A sick or injured person can obtain medical care in several different places. These include provider practices such as medical offices and clinics, hospitals and nursing homes.There are about 200,000 medical offices, clinics, and other provider practices in the United States. Earlier in the 20th century most physicians were single people working in their own offices or in partnership with another doctor. Patients visited the office, received an examination or other service, and paid a fee. This traditional fee-for-service medicine has been declining. Many physicians now practice in groups where they share the same offices and equipment with other doctors. Group practices may combine primary care physicians, several kinds of specialists, laboratories, and equipment for diagnosing disease. Physicians who practice in a group reduce their own expenses and provide patients with a wider range of services.Many doctors are joining with hospitals, insurance companies, and industrial employers to provide managed care for groups of patients. These plans manage to avoid unnecessary services and reduce costs. Rather than taking a fee from each patient, managed care physicians may receive an annual salary from a fixed sum for each patient.Patients who are too sick for care in a doctor’s office go to a hospital. Hospitals offer Patients 24-hour care from a staff of health professionals. They provide services not available elsewhere, such as major surgery, child birth, and intensive care for the critically ill. Hospital care is the most expensive form of health care. Efforts to control health care costs have emphasized reducing the number of patients admitted to hospitals and their length of stay. During the 1980s and 1990s, these efforts led to the closing of more than 600 hospitals.Patients who need long-term medical care because of advanced age or chronic illness may stay in a nursing home. The United States has about 23,000 nursing homes with about 1.3 million patients. In the sentence "Patients who need long, term medical care because of advanced age or chronic illness may stay in a nursing home. ", here "chronic" means()
A. long-term
B. short-term
C. lasting for a long time
D. constant
W: When I was getting divorced in 1975, reporters and cameramen were camped out for days in the lobby and on the sidewalk outside. They came from all over the country. Foreign reporters too. It was terrible. My neighbors could barely get in and out of the building. One reporter, who had been a friend of mine, got up to my apartment after persuading the doorman into believing that he was there on a personal visit. I wouldn’t let him in. He just wanted to talk, he said. I was certain that he had a camera and wanted a picture of me looking depressed. I just couldn’t believe this attempt to invade my privacy. TV is the worst. TV reporters present themselves as having the perfect right to be anywhere, to ask any question. It doesn’t matter how personal the matter may be.People don’t trust the press the way they used to. In most cases, stories are sensationalized in order to attract more public attention. Some papers print things that simply are not true. In many papers, if a correction has to be made, it’s usually buried among advertisements. I’ve received hundreds of letters from people asking me how do you know what’s true in the press these days. I find it difficult to respond sometimes. I tell them that there are good newspapers and serious, responsible and honest reporters. Don’t judge all of us by the standards of the bad ones. Unless the guys at the top—the editors and the news directors take firm action, pretty soon no one is going to believe anything they read in the papers or see on television news. According to the speaker, the press will lose readers unless the editors and the news directors().