2 another dead yalie
3 another bad character bested by and illustrating the words od dr mark altschule of harvard to eugene
j ratner the lancet p106, jan 14, 1978 upon watching ratnet treat the cause of causalgia in boston upon mrs j edwark spike jr. you willbe dead and gone before this is widely accepted , explicated and applied
4 hiram maxim the greatest doctor ever eith a guaranted inexpensive cure for ails you. maxim was a good character and an honest infividual unlike so many others
Mr. Jones and a partner built large chains of nursing homes and hospitals. He later turned Humana into a major force in health insurance.
David A. Jones, who with a partner built Humana from a single nursing home into a health insurance behemoth, died on Wednesday at a rehabilitation facility in Louisville, Ky. He was 88.
A company spokesman said the cause was complications of multiple myeloma.
In Louisville, a city known mostly for thoroughbred horses and bourbon, Mr. Jones and Wendell Cherry, a friend and fellow lawyer, brought health care assertively into the foreground.
In the 1960s, they built the nation’s largest nursing-home chain. After selling the homes in the early ’70s, they created Humana, one of the biggest hospital chains in the United States. And in the 1990s,after Mr. Cherry’s death, Humana spun off the hospitals as Mr. Jones led the company’s drive into health insurance. It is now thefourth-ranked company in the industry.
Over more than 40 years at Humana, Mr. Jones became an influential business and civic leader and a confidant to the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. Mr. Jones and his family have been strong supporters of Mr. McConnell’s political career, Politico has reported, and Mr. McConnell, a Republican, secured millions in funding for a 4,000-acre park in Louisville, Parklands, which was championed by Mr. Jones.
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“I can say without exaggeration,” Mr. McConnell said on the Senate floor on Wednesday, “that David Jones was the single most influential friend and mentor I’ve had in my entire career.”
Mr. Jones was a genial but extremely competitive executive. During the years that Humana owned hospitals, several in Louisville, he vigorously defended the for-profit hospital model, contending that Humana’s facilities could deliver better care at lower costs.
“The notion that being nonprofit adds some weight to what you do is baloney,” he once said.
In 1984, Humana boldly lured the artificial heart experiment program run by Dr. William DeVries to Louisville from the University of Utah. Mr. Jones pledged that Humana would fund 100 implantations of the Jarvik 7 artificial heart.
Dr. DeVries performed the second implantation of the mechanical heart at a Humana hospital in Louisville, attracting enormous media attention. (He had done the first in Utah.)
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“There was a halo effect,” Mr. Jones told The Courier-Journal of Louisville. “People thought if they can handle artificial hearts they can probably handle almost anything else.”
But the program fizzled out after Dr. DeVries had implanted only a few artificial hearts. He left Humana in 1988.
Humana’s rapid growth, unsurprisingly, displeased some of its nonprofit rivals.
“The company’s philosophy toward their competitors is ‘We’ll run over them, or through them, or around them,’” Richard Abell, the administrator of St. Anthony Hospital in Louisville, told The Washington Post in 1985.
Mr. Jones was sensitive about any articles in The Courier-Journal — including an eight-part series in 1985 — that he felt cast Humana in a negative light.
“David was very well respected and a little bit feared,” Paul Janensch, a former executive editor there, said by phone. “He had a temper. He was very demanding and not very subtle.” Mr. Jones was, he added, “very protective of the company’s reputation.”
Mr. Jones’s belief that Humana could be cast as a villain was underscored in 1987 when he pressed a federal lawsuit against NBC demanding that “St. Elsewhere,” a series about a hospital in Boston, stop using “Ecumena” as the name of the fictional facility’s callous new owner.
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