The LaTimes offers a great article that focuses on one county’s solution to focus on cost of care in the hospital emergency room. An excerpt:

Every month for four years, he’d been going to the emergency room at Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center to have his abdomen drained of fluid, the result of cirrhosis caused by years of heavy drinking.

It wasn’t exactly an emergency, but the ER was his only medical care. An illegal Mexican immigrant, Hernandez had learned that emergency rooms legally cannot turn away patients without examining and stabilizing them. He had stopped drinking, he said. But his job unloading big rigs paid little and offered no health insurance.

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When Dodd said he was planning a stealth campaign, he wasn’t kidding. Since last Friday’s rally, the weekend news and blog chatter has been all about everyone else. On the Democratic side, it didn’t help that Hillary Clinton announced she was in on Saturday. Or that Bill Richardson announced that he was in on Sunday. Or that Sam Brownback announced he was in on Saturday on the Republican side.

The wires and presidential election alert feeds were all buzzing about the rest of the field, dominated by news spin on either Clinton or Richardson. So much for the start power of Obama, Edwards and Giuliani.

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