Lump

Tom Taylor learned a lesson about healthcare finances when he had both his knees replaced a couple of months apart at separate hospitals in Northern California. The tab at the first hospital was $95,000, but the second cost $55,000. The same doctor performed identical surgeries on both knees, and Taylor says he can't detect any differences between the two. "Nobody knows what it costs," said Taylor, 53, a former health insurance sales executive. "There is a complete lack of transparency in the healthcare system."

Ford Motor Co. will offer about 90,000 U.S. salaried retirees and former employees vested in its pension plan a lump-sum payment to buy them out of monthly benefits. Ford, which also reported lower first-quarter earnings Friday because of losses in Europe and Asia, said the plan was an innovative strategy to reduce its pension obligations. The automaker won't put up any operating cash but rather will make the one-time payments from existing pension plan assets. "We believe this is the first time a program of this type and magnitude has been done in an ongoing pension plan," said Bob Shanks, Ford's chief financial officer.

Lumpy sauces have been the bane of cooks for centuries. Now they're bedeviling bureaucrats as well. Make that Euro-crats. As reported in the Times of London, there is a heated debate going on in Brussels over just how lumpy a sauce can be before it must be classified as a vegetable. The idea of European Union functionaries sitting around arguing about this may seem like something out of "Yes, Minister," but for food manufacturers, the potential consequences are enormous.

Jeffrey Stenroos, the former Los Angeles school police officer who staged his own shooting last year in a bizarre hoax that caused three schools to be locked down and forced the closure of streets across the western San Fernando Valley, will pay the city a lump sum of $309,000 in restitution, authorities said Monday. In exchange for the restitution, Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Richard Kirschner agreed to let Stenroos post bail from Los Angeles County jail pending the outcome of an appeal.

A little-noticed provision in the law implementing American participation in a world trade pact could significantly reduce the size of your pension nest egg. The provision, part of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, is intended to raise money to help offset losses in tariff revenues. According to Robert Pennington, an academic associate at the College for Financial Planning, a division of the nonprofit National Endowment for Financial Education, the provision could affect future retirees in one of two ways: Adjustments to the maximum amount that employees and employers can put into defined-contribution plans, such as 401(k)

This morning I read with surprise and alarm "Mammograms Endorsed as Top Tool in Detecting Breast Cancer" (May 16), reporting that the American Cancer Society now recommends that women do not need to do breast self-exams because a mammogram is the best diagnostic tool for detecting breast cancer. My own case was only one out of close to 200,000 diagnosed in 1998. I detected a lump three months after my mammogram was reported to be normal. Though breast self-exams may not improve survival rates overall, I am an example of one woman who has survived perhaps because I discovered the lump and got treatment early.

Good grief, I think Pauli Carnes took "The Bridges of Madison County" much too seriously. I think it was meant to be a rather light romance with "soapy" intent--a diversion from the seriousness of today's world. I enjoyed it from start to finish, and had a lump in my throat when the "hero" had only his dog for company for years and years while the "heroine" had her farm, children and husband. PAULINE N. COWLE, PACIFIC PALISADES

"Sisters in Arms" (Three on the Town, by Wanda Coleman, Feb. 6) puts a racial edge on a universal medical problem. Doctors, especially surgeons, are not sensitive enough to women. I found a lump. My general practitioner, a surgeon and a mammogram all said it was nothing. Six weeks later, I went back to the surgeon ready to fight. "I want you to either biopsy this lump or aspirate it, and do it now," I said. When he aspirated the lump, I saw a cloud pass across the eyes of the nurse, and the doctor scheduled a biopsy.

A California appeals court says Farmers Insurance Co. broke the law by failing to disclose a $5 service charge -- but the company won't have to pay back the more than $115 million it collected. The 4th District Court of Appeals in Santa Ana ruled that Farmers had violated a state code by failing to disclose the $5 it adds to monthly premiums to cover billing costs. The fee isn't charged to customers who pay the premium in a lump sum.

Sen. Inouye says the Keating Five were just trying to help their constituents. Sen. Dennis DeConcini (D-Ariz.) had a lump in his throat and tears in his eyes from this statement. That's not bad; what's bad is the people who lost all their money will have nothing but lumps this Christmas season. The tears were a nice touch. But if you want to shed a tear, shed them for the thousands who lost their life savings and for the citizens who will have to pay the tab. IRA J. HOEN, Culver City

Top officials at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum have shown a knack for banking healthy chunks of unused sick leave on the public payroll — in one case, about 35 years' worth. Interim General Manager John Sandbrook, a retired University of California administrator, used the sick leave allotment for most of his university career to boost his annual pension by $655 a month for life, to nearly $183,000, UC figures show. The increase represents 418 days — the quota for all but two of his roughly 37 years within the system, which allows 12 sick days a year.

