President George W. Bush has announced the nomination of Secretary of the Treasury Henry M. Paulson '68 for six different government positions: U.S. Governor of the International Monetary Fund, U.S. Governor of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development and U.S. Governor of the Inter-American Development Bank -- all three of which have five-year terms -- as well as for United States Governor of the African Development Fund, United States Governor of the Asian Development Fund and United States Governor of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. Paulson, who received his master's degree from Harvard Business School, served as the co-chairman, co-executive officer, chairman and chief executive officer for the Goldman Sachs Group, Inc.
The Dartmouth Medical School's Psychiatric Research Center would lose all of its $650,000 in state funding under a newly proposed plan from New Hampshire Health and Human Services Commissioner John Stephen. Stephen proposed cutting state health care expenditures and trimming support for programs in an effort to reduce a $26 million budget deficit. Stephen called for reduced payments to doctors, nursing home owners, psychiatric researchers and community mental health administrators, and decreased funding for wheelchairs, testing for diabetes patients and domestic violence programs. Stephen said the cuts would not come at the cost of reduced services for the poor, elderly or disabled.
"I will challenge anyone in here who says we are impacting direct services," Stephen said in an interview with the National Telegram. "We can do this."
Gov. John Lynch's budget director, Linda Hodgdon, expressed some concern over the proposed cuts, pointing out that Stephen proposed cutting $73,000 from community mental health centers even though he had previously acknowledged that they were underfunded.
A report from the Center for the Evaluative Clinical Sciences at Dartmouth Medical School showed that though medical costs varied across the nation, higher-cost health care and quality of health care are not necessarily linked. "The Care of Patients with Severe Chronic Illness: An Online Report on the Medicare Program by the Dartmouth Atlas Project" reports that increased numbers of physicians visits and cost do not enhance the quality of health care. Researchers used claim-based measures, including the number of physicians seen and the percent of deaths during a hospitalization involving one or more stays in an intensive care unit. The study drew on Medicare claims data from more than 4,300 hospitals involving 4.7 million Medicare enrollees who died from 2000 to 2003 and who had at least 1 of 12 chronic illnesses.
