Copyright 1995 Daily News, L.P.
Daily News (New York)
May 10, 1995, Wednesday
SECTION: News Pg. 10
LENGTH: 338 words
HEADLINE: U.S. WORLD/REPORT
BODY:
WASHINGTON Medicare will run as much as $ 165 billion short of what it needs to pay hospital bills over the next decade, the head of the Senate Finance Committee said yesterday.
Sen. Bob Packwood (R-Ore.) said the only ways to avert the shortfall are to raise taxes, which nobody proposes doing, or to "slow the growth of Medicare from its current 10 per cent-plus to something more like 7%" a year.
But Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala told Packwood, "We cannot destroy Medicare in order to save it." BOSTON The deadly Unabomber sent letters to two Nobel Prize winning scientists, warning them to give up their work in genetics and computers as he was preparing to strike again.
The FBI said Richard Roberts, who is head of research for New England Biolabs in Beverly, Mass., received one of four letters apparently sent by the Unabomber April 20.
The Boston Herald quoted unnamed sources as saying that another letter was sent to Phillip Sharp, 51, head of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's biology department. WASHINGTON The Senate approved a proposal to reshape the nation's product-liability laws yesterday, but backed off from an earlier version that would have limited punitive damages in all lawsuits.
The new proposal would limit punitive damage awards by juries hearing product-liability cases but would let judges override those limits in many instances. PUERTO CABANAS, Cuba A Coast Guard cutter returned 13 Cuban refugees to their homeland yesterday, the first group of rafters to be repatriated under a new U.S. policy bitterly denounced by Cuban-Americans.
The Cubans, all men ages 28 to 45, had been picked up from two wooden boats by a passing cruise ship last week.
The Clinton administration announced last week that rafters would be returned to the island instead of routinely granted political asylum. WASHINGTON The Senate voted yesterday to install John Deutch as the new CIA director. Deutch, a chemist, is to be sworn in as the 17th director of the CIA today.