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  • Civil War at 150: Still Relevant, Still Divisive, Pew Reports

    As the 150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War approaches, most Americans say the war between the North and South is still relevant to American politics and public life today.

    More than half of Americans (56%) say the Civil War is still relevant, according to the latest national survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, conducted March 30 – April 3 among 1,507 adults. Nearly four-in-ten (39%) say the Civil War is important historically but has little current relevance.

    In a nation that has long endured deep racial divisions, the history of that era still elicits some strong reactions. Nearly half of the public (46%) says it is inappropriate for today’s public officials to praise the leaders of the Confederate states during the war; 36% say such statements are appropriate.

    Nonetheless, a majority (58%) say they have no particular reaction to the Confederate flag, the symbol of the South. Among those who have a reaction to the flag, more than three times as many say they have a negative reaction as a positive reaction (30% to 9%).

    There is no consensus among the public about the primary cause of the Civil War, but more (48%) say that the war was mainly about states’ rights than say it was mainly about slavery (38%). Another 9% volunteer that it was about both equally.

    Young people are more likely than older Americans to say that the war’s main cause was states’ rights – 60% of those younger than 30 express this view, the highest percentage of any age group. Those 65 and older are the only age group in which more say that slavery, rather than states’ rights, was the main cause of the Civil War (by 50% to 34%). While 48% of whites view states’ rights was the war’s main cause, so too do 39% of African Americans.

    Sense of Southern Identity


    On some, but not all, issues relating to the Civil War, the views of whites who identify as Southerners differ significantly from those who do not.

    About a quarter of all whites (24%) consider themselves Southerners; 75% do not.

    Nearly half of self-described Southern whites (49%) see states’ rights as the war’s main cause; among whites who do not consider themselves Southerners, a comparable percentage (48%) also says states’ rights was the war’s main cause. However, self-described Southern whites are more likely than other whites to view praise by politicians for Confederate leaders as appropriate and to have a positive reaction to displays of the Confederate flag.

    Less Positive View of Politicians Praising Confederates


    The public expresses a less positive view of politicians praising Confederate leaders than it did a decade ago. In a January 2001 Gallup survey, 50% said they thought it was appropriate for public officials to praise the leaders of the Confederate states in the Civil War; 40% said such praise was inappropriate.

    In the new survey, more think that politicians’ statements praising Confederate leaders are inappropriate rather than appropriate (by 49% to 36%).

    Whites who consider themselves Southerners are the only group in which substantially more view public officials’ praise for Confederate leaders as appropriate rather than inappropriate (52% to 32%). A plurality of all whites (49%) – and a clear majority of African Americans (60%) – say it is inappropriate for public officials to praise Confederate leaders.

  • Hospital Compare Website Offers Data about Hospital Acquired Conditions

    For the first time, Medicare patients can see how often hospitals report serious conditions that develop during an inpatient hospital stay that could possibly harm patients. This data  about the safety of care available in America’s hospitals has been added to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ (CMS) Hospital Compare website.

    These serious conditions, also known as hospital acquired conditions (or HACs), often result from improper procedures followed during inpatient care. The  data release shows the number of times a HAC occurred for Medicare fee-for-service patients between October 2008 and June 2010. The numbers are reported as number of HACs per 1,000 discharges, and are not adjusted for hospitals’ patient populations or case-mix.

    Independent data from the Institute of Medicine estimates that as many as 98,000 people die in hospitals each year from medical errors that could have been prevented through proper care. Although not every HAC represents a medical error, the HAC rates provide important clues about the state of patient safety in America’s hospitals. In particular, HACs show how often the following potentially life-threatening events take place:

    ·        Blood infections from a catheter placed in the hospital;

    ·        Urinary tract infections from a catheter placed in the hospital;

    ·        Falls, burns, electric shock, broken bones, and other injuries during a hospital stay;

    ·        Blood transfusions with incompatible blood;

    ·        Pressure ulcers (also known as bed sores) that develop after a patient enters hospital;

    ·        Injuries and complications from air or gas bubbles entering a blood vessel;

    ·        Objects left in patients after surgery (such as sponges or surgical instruments);

    ·        Poor control of blood sugar for patients with diabetes.

