the state house in Massachusetts passed its Health Care Cost Control and Payment Reform, something of a patchwork fix-up of the problems that had arisen under Romney's system. The bill, at heart, created a measure for health care cost containment, Between 2013 and 2017, it was to be the policy of Massachusetts that the health care industry should not grow any more quickly than the state's economy, as measured by the increase in the GSP over the same period. Between 2018 and 2022, the official goal was to be that the health care industry's expansion should be below that of the gross state product. How was this to be achieved? In large part by paperwork. The bill provided that every health care provider group that operated in the state must register and regularly report on financial performance, market share, cost trends, and quality measure. The legislation also established a special commission to track price variations. I wrote a brief story on all...