Read the passages, match them and the headlines.

Headlines:

1. Pharmacist Works in Two Worlds.

2. The Right to Cheaper Medicine.

3. Hospitals Still Suffering From Medicare Cuts.

4. Growing Pains. Hospitals Seeking to Expand Face Wary Lenders, Ris­ing Rates.

5. How to Love Your HMO.

6. Baby Boomer Cancer Rates Increase.

7. Why Can't a Taxpayer Afford a New Wonderful Drug?

A. Despite legislation passed in 1999 to restore a portion of the Medi­care reductions imposed by the 1997 Balanced Budget Act, hospitals are still in perilous financial condition according to a new report.

While the 1997 law did shore up Medicare's finances, "it may have erod­ed the foundation of the health care delivery system," said John Morrow, senior vice president of HCIA-Sachs, which did the study of 1999 hospital margins along with Ernst & Young.

B. With patients pouring in the doors and revenue plummeting, hospi­tals and community health centers hoping to borrow enough money to build new facilities or buy the latest technology are facing other obstacles: scared lenders and sharply rising interest rates.

Hospitals and health centers have borrowed $163 million so far in this fiscal year ending in June, a dramatic drop-off from the $1 billion in debt they took on last year, according to the Massachusetts Health & Educa­tional Facilities Authority.

C. Managed care companies work hard to be despised, and they're suc­ceeding. They've offended the public, lost its trust, and recently landed themselves in the Supreme Court. In February, the justices heard the case of Cindy Herdrich, who went to her HMO complaining of abdominal pain. The examining physician found hints of an inflamed appendix. Yet, in­stead of sending Herdrich for an immediate, full-price ultrasound at the local hospital, the doctor told her to wait eight days until an appointment became available at an ultrasound facility that offered the HMO a discount. During the wait Herdrich's appendix ruptured, threatening her life. She's already sued the doctor for negligence and won.

D. Many people assumed managed care would stunt the development of more effective or more humane treatments by driving all medical services to­ward whatever is cheapest. That has not happened; expensive procedures con­tinue to proliferate. Two decades ago, for example, artificial joints were a rar­ity; now almost all insurers pay for hip-replacement surgery. Heart bypass surgery is much more frequent than it was a decade ago – extending life, with vigor, even for those who have the operation in their seventies. Traumatic in­vasive procedures have been replaced by laparoscopic surgeries, done routinely on an outpatient basis with short recovery times. Not that long ago, a middle-aged adult experiencing chronic knee pain would have been informed that joints begin to ache with age, given ibuprofen, and told to live with it. Today, any­thing from laparoscopic surgery to an artificial knee is likely to be approved by almost any managed care plan, with the result that the pain is removed.

E. For the last 20 years, the federal government has failed to exercise its right to get price breaks for US agencies purchasing prescription drugs that benefited from public research money. It has dropped the ball on this for two reasons: It gets bulk discounts anyway for drugs purchased by the Vet­erans Administration and other agencies; and it has never bothered to track the trail of research money to a final drug product. As for the drug indus­try, its attitude has been that the public gets its reward when taxpayer-fi­nanced research helps bring a wonderful new medicine to pharmacy shelves.

But what if taxpayers, who have subsidized the highly profitable phar­maceutical industry all these years, cannot afford that wonderful new drug?

F. Some people look for health cures in the alternative world, trying herbs and crystals to find a balance and help the body heal itself.

Other folks look to the world of conventional allopathic medicine, in which doctors prescribe medicines that fight against the illness, stopping the symptoms.

Michael Vacovsky works in both worlds, and wants to help people find the best way to get healed.

G. CHICAGO – White men born during the middle of the baby boom are three times as likely to get cancers unrelated to smoking as their grand­fathers were, a study says.

And white women born during the same years – 1948 through 1957 – are 30 percent more likely to develop cancers unrelated to smoking than were their grandmothers, the researches reported in Wednesday's issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association.

During a 15-year period ending in 1987, death rates from heart disease dropped 42 percent in people up to age 55 and 33 percent among 55- to 84-year-olds, the study found.