    In total, CMS reports HAC rates for 8 measures, which were selected because they incur high costs to the Medicare program or because they occur frequently during inpatient stays for Medicare patients. Furthermore, HACs usually result in higher reimbursement rates for hospitals when they occur as complications for an inpatient stay because they require more resources to care for the patient with the complication. Lastly, CMS considers HACs to be conditions that could have reasonably been prevented through the use of evidence-based guidelines for appropriate hospital inpatient care.

    Editor’s Note: We ran three different hospitals in the San Francisco Bay Area that we considered well-known for their care and, in some cases, where we had (or a family member had been) hospitalized.  The tables also gave us the relative mileages so we could also compare those statistics in choosing a hospital.

    CMS has gathered HAC rates from hospitals since 2007. Since 2008, Medicare has not provided additional reimbursement for cases in which one of the HACs was reported as having developed through the course of a patient’s hospital stay.

    Rates for the 8 HAC rates reported on Hospital Compare vary among hospitals.  The most common HAC reported was injury from a fall or some other type of trauma, which occurred just once for every 2,000 discharges. Over 70 percent of hospitals reported at least one fall or trauma during the reporting period.

  • Justice Elena Kagan’s First Dissent: Discriminating on the Basis of a Child’s Religion When Awarding Scholarships

    Kagan, J., dissentingJustice Elena Kagan

    Supreme Court of the United States

    Arizona Christian School Tuition Organization, Petitioner 09- 987 v. Kathleen M. Winn et al

    Gale Garriott, Director, Arizona Department of Revenue, Petitioner 09-991 v. Kathleen M. Winn et al

    On writs of Certiorari to the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit

    [April 4, 2011]

    Justice Kagan, with whom Justice Ginsburg, Justice Breyer, and Justice Sotomayor join, dissenting.

    Since its inception, the Arizona private-school-tuition tax credit has cost the State, by its own estimate, nearly $350 million in diverted tax revenue.  The Arizona taxpayers who instituted this suit (collectively, Plaintiffs) allege that the use of these funds to subsidize school tuition organizations (STOs) breaches the Establishment Clause’s promise of religious neutrality.  Many of these STOs, the Plaintiffs claim, discriminate on the basis of a child’s religion when awarding scholarships.

    For almost half a century, litigants like the Plaintiffs have obtained judicial review of claims that the government has used its taxing and spending power in violation of the Establishment Clause. Beginning in Flast v. Cohen, 392 US. 83 (1968), and continuing in case after case for over four decades, this Court and others have exercised jurisdiction to decide taxpayer-initiated challenges not materially different from this one.  Not every suit has succeeded on the merits, or should have.  But every taxpayer-plaintiff has had her day in court to contest the government’s financing of religious activity.

    Today, the Court breaks from this precedent by refusing to hear taxpayers’ claims that the government has unconstitutionally subsidized religion through its tax system. These litigants lack standing, the majority holds, because the funding of religion they challenge comes from a tax credit, rather than an appropriation.  A tax credit, the Court asserts, does not injure objecting taxpayers, because it “does not extract and spend [their] funds in service of an establishment.” Ante, at 15 (internal quotation marks and alterations omitted).

    This novel distinction in standing law between appropriations and tax expenditures has as little basis in principle as it has in our precedent.  Cash grants and targeted tax breaks are means of accomplishing the same government objective — to provide  financial support to select individuals or organizations.  Taxpayers who oppose state aid of religion have equal reason to protest whether that aid flows from the one form of subsidy or the other. Either way, the government has financed the religious activity.

    And so either way, taxpayers should be able to challenge  the subsidy. Still worse, the Court’s arbitrary distinction threatens to eliminate  all  occasions for a taxpayer to contest the government’s monetary support of religion.  Precisely because appropriations and tax breaks can achieve identical objectives, the government can easily substitute one for the other.  Today’s opinion thus enables the government to end-run Flast’s guarantee of access to the Judiciary. From now on, the government need follow just one simple rule — subsidize through the tax system — to preclude taxpayer  challenges to state funding of religion.

