Opponents’ arguments are inconsistent and lack proportion, says Avinash Persaud, former senior executive at JPMorgan and UBS, and an executive fellow at London Business School. The banking industry has launched a concerted and broad attack against the plans of 11 European countries to impose a financial transaction tax. Bankers are complaining that the tax will kill growth, rob pensioners, make the European debt crisis worse, impoverish small farmers and more. On examination, the arguments by opponents of the FTT have three defining features. First, they are inconsistent. We are told that the tax will be so completely avoided that no one will pay it. Then we are told that the tax will bring economic and financial ruin. It is hard to have it both ways.

Less coverage. Considerable maneuvering is underway, as companies seek to achieve the very minimum contributions to employee health plans under President Obama’s Affordable Care Act. “Benefit advisers and insurance brokers.... are pitching low-benefit plans across the country,” wrote the Wall Street Journal. “Some of the plans wouldn’t cover surgery, X-rays or prenatal care at all. Others will be paired with limited packages to cover additional services, for instance, $100 a day for a hospital visit.”

Registered nurses at Rideout Health Group will vote Tuesday on whether to approve a tentative agreement on a new four-year contract, the association representing the nurses said Friday. The agreement, if finalized, would provide some 400 registered nurses with a 9 percent across-the-board pay increase over the four years of the agreement with an additional 2 percent for longer term registered nurses.

The Department of Public Health has just issued its findings regarding the proposed plan by Cambridge Health Alliance to close its nationally recognized child psychiatric unit for the care of young children with acute mental illness (see the letter attached) The DPH finds that this unit provides an essential service that is “necessary for preserving access and health status in the Cambridge Hospital’s service area, which for the children and adolescents it serves extends throughout Eastern Massachusetts.”

WORCESTER - Thursday's nurses' strike at UMass Memorial Medical Center's University Campus was averted and a tentative three-year contract agreement was reached between hospital management and the union representing 1,100 nurses on Wednesday. The agreement was reached after 18 months of negotiations.