Monthly Archives: March 2015

Civ V Live (Polynesia) #22 – Emperor, Small, 6 Player, Standard, Large Islands – Video

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Civ V Live (Polynesia) #22 - Emperor, Small, 6 Player, Standard, Large Islands
Moia? Moai? Moeawea? Join me as I struggle to pronounce the most basic of Polynesian terms on my latest playthrough. Will my hotels be up to scratch? Will my package holidays sell? Or will...

By: Ursa Ryan

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Civ V Live (Polynesia) #22 - Emperor, Small, 6 Player, Standard, Large Islands - Video

Supreme Court’s Obamacare Decision: What’s At Stake? | NBC Nightly News – Video

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Supreme Court #39;s Obamacare Decision: What #39;s At Stake? | NBC Nightly News
The Justices #39; decision on Obamacare subsidies would affect millions of Americans who receive them to help pay for health care. Subscribe to NBC News: http://nbcnews.to/SubscribeToNBC ...

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Supreme Court's Obamacare Decision: What's At Stake? | NBC Nightly News - Video

Kingston hospital front-line staff take in international education thanks to BMO – Video

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Kingston hospital front-line staff take in international education thanks to BMO
Four deserving care providers from Kingston #39;s university hospitals are brushing up on world-leading techniques thanks to a special endowment fund established by BMO. Recipients of the first...

By: UHKFdn

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Kingston hospital front-line staff take in international education thanks to BMO - Video

Health care ministries rely on community to share costs

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Richard and Jaime Wilson didn't have health insurance when the second of their three children was born in 2011, so the couple had to come up with $13,000 in cash to cover the delivery.

But several months later, when the couple had moved to Pittsburgh from North Carolina, checks from people across the country started arriving in the mail.

Accompanying the checks, which eventually added up to $13,000, were letters and cards letting the Wilsons know they were in the donors' prayers.

It was no miracle, but religion and faith played a part.

The Wilsons, who are both 37 and live in McKees Rocks, belong to Samaritan Healthcare Ministries, a Peoria, Ill.-based Christian organization in which members agree to contribute toward each other's medical bills.

Health care sharing ministries are an organized way of passing the hat after church, said James Lansberry, executive vice president of Samaritan. With about 140,000 members, Samaritan is among the largest of such groups in the country.

Christian sharing ministries are experiencing a spike in membership as people look for alternatives to government-mandated health insurance under the federal Affordable Care Act, which was passed in 2010.

There are three national ministries that have about 425,000 members, said Joel Noble, vice president of the Alliance of Health Care Sharing Ministries, a Washington, Ill.-based advocacy group.

Small church-based ministries add another 25,000 members, bringing total membership this year to about 450,000, he said. That's more than double the 200,000 total ministry members in 2013.

Health law exemption

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Health care ministries rely on community to share costs

Utah lawmakers get premium state health care while debating what to give the poor

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Utah legislators, as part-time state workers, are eligible for a package of benefits that includes the health insurance offered to other state employees, including highway patrol officers, motor vehicles clerks and wildlife resource officers.

Under legislation tweaked several times over the years, retired lawmakers also are eligible for medical coverage, depending on when they retire and how many years they have served in the Legislature. Lawmakers who were elected before 2012 and have served 10 years or more can have 100 percent of their health insurance costs covered by taxpayers for life.

The House and Senate denied The Salt Lake Tribune's open-records requests for documents explaining members' insurance benefits and declined to say how many and which lawmakers participate.

The state's Public Employees Health Program declined to provide an exact number or the names of lawmakers who participate, citing the federal health care privacy act, HIPAA.

PEHP did say, however, that year in and year out, more than 90 percent of the 104 lawmakers take one of the insurance plans offered to state employees. And it provided information about the plans.

As soon as they take office, legislators qualify for the same three plans as other state employees, including all permanent full-timers and some part-timers who work at least 20 hours a week.

The plans are called Traditional, STAR and Utah Basic Plus, and each has two tiers distinguished by which network of doctors and hospitals the employee wants to use. STAR and the high-deductible Utah Basic Plus offer tiers that require no monthly premium payments from employees.

Of the state's 23,300 employees, 18,900 take one of the plans.

And whichever route lawmakers choose Healthy Utah, which would cover 89,000 Utahns; or Utah Cares, which proposes to expand coverage to half that number their own insurance is pretty deluxe, said Sen. Luz Escamilla, D-Salt Lake City.

"It is shameful for all of us who have the best health care coverage in the state, which is PEHP, to talk about people who do not have coverage and think that's OK," she said when the Senate was debating a Medicaid expansion bill.

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Utah lawmakers get premium state health care while debating what to give the poor

Be Wary of Websites Selling Genetic Cancer Tests: Study

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THURSDAY, March 5, 2015 (HealthDay News) -- Websites that offer personalized genetic cancer tests tend to overstate their supposed benefits and downplay their limitations, a new study says.

And many sites offer tests that have not been proven to be useful in guiding cancer treatment, according to the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute team that analyzed 55 such websites.

"We wanted to see if consumers are getting a balanced picture of benefits and limitations of these services," said study first author Dr. Stacy Gray in an institute news release. She is a medical oncologist and investigator at the Dana-Farber Center for Outcomes and Policy Research in Boston.

"We found a lot of variation. Some of the information is good, but all of it needs to be looked at critically by consumers and health care providers," she said.

In general, "the benefits of these personalized cancer products are reported much more frequently than are the limitations," Gray said.

The researchers also found that 88 percent of the websites offered one or more "nonstandard" tests that lacked evidence of having value in routine cancer care.

The study was published March 5 in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

Some sites marketed tests of a tumor's genetic characteristics, while others analyzed a patient's personal genome, or gene profile, looking for altered genes that might raise a healthy person's risk of developing cancer.

Claims and other information on websites are not regulated by agencies such as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration or the Federal Trade Commission, the researchers noted. Recently, the FDA said it intends to start regulating genetic testing more broadly.

Even if genetic testing websites become regulated, cancer specialists "will need to guide patients as they navigate decisions about personalized cancer medicine," the study authors wrote.

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Be Wary of Websites Selling Genetic Cancer Tests: Study