    And that result — the effective demise of taxpayer standing — will diminish the Establishment Clause’s force and meaning. Sometimes, no one other than taxpayers has suffered the injury necessary to challenge government sponsorship of religion. Today’s holding therefore will prevent federal courts from determining whether some subsidies to sectarian organizations comport with our Constitution’s guarantee of religious neutrality.  Because I believe these challenges warrant consideration on the merits, I respectfully dissent from the Court’s decision.

    Read the rest of the dissent at the Cornell site.

  • FactCheck Examines a Politician’s Statements About Abortion and Birthrates

    Santorum Wrong on Abortion, Birth Facts, States FactCheck.org

    Rick Santorum incorrectly stated that “one in three pregnancies end in abortion” in the United States. It’s actually fewer than one in four.

    Santorum appeared on a New Hampshire radio talk show, blaming abortions for “causing Social Security and Medicare to be underfunded.” But he not only misstated the abortion statistic, he also got it wrong when he said that “our birthrate is now below replacement rate for the first time in our history.” The total fertility rate, not the birthrate, is used to determine the stability of a nation’s population, and the US total fertility rate was below its replacement rate from 1972 to 2006. Finally, Santorum also misrepresented France as lagging far behind its replacement rate.

    The former senator from Pennsylvania, who is considering running for the Republican nomination for president, appeared March 29 on “The Advocates,” a radio talk show on WEZS-AM in Laconia, NH.

    (Click image to listen to Rick Santorum’s interview on WEZS-AM.)

    Santorum agreed with a caller who claimed “there would be no problem” funding Social Security if not for abortion.

    Caller, March 29: The real problem is — and nobody even suggests this, I haven’t heard it anyplace — is the 50 million abortions in this country a year. Say 25 million, half of them, were paying Social Security taxes and the Medicare, there would be no problem. Why hasn’t somebody said that?

    Santorum: … This caller is absolutely right. The reason Social Security is in big trouble is we don’t have enough workers to support the retirees. Well, a third of all the young people in America are not in America today because of abortion, because one in three pregnancies end in abortion.

    The caller was referring to the 50 million abortions in the United States since the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Roe v. Wade legalized abortion. He merely slipped when he said there were 50 million abortions “a year.” But Santorum was wrong when he said that a third of pregnancies end in abortion.

    In a March 2011 report, the nonpartisan Guttmacher Institute reported that there were 22.4 abortions for every 100 pregnancies in 2008, excluding miscarriages.  The 2008 data is the most recent available, according to Guttmacher spokeswoman Rebecca Wind. The institute’s chart goes back to 1973, and the abortion ratio never reached 33 per 100 pregnancies. Its peak was 30.4 in 1983.

    Guttmacher favors abortion rights, but the abortion statistics it gathers are the most detailed available and are widely cited by both sides in the debate. And regardless of whether the abortion ratio is 33 or 30 or 22 percent, Santorum cannot assume that those aborted fetuses reduced the US population by an equal number of people — which is what he suggests when linking abortions to Social Security’s financial problems. In an e-mail, Wind said that “most women obtain abortions to postpone childbearing not to prevent it altogether,” and noted that some of the aborted pregnancies “would have ended in miscarriage.”

    Wind, March 31: The group of women most likely to have an abortion are in their early 20s. They may already have one child and don’t want another at that time, or they may be childless but desire to have children in the future. Either way, the abortion postpones the birth of their child, it does not eliminate it — and there is no impact on the overall population. Some abortions actually terminate pregnancies that would have ended in miscarriage, so again you can’t assume that every abortion would have otherwise resulted in a live birth.

  • A Celebratory Lunch High in The Pyrenees

    by Jane ShortallThe Pyrenees

    International Women’s Day. Not only had I nothing special planned, but the day was not even marked in my diary, nor did it feature on any of my many ‘to do’ lists, as something to be celebrated.

