Cost Control

On a recent winter night, while neighbors strung their Baldwin Park homes with Christmas lights, the Lams and their three children sat in front of a television set with rabbit ears sprouting out of the top. Wait a second -- rabbit ears? Is this 1950? No, it's almost 2010, and the Lams are a modern Los Angeles family that, like many in the region, are rediscovering the convenience -- and economics -- of the old-fashioned TV antenna. In the wake of the transition to digital television, Southland viewers are finding they can get nearly three times as many channels as they once could with an antenna.

Gov. Jerry Brown has a history of tangling with California's public universities, which pride themselves on their independence. As governor decades ago, he shook up the UC Regents with such unconventional board appointments as music mogul David Geffen, a local YMCA director and a Zen Buddhist porpoise expert. He said faculty pay should be reduced because professors derive "psychic income" from their job. Now he is challenging the UC and Cal State systems again -- minus the eccentricity.

President Clinton's health care advisers are preparing a list of reform options that include various forms of short-term cost controls, including a possible extension of Medicare rate regulations to the private sector, according to a report in today's Washington Post. The imposition of mandatory controls, a step not taken since the Richard M. Nixon Administration froze wages and prices in the early 1970s, is among a range of options cited in White House documents obtained by the Post.

For parents, the costs of youth sports can add up. There are fees for leagues and competitions, plus expenses for equipment, training and uniforms. How can you keep the spending under control? Mark Hyman, the author of "The Most Expensive Game in Town," has some advice: • Start an equipment exchange. Hyman has used this himself in youth leagues. "Families bring us their used, outgrown, no-longer-needed baseball pants, lacrosse sticks, soccer shoes, etcetera," he explained. "We then make them available to others at no charge.

The Health Care Finance Administration in Washington, responsible for administering both Medicare and Medicaid, is moving ahead with new strategies to try to get better control over Medicare expenditures for physicians. So it should. Part B Medicare premiums, covering medical care, will increase from $17.90 to $24.80 a month in January--the largest increase in the history of the program.

Winter has always meant fat paychecks for Juan Carlos Gonzales. That's the height of masa season at his local food processing job, where line workers can expect plenty of overtime preparing the rich, corn-based dough used in holiday tamales. No longer. Saddled with rising costs and slowing sales, Gonzales' employer, Industry-based El Burrito Mexican Food Products Inc., hired temporary employees to work the extra hours this season.

Once a darling of the health care reform movement, Southern California Edison is chucking its carefully assembled network of 7,000 doctors and 91 hospitals and starting over again in its crusade to control medical spending. On Jan. 1, the giant utility will abandon its 5-year-old HealthFlex system, in which Edison had directly recruited doctors, hospitals and pharmacists to care for its workers and their families.

In a continuing crackdown on entertainment expenses at the Los Angeles Harbor Department, City Controller Rick Tuttle said Thursday he has rejected "excessive" meal and travel charges and is questioning the legitimacy of thousands of dollars in hotel and refreshment bills. In a letter to Harbor Executive Director Ezunial Burts, Tuttle said that expenses for meals, limousines and liquor "violate the 'reasonable person' standard" he uses in weighing the legitimacy of expense claims.

As the Senate launched its long-awaited health care debate this week, Majority Leader George J. Mitchell (D-Me.) declared that the American health care system is mired in "a crisis of affordability and price." Yet, ironically, the issue of containing health care costs has receded into the background of the discussion, almost drowned out by the far louder argument over universal coverage.

The government overpaid as much as $1 million in bonuses to two Hubble Space Telescope contractors for their cost-control efforts on the device, whose flaws have become a major problem for NASA, a magazine reported Saturday. Congressional Quarterly reported in its Saturday edition that the overpayments occurred at the same time costs for the expensive telescope were rising dramatically. The original cost estimate for the Hubble was $678 million, but its final price tag was more than $1.

Consumers saved nearly $1.5 billion in 2011 as a result of rules in President Obama's healthcare law that limit what insurance companies can spend on expenses unrelated to medical care, including profit, a new analysis shows. Much of those savings -- an estimated $1.1 billion -- came in rebates to consumers required because insurers had exceeded the required limits. The study by the New York-based Commonwealth Fund also suggests that the Affordable Care Act forced insurers to become more efficient by limiting their administrative expenses, a key goal of the 2010 law. In some cases, insurers passed savings on to consumers in the form of lower premiums and higher spending on medical care, the researchers found.

