September 27, 2013.

Hospitals Give Health Law Real-World Test

He walked on. The bomb had demolished a group of houses 200 metres up the street. A black plume of smoke hung in the sky, and below it a cloud of plaster dust in which a crowd was already forming around the ruins. There was a little pile of plaster lying on the pavement ahead of him, and in the middle of it he could see a bright red streak. When he got up to it he saw that it was a human hand severed at the wrist. Apart from the bloody stump, the hand was so completely whitened as to resemble a plaster cast.

NEW YORK----Dale Johnson is Exhibit A for people who believe that the new federal health-care law has embedded in it the secret to better care for less money.

He kicked the thing into the gutter, and then, to avoid the crowd, turned down a side-street to the right. Within three or four minutes he was out of the area which the bomb had affected, and the sordid swarming life of the streets was going on as though nothing had happened. It was nearly twenty hours, and the drinking-shops which the proles frequented ("pubs," they called them) were choked with customers. From their grimy swing doors, endlessly opening and shutting, there came forth a smell of urine, sawdust, and sour beer. In an angle formed by a projecting house front three men were standing very close together, the middle one of them holding a folded-up newspaper which the other two were studying over his shoulder. Even before he was near enough to make out the expression on their faces, Winston could see absorption in every line of their bodies. It was obviously some serious piece of news that they were reading. He was a few paces away from them when suddenly the group broke up and two of the men were in violent altercation. For a moment they seemed almost on the point of blows.

Suffering from congestive heart failure, coronary-artery disease and diabetes, the 58-year-old former teacher was hospitalized five times last year at Mount Sinai Medical Center here and visited its emergency room 12 times. Cost to Medicare: $43,849.

"Can't you bleeding well listen to what I say? I tell you no number ending in seven ain't won for over fourteen months!"

This year----with the help of a team of doctors, nurses and social workers----Mrs. Johnson shows up for appointments, takes her medications and is managing her chronic conditions. She has been hospitalized only once and ran up only $6,796 in Medicare costs through late August.