    I not feel a need to plan anything special; in fact I didn’t really want anything, special or otherwise, in my diary. I always have too much to do, and all I desperately wanted was to stay at home and get back to some serious writing after what felt like a time of blackness, some kind of hideous block, when all my ideas seemed to dry up. It was as if my head had emptied itself of all useful thoughts. Any writing I had attempted seemed to me to be dull and tedious, lacking authenticity. It read mechanical, I felt mechanical.

    As well as getting back to putting words down, I had the idea of painting again; I longed to hold a brush or a palate knife. Also, I had a list of books I intended to read this year and I had already made a good start by buying them. Complete with endless notes lying about on every surface in my little office, I felt I would, any day soon, be ready to re-start creativity.

    How clever. In order to kick start creativity, I had done the absolute worst thing possible, by becoming far too much immersed, indeed obsessed, with my own life and my wish to be on my own, my need for an empty diary. When exactly, had I and my wants become so important?

    Then, out of the blue, a telephone call. From an enchanting and inviting, vibrantly decorated, converted barn high up in the hills, so high that the Pyrenees are practically in the garden, an extraordinary woman was inviting me to a lunch to celebrate Women’s Day. Nan Ping was born in China, appears to have travelled the world, and spent long periods of time living in various countries. Equally at home in California where she lived for years, or here in the high Pyrenees, she is truly a citizen of the world.

    There were seven nationalities at her lunch table, and a memorable occasion it was, one of the highlights the first quarter of the year for me. I renewed friendships with women I already knew and met others for the first time.

    The peculiar ease with which women meet and greet each other, settle in at a table to share and enjoy food together, is an elevating experience. The effortless swapping of views and life stories, the ability to encourage each other to continue with a chosen path, be it to write that novel or finally make the journey and trek off to India, has been one of the chief delights of my life.

  • Who’s That Girl? Georges Dambier: Fashioning the Fifties

    For we who remember the fashion of the fifties with fondness and nostalgia, George Dambier’s photographs on exhibit at the Bonni Benrubi Gallery in New York City recall not only the style but the beauty of the models of that time. The sisters, Dorian Leigh (Dorian Elizabeth Leigh Parker) and ‘Suzy’ (actually named Cecilia) became the faces of the time. Suzy went on to be an actress and her sister, Dorian, started her own modeling agency called the Fashion Bureau. The fashions of that decade were elegant and flattering; style that today is still valued from a vintage point of view. Dorian Leigh

    George Dambier was born in Paris in April 1925. In early 1942, with WWII raging, Dambier, at age 17, began assisting the famous artist and poster designer Paul Colin. Colin was responsible for introducing his budding young apprentice to the world of fashion, interiors, antiques and, most of all, to beautiful Parisian women.

    At the end of the war, Dambier secured his first job with a magazine, Presse, where he met and assisted the up-and-coming photographer Willy Rizzo. He quickly moved on from assisting and became a photographic reporter working on a range of stories for Le Tout-Paris. It was his natural skill with graphics and penchant for stylish women which led him to concentrate on fashion photography. Within a few years he was regularly photographing the beauties of the day: Dorian Leigh, Suzy Parker and Brigitte Bardot.
    Suzy Parker
    It was not long before Helene Lazareff, the famous editor of Elle, took notice of his work and offered him a position at Elle. This was a fantastic opportunity for Dambier which he happily took advantage of. It was while working with Elle that he became one of the first French photographers to take models out of the studio for their shoots. It is here, on the streets of Paris, that Dambier took some of his most memorable and engaging photographs. In May 1954 his friend Robert Capa suggested to George that they start up a Fashion Department at the famed photography agency,  Magnum. Unfortunately this never happened: several days later Capa died unexpectedly while working in Vietnam.Brigette Bardot

    Between 1960 and 1980, Dambier started and worked at two important publications that helped spread his fame. In 1964 he created the magazine, Twenty, which embodied a new publishing concept in the early 1960’s: presenting fashion and culture in a style to attract a younger generation of readers. The second magazine he worked on came about in 1980 when the popular news magazine, V.S.D., took an editorial turn towards the arts, and for
    the next ten years became the second most popular magazine in France, after Paris Match.

