Surprise? A Kelley Blue Book for Hospital Bills | Ice Cream Behind Bars

New Delhi is stepping up arrests of Kashmiri clerics and monitoring their mosques, sparking concerns of a religious crackdown, and not just a political one.

It was a dark Eid for 11-year-old Saeed Mutaiba this August. When she returned home from a brief vacation at her grandfather’s house, she discovered police taking away her father, Mohammed Ameen, a prayer leader at Jamia Masjid in Awantipora, an hour’s drive from Srinagar, the capital of the strife-torn region of Jammu and Kashmir. She, her mother and her 6-year-old brother have repeatedly visited the police station to appeal for his release — in vain.

“He looked tired. I felt helpless that I couldn’t do anything for him,” says the young girl.

A secular democracy, India has long tried to avoid emphasizing the religious undertones to the conflict in Kashmir, blaming it instead solely on Pakistan-backed militancy there. But in recent months, police have stepped up arrests of Islamic clerics and prayer leaders and clamped down on mosques in what was the country’s only Muslim-majority state. That has coincided with the Indian government’s move on Aug. 5 to strip off the constitutional provisions of autonomy Kashmir enjoyed while placing the region under lockdown. Though there is no official number of arrests, the government’s approach — which it argues is necessary for the region’s security — threatens India’s credibility, say analysts.

Marty Makary has worked with both the Trump and Obama administrations on health policy without a partisan shouting match.

Wanda Brooks works at an assisted living facility in Fredericksburg, Virginia. She saw a doctor at Mary Washington Hospital after a series of headaches and received an MRI and CT scan, both of which came back normal. Months later, she was slammed with a bill for $8,000. She couldn’t pay it, so the hospital sued her and garnished a portion of her $25,000 annual salary — making her one of 24,200 patients it has sued. Stories like Brooks’ caught the attention of Dr. Marty Makary, who outlines his plan to reinvent the American health care system from the inside out in his recently published book, The Price We Pay.

Whether you want to rip the Affordable Care Act out by its roots or ban private health insurance in favor of a single government-run system, you probably see the need to fix surprise medical bills. That’s the health policy space in which Makary operates. He has consulted for both the Obama and Trump administrations with the same message of how to improve health care for consumers: transparency.

The battle over ice cream behind bars has been raging in the U.S. for at least a century.

In 1915, H.O. Fishback, a county commissioner for Washington state, refused to pay $1.75 to provide ice cream to inmates at the county jail. “Ice cream is a little too good for prisoners,” he said, suggesting that if they needed a treat, pies should be provided instead. “And thus another question in the prison reform movement is introduced,” reported the Ice Cream Trade Journal.

For as long as there have been prisons, the amenities offered to inmates have varied greatly. In general, the more rehabilitative-minded the place, the better the food. In 1871, Col. Lawrence Shuler fed inmates at Indiana State Prison a diet of turkey, ice cream, oysters and cake at a cost of 14 cents per inmate per day. Not only was this far cheaper than most prison food at the time, but the prison’s inmates were considered some of the most cheerful and productive in America.