‘The Bottom Line’

Re: “The Bottom Line,” Editorial, June 13, 2005. You characterized the $1.6 billion a year that New York hospitals spend providing services to the uninsured and underinsured as the “sticker price” of those services and said that the industry therefore exaggerates the cost of those services by about 60%. That is factually incorrect.

If you had contacted the New York State Department of Health, you would have been told that the $1.6 billion figure reflects the actual cost of the services delivered and not a marked-up price for the services. In addition, the $1.6 billion figure greatly understates the level of uncompensated care provided by New York hospitals because it does not include the net loss of more than $1 billion a year that the hospitals incur by providing outpatient services to Medicaid beneficiaries at a price that is well below cost.

KAREN S. HELLER
Executive Director
The Health Economics and Outcomes Research Institute
Greater New York Hospital Association
Manhattan

‘Islam’s Anschluss’

Mark Steyn’s “Islam’s Anschluss” brings to the forefront the hard-hitting reality [Opinion, July 11, 2005]. I am convinced that after London’s horrific bombings that there were many European “elites” who woke up with very uncomfortable burnings in their guts. This gnawing was not from usual gastric disturbances. Rather, they were forced to make the dreaded connection – that they too have become afflicted with the “Israeli” disease. They understood that just as Israelis/Jews get knots in their stomachs when they board a bus, send their children off to school, eat in cafes, and go about all the mundane tasks of life, they too will feel these same knots from now on, despite their loathing of the “Zionist Entity.”

ADINA KUTNICKI
Ridgewood, N.J.

‘Class-Size Myth’

In a letter to the editor [“The Class-Size Myth,” Charles H. Brunie, June 20, 2005] in support of your editorial position on class size [“The Class-Size Myth,” May 13, 2005], the writer states that, as he recalls, a Harvard professor, quoting another source, reported that “smaller class size, over the decades, improved academic achievement (only) one tenth of 1%.”

The president of the United Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten, along with some mayoral candidates, is a proponent of the opposite view [“Class Size Becomes Thorny Issue in Mayoral Campaign,” Julia Levy, New York, June 16, 2005].

Common sense and personal experience have taught me that too few students in a large classroom can create an uncomfortable sense of being in a vacuum, and discussion is inhibited. On the other hand, an overcrowded classroom provokes its own discomforts – an overworked teacher and anonymous students. There may be an approximate optimum size within the prescribed space, to which neither of the above opinions seem to allude. Previous to and beyond that point, diminishing returns, of an educational nature, seem to take effect. Also, opposing conclusions with regard to academic achievement due to class size may be rooted in the use of, intentionally or otherwise, different and even conflicting arrays of criteria. Oranges may be being compared with apples.

At a time when I taught classes in high school equivalency at a business college, I was quite surprised by how quickly a number of students displayed excellent comprehension of concepts mathematics and science, as well as reading skills. It was a moment of epiphany to realize that a disproportionate number them were students whose surnames began with letters that appear later in the alphabet; students in traditional high school settings had been seated accordingly.

When, as it often happened, that the room’s seating capacity had been exceeded, they were relegated to chairs without desks, or no seats at all, instead leaning against radiators at the side of the room or bookcases in the back. Coupled with poor classroom acoustics, they claimed to have, in time, been sufficiently discouraged to become high school dropouts. It does not take a great leap of faith to imagine that their classroom performance may not have shown up or been accurately gauged in the statistics that the “experts” relied upon arrive at their contradictory conclusions.

THEODORE FETTMAN
Bronx

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