    Images from the Exhibit:

    1. Dorian Leigh, Normandy

    2. Suzy Parker, Elle’s Spring Collection, Paris

    3. Brigitte Bardot,  Paris

    Images from Georges Dambier’s website

  • As the Light Grows Stronger and Spring Is Upon Us

    by Kristin NordAudubon Gyrfalcon

    It is one of nature’s marvels to see thousands of birds, navigating by the stars and gravitational force, traversing the Atlantic flyway in the spring and south again in the fall. Yet it happens every year as the light grows stronger, and again, as the declining light draws them south to their winter habitats.

    Some 500 birds will be caught every spring in the mist nets that are mounted within the Birdcraft Sanctuary in Fairfield, CT; where trained volunteer banders, working under the auspices of the US Fish and Wildlife Service, will catch, bag, band, and release them after recording salient details. Starting in April after the snow melts, master bander Judy Richardson and her volunteers will be up and out on the grounds at dawn — removing the birds who are caught in the 15 nets stationed strategically throughout the property. They will process, and in most cases, release them in less than ten minutes. The handling of the birds is a craft in itself, for the birds often have wings, a head, or a foot caught in the mesh, and unless they are handled with skill they will die.

    Culling the information gathered, scientists can track how far birds travel, how long they live, and discover where they rest and spend the winter. Over time they can assess whether species are rising or falling.

    For the banders who participate in this bi-seasonal operation, these are weeks to see an extraordinary assortment of birds, from delicate and exquisitely marked songbirds — gray catbirds are most common in springtime while white-throated sparrows top the list in the fall — to the occasional misfit who has wound up in Fairfield terribly off-course. Some 120 species of birds have been recorded since the banding station was established in 1977.

    The Birdcraft operation is now a part of a national banding effort; though it’s remarkable to remember that it was from this diminutive 6-acre urban sanctuary that the plight of birds came to national attention nearly a century ago.

    Mabel Osgood Wright*, its creator, set out to thwart the wanton slaughter of birds for women’s hats, and to offer in contrast, at the “Song Bird Sanctuary, … an oasis in a desert of material things.” When Annie Burr Jennings, an heir to the Standard Oil fortune and Mabel’s friend, gave the project her imprimatur, the future of the sanctuary and the Birdcraft Museum was secured. Money was not spared to make the urban oasis, just “ten minute’s walk from trolley, village, and railway station,” and this gem of a place has set the standard for instruction and conservation for nearly 100 years.

    Mabel was a visionary —  “my idol,” Judy says. Today the institution is designated as a National Historic Landmark while continuing to serve as an important educational resource; as with the avian migrants, hundreds of schoolchildren flow through the grounds and the museum each year, studying the mounted specimens and learning how to become better stewards of nature.

  • Lifelong Pursuits: An Affair With A Creative Passion

    by Roberta McReynolds

    The assignment, as I remember it, was to write about a lifelong passion*.  That was at least two years ago. Quite simply, I didn’t feel like I had devoted enough continuous time and effort for any interest of mine to qualify as either ‘lifelong’ or a ‘passion’.

    Few things come to mind that have stuck with me through every stage of my life, but the process of creating art would have to top my short list, closely followed by writing. That order hasn’t always remained the same, by the way, regularly flip-flopping and often intertwined like the fingers of lovers holding hands.

    My first art ‘masterpieces’ date back to when I was about four years old, but I don’t remember them personally. How many times has it been said that beauty is in the eye of the beholder? My mother saved a watercolor of a clown face. I have no idea if that was what I was really intended to paint, or if that was just her interpretation of my finished portrait. My father preserved a drawing I’d done on a chalk board by photographing it before I erased it. I’m assuming the coil of curly hair perched on the top of the round head suggested a worthy attempt at a self-portrait.

