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Airlines are improving the airport experience for VIPs and passengers willing to pay extra
• NEW YORK (AP) -- Cutting lines at airports used to be only for the rich, famous or very frequent fliers. But then airlines started granting fast-track access to anybody with the right credit card or who was willing to shell out a few extra dollars.
• Now, with the masses clogging up special security and boarding lanes, true VIPs are saying: Get me away from this chaos. And the airlines are listening.
• Just as they've made first class more enjoyable with new seats, tastier meals and bigger TVs, airlines are focusing on easing the misery of airports for their highest-paying customers and giving them a truly elite experience.
• At a growing number of airports, special agents will meet these celebrities, high-powered executives and wealthy vacationers at the curb and will privately escort them from check-in to security to boarding.
• American Airlines built a private check-in lobby in Los Angeles for VIPs who are greeted by name, given preprinted boarding passes and then whisked by elevator to the front of the security line.
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What health care overhaul? Tracking costs of Obama's health law in budget isn't easy
• WASHINGTON (AP) -- Next year is the year President Barack Obama's signature health care law goes into high gear, covering millions of uninsured Americans by a mix of private plans and government programs infused with tens of billions of dollars in taxpayer money.
• You'd think there'd be a chapter in the new 2014 budget that lays it all out. Wrong.
• Well, maybe a table? Wrong again.
• A box? Nope.
• It turns out that the costs of the Affordable Care Act -- Obamacare to its unyielding Republican foes-- are sprinkled here and there through hundreds of pages of budget books. It's partly due to the arcane ways of government budgeting. It may also be an effort to avoid giving foes more of a target.
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