Stacy Matulis doesn't see how one politician could represent everyone in the newly proposed 4th Los Angeles City Council District that stretches from the trendy neighborhoods northeast of downtown to the heart of the San Fernando Valley. She would know. The 33-year-old greets many of the baristas in her Silver Lake neighborhood by name, but she's also lived among the rows of strip malls in the Valley and teaches yoga to millionaires in their sprawling mansions in the Hollywood Hills.

U.S. theater owners aren't in a festive mood. They were counting on a slew of high-profile holiday films to end an erratic moviegoing year on a high note. After a strong rally at the box office this summer - when ticket sales soared to record levels - the U.S. exhibition industry looked as if it had reversed a slump earlier in the year. But those hopes have been dampened by unexpectedly weak ticket sales in recent weeks from sequels "Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked" and "Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows," as well as new films like the Aardman Animations holiday-themed "Arthur Christmas" and Martin Scorsese's critically acclaimed "Hugo.

It may be the holiday season, but the public mood is grumpy. Californians are dispirited, especially about the state's direction and their own pocketbooks as the inequality gap between haves and have-nots steadily widens. Consider the views of people surveyed by the Public Policy Institute of California and reported last week: — Two-thirds of voters believe the state is headed in the wrong direction. That's up 11 percentage points from February. — Despite signs of slow economic recovery in California, two-thirds of voters think the state is headed for bad times next year.

Reporting from Concord, N.C. -- The battle for the NASCAR Sprint Cup title is starting to take on the feelof a WWE Battle Royal. The question remains, who is going to be the last man standing? It probably won't be five-time defending champion Jimmie Johnson, who got tangled up with Ryan Newman in the closing laps of the Bank of America 500 at Charlotte Motor Speedway on Saturday night. Johnson spun and hit the wall, fortunate that a safety barrier and a HANS device cushioned the blow.

It takes a special skill to make a film feel as soft and light as a summer breeze, and yet that is what French director Jean Becker accomplishes with "My Afternoons With Margueritte," a glimpse into the everyday of two ordinary lives. This little gem is all about the nature of chance encounters and how they can change us in unexpected ways. The one on which this story hangs begins on a park bench in a small village in the French countryside. It is a place patina-ed by the years, as are the two main characters, a fragile bird-thin woman named Margueritte (Gisele Casadesus)

Re "For the State's Aged, Blind, Disabled, a Lump of Coal for Christmas," column, Dec. 22 Kudos to George Skelton for his eye-opening expose on what Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Legislature have done to aged, blind and disabled Californians while at the same time legislators were given a 12% pay hike of close to $12,000. Why are the most disadvantaged always the first to feel the budget ax? Is it a coincidence that our Scrooge Vice President Dick Cheney cast the tie-breaking vote for spending cuts aimed at student loans, Medicare and Medicaid (Dec.

I have recently heard (and read) many stories about how much more Social Security returns over and above what one contributes during his working years and how the excess ought to (at least) be subject to federal income tax. Most disturbing is the notion that if the foregoing is true, it constitutes a massive transfer of wealth from the working young to the retired elderly. I decided to ascertain once and for all my own status in this regard, and so I requested (and received) from the Social Security Administration a copy of my contribution records (1952 to present)

Look at the bright side: At least the Pac-12 still has Stanford and the Southeastern Conference has Vanderbilt. While America's power conferences worked politely, but carnivorously, behind the scenes to kill off competitors and reconfigure college football, their schools mostly sputtered and spit. The SEC won the ultimate showdown, with Louisiana State soundly defeating Oregon on a Dallas-area field that was supposed be a neutral but leaned more toward the Mississippi River than the Willamette.

Google Inc. can give websites a lot of traffic. It can also take it away. That's what Valerie Whitmore found out recently. Whitmore runs CDKitchen out of her Austin, Texas, home with husband Brent. She started the website as a hobby in 1995 and named it after her 100-pound Dalmatian, Chili Dog. With Google's help, the mom-and-pop shop grew into one of the most popular cooking sites on the Web. But traffic to CDKitchen, which features free recipes and cooking columns, plunged 39% on Feb. 24, knocking it "into the abyss," Whitmore said.