Health Care, Health-care, or Healthcare?

Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary (2003) says that health care is two words when used as a noun.  It is hyphenated when used as an adjective (as in health-care providers). 

In U.S. English, hyphenating a multiple-word adjective is standard practice unless the dictionary rules otherwise. 

However, many U.S. writers, including corporate writers, have started using healthcare as one word.  For example, one of my early clients was the Metropolitan Chicago Healthcare Council.  Another (now functioning under another name) was called Healthcare Compare. 

U.S. dictionaries are compiled by lexicographers who survey how we write and speak in both public and private discourse.  As a result,  in the next edition (2013), Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary may well list healthcare.  To write the adjective healthcare now is, perhaps, to be ahead of your time. To write the phrase health-care providers is safe.

Business Writing and Proofreading

"Today, Hyatt Hotels & Resorts ® specialize in deluxe hotels with meeting facilities and special services for the business traveler, operates in hotels in major and secondary cities, airport locations, and leading resort areas throughout the world."

That "sentence" should make its writer blush.  But it is typical of the errors that creep into electronic text today.   Someone changes one part of a sentence and fails to reengineer the entire sentence correctly.  

In order to catch those errors before they tarnish the corporate image, firms are offering my workshops to their writers.  And we are nearly all writers because e-mail is the lifeblood of business. 

Grammar & Proofreading

or 

The Impeccable Page

taught by Rosemary Camilleri     CSeminar@uic.edu

The Noun Assumes; the Verb Explains

The following sentence puzzled me:

"The investment account should have been [cashed in] second, given a long-term tax rate versus the traditional income tax liability."

That sentence advises a retiree when to draw from her investment account.  But that advice gets an "explanation" that fails to explain.  The "given that..." phrase assumes that every reader instantly knows which is greater: "long-term tax rate" or "traditional income tax liability."    

If the noun "tax" became a verb, the new sentence would explain the writer's rationale:

The investment account should have been cashed in second, because the U.S. government taxes long-term investment gains at a lower rate than it taxes other income.