    Finger-painting in kindergarten is something I do recall and I loved it. Pushing the thickened paint across the surface of slick paper was tactile heaven. If the public school system had allowed five-year-olds to pick a major field of study, that would have been it for me. My other clear memory that year was receiving a personal box of eight chunky crayons. I printed my name in clumsy block letters on the outside, claiming ownership, and guarded them possessively. Playing with the arrangement of the crayons, I discovered they looked ‘perfect’ if I laid them out in a precise order: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, brown, and black. This was so esthetically balanced to my eyes, but I worried the order might get mixed up as I used them and I’d never figure it out again. So I carefully lifted each crayon out of its assigned position, one at a time, and traced a line with the corresponding color on the inside bottom of the box. I now had a placement chart where each of my precious crayons belonged. (It would be an understatement to interject that I have been known for obsessive tendencies and a rather serious nature my entire life.)

    I decided I might actually be an artist (someday) by the time I entered third grade. The class had been studying birds and each week we were assigned a different bird to draw. The teacher instructed us to leave the finished drawings out on top of our school desks, then walk around the room and vote for the best one by slipping a one-inch square of construction paper under the drawing of choice. Two of my drawings were voted as top favorites and my inner child is still very proud of that recognition from peers.

    My interest in creative writing developed a little later. I always enjoyed reading and became intrigued with the notion of being the one actually doing the writing by the age of 12. I begged my parents for a typewriter for Christmas and imagined becoming a famous, well-paid screenwriter (of all things). The dream of being published was thrilling. Meanwhile, trying to imagine actually having a painting of mine hanging in an art gallery seemed more remote and too much to even hope for. Maybe I should have considered becoming an art critic, because I was certainly hard on myself.

    I painted a few canvases during my childhood and teenage years. My mother was a pretty decent artist and I inwardly believed I could never match her skills or earn her approval, so I tended to avoid it. But deep inside I desperately wanted to paint. I saw images in my head all the time that pleaded for me to allow them to flow onto paper. Most my attempts resulted in frustration and dismay. I saw things a certain way and couldn’t duplicate them with the accuracy of my mental images.

    The art classes I took in high school were basic. It was then I realized that my continued practice of arranging art supplies in the same color sequence as I had done in kindergarten matched what my first year art instructor was referring to as ‘The Color Wheel’. Since I saw this instinctively, I couldn’t understand why it, or color mixing, had to be taught at all. Over the next three years I ended up advancing to pottery and commercial art to learn something new, but never took any painting classes.

  • Life, Legend, Landscape: Victorian Drawings and Watercolours

    The Courtauld’s Virtual Gallery Tour

    Old Farm Garden

    Lost from view for many years and recently presented to London’s The Courtauld Gallery, The Old Farm Garden by Frederick Walker (1840-1875), sets the scene for a wide-ranging exploration of Victorian drawings and watercolours.  The exhibition will be the first devoted to this area of The Courtauld Gallery’s collection and reflects the growing appreciation for Victorian draughtsmanship. The show includes numerous previously unseen works and ranges from informal preparatory drawings for paintings, sculptures and stained glass to highly finished exhibition watercolours.  It includes life studies, landscapes, genre scenes and subjects from literature and legend.  The exhibition features works by most of the major artists of the age, from the redoubtable Royal Academicians of the early years of Victoria’s reign, such as J.M.W. Turner, William Etty and Edwin Landseer, to Pre-Raphaelites such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and works of the 1890s by Whistler and Aubrey Beardsley.

    Frederick Walker began his career as an illustrator but his growing success as an ambitious painter in oils and watercolours was cut  short by his early death, aged 35. Although he is now little-known outside a small circle of specialists, his work enjoyed a significant posthumous reputation, with artists as diverse as Vincent van Gogh and John Ruskin amongst his fervent admirers.  The Old Farm Garden of 1871 shows a woman, modelled by the artist’s sister Mary, knitting out of doors, with a cat about to spring on her ball of wool.  Tulips, flowering shrubs and beehives adorn the garden.  The influential critic John Ruskin described the flowers in this work as ‘worth all the Dutch flower pieces in the world’.  The exhibition also includes an earlier watercolour by Walker depicting boys playing piggyback in a village street, and it offers a rare opportunity to reconsider this outstanding artist.