THE VILLAGES, Fla. - Diving deeper into the Medicare fight, Republican vice presidential candidate Paul D. Ryan warned seniors Saturday that a key cost-control measure in President Obama's healthcare law would lead to rationing of their medical care. Ryan made the charge during a campaign speech at the largest retirement development in Florida, a state with the biggest proportion of seniors in the country and the most electoral votes of any 2012 battleground. The state is considered a must-win for Mitt Romney, and politicians in both parties say the Medicare debate could sway the outcome.

A tentative agreement to shorten the school year for Los Angeles students -- for the fourth consecutive year -- is almost certain to weaken academic gains, and was driven, critics said, by expediency more than the best interests of students. The deal reached last week between L.A. Unified and its teachers union calls for canceling up to five instructional days from the 2012-13 school year. It also could reduce teacher pay by the equivalent of 10 days overall, about a 5% salary cut. This would bring to 18 the number of school days cut over four years.

If California starts building a 130-mile segment of high-speed rail late this year as planned, it will enter into a risky race against a deadline set up under federal law. The bullet train track through the Central Valley would cost $6 billion and have to be completed by September 2017, or else potentially lose some of its federal funding. It would mean spending as much as $3.5 million every calendar day, holidays and weekends included -- the fastest rate of transportation construction known in U.S. history, according to industry and academic experts.

California's projected budget deficit has ballooned to $16 billion, much larger than the $9.2 billion estimated in January, Gov. Jerry Brown said, and he warned of more painful spending cuts. "We will have to go much further, and make cuts far greater, than I asked for at the beginning of the year," Brown said in a video posted Saturday on YouTube. He plans to detail his revised spending plan in the Capitol on Monday. It's a significant setback for Brown, who began his return engagement in Sacramento by promising to get the budget back under control.

President Obama embraced the idea of federal action to restrain the rapidly increasing cost of higher education, giving a boost to a long-simmering policy idea that has gained steam amid growing frustration with rising tuition. His proposal that colleges and universities cut costs or risk losing out on some federal aid was part of a larger package of ideas for college affordability unveiled by the president on Friday in a speech at the University of Michigan. Obama wants to increase funds for higher education, mostly through an expansion of federal loan programs.

It's 8:30 a.m. in Operating Room No. 1 and Dr. Alan Aker, peering through a microscope, delicately cuts a quarter-inch incision into the surface of Blanche Klein's right eye. He carves open the layer of cloudy material that has made Klein feel as if she's been squinting through a dirty milk bottle. Using an instrument that works like a tiny jackhammer, he pulverizes the cataract with hissing sound waves pulsing at 40,000 times a second as a hollow needle vacuums away the particles.

When Wal-Mart Stores Inc. demands a lower price for the shirts and shorts it sells by the millions, the consequences are felt in a remote Chinese industrial town, at a port in Bangladesh and here in Honduras, under the corrugated metal roof of the Cosmos clothing factory. Isabel Reyes, who has worked at the plant for 11 years, pushes fabric through her sewing machine 10 hours a day, struggling to meet the latest quota scrawled on a blackboard.

The state retirement system has slashed the benefits of scores of top-paid local government officials as part of a review of overly generous public pensions prompted by the Bell scandal. Although the California Public Employees Retirement System has cut the benefits of individuals in the past, this review is its largest systematic effort to examine and possibly adjust high-end pensions. So far, the state retirement board has reviewed 2,250 retirement payments and found that 329 needed to be reduced, mostly because employers incorrectly reported employees' pay. They include a former general manager at the Serrano Water District in Orange County whose pension was reduced because the salary it was based on -- $206,668 -- was too high.

For the first time, California's largest nonprofit health insurer has released the salaries of its 10 highest-paid executives in response to a new state law intended to keep healthcare insurance costs under control. The top earner at Blue Shield of California was Chief Executive Bruce Bodaken, who made $4.6 million last year — more than four times the salary of his counterpart at the state's largest for-profit insurer, Anthem Blue Cross. San Francisco-based Blue Shield revealed Bodaken's salary in documents filed with the state's insurance commissioner, who had demanded the information under the law that allows regulators to examine executive salaries and other criteria to determine whether insurance rate increases are "unreasonable.