Iceland for sale Iceland's wealth has long been a mystery. For centuries the volcanic, windswept island clung to the edge of Europe, scraping a hard living from the barren land and the cold seas.
By the start of the millennium, however, Iceland had become extraordinarily rich, with a living standard measured in 2007 by the United Nations Development Report as the world's highest. …
The wealth, however, was built not simply on hard work, initiative and valuable catches of cod. It was also built on a massive inflow of funds into the country's banks and highly leveraged raids on the riches of Western Europe. By the start of this year, Iceland's three banks had foreign liabilities of more than $ 100 billion - dwarfing the country's gross domestic product of $ 14 billion. Now, suddenly, everything may be gone, the economy wiped out with the same cataclysmic devastation that was regularly visited on the land by the eruptions and plagues of earlier centuries.
The mood in Reykjavik today is grim. There is no panic. But the prime minister has spoken dramatically of returning to Iceland's fishing and farming roots, rebuilding by simple hard work what may have been lost. … There is a palpable sense that a nation of such proudly independent people has betrayed its own heritage in becoming so dependent on the vagaries of international capital.
Iceland's crisis is not only a morality tale of global concern, given the number of foreign, especially British, investors; it also lays the country open to predators ready to seize this prize. Russia has offered to bail out Iceland to the tune of euro 4 billion. … If we are not careful, Iceland will signal the ominous start of a new round of mergers and acquisitions - not of companies, but of whole countries.
- The Times (London ) Not paying for'never events'Horror stories of instruments left in a patient's body after surgery or the wrong leg being amputated may sometimes be apocryphal, but there are enough instances of "never events"in hospitals - so called because they should never happen - that, as of Oct. 1, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS ) no longer pays hospitals for additional care resulting from "reasonably preventable"errors. The actual savings to Medicare will be about $ 21 million, enough to provide coverage for about 44. 8 million elderly and disabled Americans this year. That's a small fraction of the estimated $ 29 billion cost of medical errors, but it is already shifting the focus, both in hospitals and with insurance payers, to rewarding quality, rather than quantity, of care. … If a condition is not present when the patient is admitted, but is acquired during the hospital stay, Medicare will no longer pay the additional cost of the hospitalization, nor will the patient be responsible for the additional cost. … Neither patients nor taxpayers should have to pay for treating patients who have been injured by the hospital whose function it was to heal them.
- Houston Chronicle
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