    William Etty’s large watercolour of a female nude contrasted with a cast of the Venus de’ Medici opens the exhibition’s first section on the figure.  As well as serving as an artistic exercise, Etty’s image explores the real and the ideal in female beauty.  This theme is raised in a different context by Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s imposing Pre-Raphaelite portrait study for his celebrated painting Venus Verticordia.  Rossetti is said to have used a cook whom he had encountered on the street as the model for this sensuous idealised image of ‘Venus who turns hearts’.  A more intimate aspect of female portraiture is developed in the exhibition by Rossetti’s small  pencil sketch of Elizabeth Siddal, his wife and muse, seated at her easel; Whistler’s portrait of the young Elinor Leyland, daughter of one of his major patrons; and George Frederic Watt’s sensitive depiction of Emily Tennyson, wife of the great poet.

    The exhibition features a splendid selection of landscapes, produced both abroad and at home.  They include John Frederick Lewis’s watercolour of a Cairo silk bazaar, J.M.W. Turner’s late Swiss view of Brunnen on Lake Lucerne and The Quarries of Syracuse (Sicily) — Edward Lear’s final design for one of the few oil paintings he exhibited at the Royal Academy.  Lewis’s portrait of a man in North African dress, possibly the artist himself, underscores Victorian taste for travel and the exotic.  Also in this vein is David Wilkie’s Madame Giuseppina, a depiction of a celebrated Greek beauty who was  the landlady of an inn in Istanbul where Wilkie stayed  in 1840 on his last trip abroad.  By contrast, Samuel Palmer’s naturalistic watercolour of the Surrey countryside near Dorking responds to the beauty of the English landscape.  Views by Philip Wilson Steer and Whistler show the development of a more informal and Impressionistic approach to landscape painting around 1890.

  • Raising Medicare’s Eligibility Age to 67? Government Saves But Individuals, Employers & Medicaid Don’t

    Raising Medicare’s eligibility age from 65 to 67 in 2014 would generate an estimated $7.6 billion in net savings to the federal government, but also result in an estimated net increase of $5.6 billion in out-of-pocket costs for 65- and 66-year-olds, and $4.5 billion in employer retiree health-care costs, according to a new Kaiser Family Foundation projection of the potential change suggested by several deficit-reduction plans.

    The study also estimates that the change in Medicare eligibility would raise premiums by 3 percent for those who remain on Medicare and for those who obtain coverage through health reform’s new insurance exchanges. The study assumes both full implementation of the health reform law and the higher eligibility age in 2014 in order to estimate the full effect of both the law and the policy proposal.

    Among the estimated 5 million affected 65- and 66-year-olds, about three in four would pay an average of $2,400 more for their health care in 2014 than they would have paid if covered under Medicare, the study estimates.  Nearly one in four, however, are expected to have lower out-of-pocket spending, mainly due to the health reform law’s coverage expansions through Medicaid and the premium tax credits available to low- and moderate-income Americans.

    “Raising Medicare’s age of eligibility would obviously reduce Medicare spending, but would also shift costs onto seniors and employers, and increase costs elsewhere on the federal ledger,” said Kaiser Family Foundation Vice President Tricia Neuman, who leads the new Kaiser Project on Medicare’s Future.  “This analysis drives home the tough policy choices that lie ahead when Washington gets serious about reducing the federal deficit.” 

    Several major deficit-reduction and entitlement reform proposals include raising Medicare’s age of eligibility to 67 as a way of improving Medicare’s solvency.  The new Kaiser study is the first to estimate the expected effects on seniors’ out-of-pocket costs and other stakeholders in light of last year’s health reform law.  

    In the absence of the health reform law, raising Medicare’s age of eligibility would result in an increase in the uninsured, according to other studies, as many older Americans would have difficulty finding affordable coverage in the individual market in the absence of Medicare.