5. Medicare to Start Paying Doctors Who Coordinate Needs of Chronically Ill Patients

In his article, Robert Pear explains to readers how doctors will start to get paid for mending patients with chronic illnesses. In the past, these doctors were not paid. As a result of this, these doctors stopped caring for the patients as they should. Evidences of their carelessness were obvious since patients started to complain about their fragmented care. The reason behind these doctors not being paid were that they perfomed menial works on their patients- works that the government thought was not enough for payment. However, doctors who worked mostly on patients with chronic illnesses (which is about 70 percent of the H.M.O. private health plan) found it unfair for them to do their services with no fees. These doctors do not perform a menial job, rather play a huge roll in their patients' life. These patients need doctors who treat chronic illnesses for (almost) the rest of their lives. As a result of increasing complaints from both the doctors and the patients, the Obama administration has changed the policy in order to start paying these doctors.
Robert Pear writes his article in the third person, and informs his readers about the rising conflict with doctors and the Obama administration. (Thus, this is an informative article). He uses a chronological view of the conflict by starting off talking about the past. He uses the past tense to explain how doctors who coordinated the needs of chronically ill patients used to perform their works with no fees required. Then he changed to the present tense to explain how these doctors were performing their works poorly and that the patients complained to the Obama administration. Finally, he changed the verb tense to future to explain how the policy change will benefit the nation by having more doctors join in the health care of treating chronically ill patients. By using this past-to-present flow, the author is able to  easily and swiftly illustrate both the conflict and the resolution of the matter in hand.

(source: nytimes.com - I don't have the website because I used my phone!)