Peter Aspden:

Jay-Z’s new album and song lyrics show how our understanding of the Magna Carta has come a long way since barons imposed their will on King John in 1215

It was, as these things go, something of a flop. The Magna Carta was a document hammered out between King John and a group of feisty barons in the summer of 1215 that set out an agreement between them on the subjects of England’s taxation, feudal rights and justice.

It was the culmination of a sticky period for both parties, and must have been greeted with some eyebrow-raising on that evening’s edition of Newsnight. The most striking part of the charter allowed, for the first time, for the powers of the king to be limited by a written document. Observers hoped that it heralded a new era of collaboration between the monarch and his subjects.

But the dawn was false. The Magna Carta was valid for just 10 weeks.

The only reason the king had agreed to the terms of the charter was to play for time. He then appealed to Rome to declare the document null and void. By the end of the summer, a papal bull from Pope Innocent III granted him his wish. By the winter, England was embroiled in civil war. The following year John went on the offensive, celebrating a victory in the eastern counties with a feast of peaches and cider. They gave him dysentery. He died in October 1216.

Little of the drama and subterfuge of those politically febrile days can be detected in the small room of the British Library in which two of the four surviving copies of the first Magna Carta are kept. One of them is virtually illegible, having been damaged by fire in the 18th century. The other is a pretty tough read too, the text laid out austerely in a continuous flow of abbreviated Latin.

Peter Whoriskey and Dan Keating:

When Harinath Sheela was busiest at his gastroenterology clinic, it seemed he could bend the limits of time.
Twelve colonoscopies and four other procedures was a typical day for him, according to Florida records for 2012. If the American Medical Association’s assumptions about procedure times are correct, that much work would take about 26 hours. Sheela’s typical day was nine or 10.

“I have experience,” the Yale-trained, Orlando-based doctor said. “I’m not that slow; I’m not fast. I’m thorough.”

This seemingly miraculous proficiency, which yields good pay for doctors who perform colonoscopies, reveals one of the fundamental flaws in the pricing of U.S. health care, a Washington Post investigation has found.

Unknown to most, a single committee of the AMA, the chief lobbying group for physicians, meets confidentially every year to come up with values for most of the services a doctor performs.

Those values are required under federal law to be based on the time and intensity of the procedures. The values, in turn, determine what Medicare and most private insurers pay doctors.

But the AMA’s estimates of the time involved in many procedures are exaggerated, sometimes by as much as 100 percent, according to an analysis of doctors’ time, as well as interviews and reviews of medical journals.