business

Mayo Clinic AZ Ceases to Treat Medicare Patients

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Mayo Clinic in Arizona to Stop Treating Some Medicare Patients – Bloomberg.com

The Mayo organization had 3,700 staff physicians and scientists and treated 526,000 patients in 2008. It lost $840 million last year on Medicare, the government’s health program for the disabled and those 65 and older, Mayo spokeswoman Lynn Closway said.

This is not political commentary.  No one should be expected to run a business at a loss.

Facts are facts.

May Be Ugly

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Average Income in the United States Will Continue to Drop in 2009

Median household income in the United States has been in a freefall over the past few years due to the “Great Recession”. In inflation adjusted dollars, the last time that the median household income in the United States was $50,303 or lower was 1997. This is a staggering drop that has completely erased all of the gains made in the beginning and middle stages of the decade.

2009 should be even worse, as many are expecting that median household income in the United States could drop as much as 5%. This would leave us with a median household income number of about $47,800. This would be the lowest such number, in inflation adjusted dollars, since 1995.

A New Paradigm for Education

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Reining in College Costs – BusinessWeek

In the “learning” paradigm, the teacher is not the expert provider of knowledge, but rather a guide who first specifies what students are expected to learn and then lays out pathways they can follow to meet the learning goals. The teacher becomes a supporter, a collaborator, and a coach for students as they learn to evaluate and gather information, test ideas, and explore their application to different issues and problems. Students begin to learn how to develop and pose their own questions and to explore alternative ways of finding and framing answers. So instead of working only to master the subject matter of a course, students are developing the skills to learn on their own. They no longer wait to be taught—they come to realize that, if they are to succeed, they must take a good deal of responsibility for their own learning.

Read this article written by Michael Bassis,  President of Westminster College in Salt Lake City, Utah.  We need to rethink corporate training methods if you agree with Mr. Bassis’ paradigm shift assessment.