Health care Q&A: I can't afford a plan, will I be fined?

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Health care Q&A: I can't afford a plan, will I be fined?

By Calvin Woodward Associated Press Saturday, March 22, 2014 4:06 AM EDT

WASHINGTON The new health care law helps some people, hurts others and confuses almost everyone. Hoping to simplify things a bit, The Associated Press asked its Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus followers for their real-life questions about the program and the problems they're running into as the March 31 deadline approaches to sign up for coverage in new insurance markets.

Two of their questions and our answers:

CAN THEY FINE ME?

Q: "I'm currently unemployed and without health insurance. How does this affect me at this time? ... I'll be fined because I can't afford coverage?" Cat Moncure, Harrisonburg, Va.

A: As long as you don't have income, the government doesn't require you to get health coverage and won't fine you. Specifically, if you don't make enough money so that you have to file a federal tax form, you're in the clear from the law's insurance mandate. The tax-filing threshold is $10,000 for an individual, $20,000 for a family.

But let's say you get a job this year and earn enough so that you have to file a 2014 tax form. Then you'll have to do some math to see whether you have come under the requirement to get health insurance.

If the cheapest policy you can get costs more than 8 percent of your income, you still don't need health insurance. In that case, you'll get an exemption from the coverage requirement when you file your taxes. If you make more than that, then you will need coverage or face an IRS penalty.

Of course, none of this helps you get health care if you need to see a doctor while you are jobless.

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Health care Q&A: I can't afford a plan, will I be fined?

Health Care Stocks Are Soaring; Here's How to Invest in Them

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NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Health care-related stocks such as Aetna (AET),CNO Financial (CNO) andUnitedHealth (UNH) have become momentum trades. Today I'll provide you with information on how to trade them.

Share prices have moved higher for seven of the eight health care stocks in today's "Crunching the Numbers" table (see page 2). The table contains key moving averages, and all eight stocks are above all moving averages, which is a sign of technical momentum.

All eight also have either rising or overbought 12x3x3 weekly slow stochastics, another sign of technical momentum.

The rush to enroll in Obamacare is a factor for these stocks, as open enrollment on HealthCare.gov comes to an end on March 31.

If you already own any of these companies, you can use this information to adjust positions. If you are building positions, consider adding to longs using good 'til cancelled limit orders to buy weakness to a moving average or value levels shown in the table.

If you are reducing positions to book profits, consider doing so using GTC limit orders to sell strength to a moving average or to the risky levels shown in the table.

Aetna ($75.39 vs. $68.59 on Dec.31, up 9.9% year to date) is the nation's largest health benefits company. Shares traded as low as $64.68 on Feb. 13 then rallied to a new all-time intraday high at $76.38 on Thursday. The stock stayed just above its 200-day simple moving average at the 2014 low and tested my quarterly value level at $66.86, providing a buying opportunity. The weekly chart is positive, with its five-week modified moving average at $71.52. This month's value level is $71.03.

Centene (CNC) ($65.20 vs. $58.95 on Dec. 31, up 11% YTD) provides health care services to individuals. The stock traded as low as $56.88 on Feb. 4 staying above its 200-day SMA. The stock traded to a 2014 intraday high at $65.67 on Thursday. The stock began the year below my semiannual pivot, now a value level at $59.60 and tested my quarterly value level at $57.28 at the low. The weekly chart is positive but overbought with the five-week MMA at $62.60. This month's risky level is $67.40.

CNO Financial ($19.15 vs. $17.69 on Dec. 31, up 8.3% YTD) is the parent of insurance companies including Colonial Penn and Bankers Life. Agents of Bankers can sell health care plans offered by Humana. The stock traded as low as $16.07 on Feb. 5 and set a multiyear intraday high at $19.26 on Thursday. The stock began the year below a quarterly pivot at $17.86, which is now a value level. The weekly chart is positive but overbought with the five-week MMA at $18.26. A monthly risky level is $19.47.

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Health Care Stocks Are Soaring; Here's How to Invest in Them

Guinta brings Health Care Listening Tour to Portsmouth

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Congressional candidate seeks help in reformation

Congressional candidate Frank Guinta brought his Health Care Listening Tour to Portsmouth on Friday.Suzanne Laurent Photo

PORTSMOUTH Frank Guinta, candidate for U.S. Congress, continued his Health Care Listening Tour on Friday morning with a stop in the downtown hosted by Mark Galvin, managing director of the New England Innovation Center LLC at 75 Congress St.

A roundtable discussion included a half-dozen Seacoast health care professionals and business leaders. Guinta is conducting the tour around the 1st Congressional District to discuss topics that include New Hampshire's affordability and access to health care under the Affordable Care Act.

While Guinta had previously visited Frisbee Memorial Hospital in Rochester, Frisbee Chief Executive Officer Al Felgar attended the meeting Friday morning in Portsmouth. Frisbee Memorial was one of 10 hospitals in the state cut out of Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield's narrow network of providers for the ACA marketplace exchange.

"We cannot help reform health care and make it more affordable like this," Felgar said. "It could have been stopped. It's a travesty."

Felgar said he "wants to be part of the solution." "But, we can't if we're locked out for no good reason," he said.

Guinta said this went against President Barack Obama's two goals of expanding access to health care and decreasing cost.

Felgar recently went to a hearing in Concord with the N.H. Insurance Department with a bus-load of patients from Frisbee to get some answers, but came back empty-handed. "How can they lock out 40 percent of the state's hospitals and 1,000 doctors when there is a shortage of doctors," he said.

Patricia Cummings, an administrator at the Edgewood Centre in Portsmouth, said consumers are being affected as well. "They have no real choice," she said.

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Guinta brings Health Care Listening Tour to Portsmouth

Health care Q&A: Am I stuck with my job's health plan? Do I need coverage when out of work?

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FILE - This March 1, 2014, file photo shows part of the website for HealthCare.gov as photographed in Washington. The new health care law helps some people, hurts others and confuses almost everyone. (AP Photo/Jon Elswick, File)

WASHINGTON - The new health care law helps some people, hurts others and confuses almost everyone. Hoping to simplify things a bit, The Associated Press asked its Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus followers for their real-life questions about the program and the problems they're running into as the March 31 deadline approaches to sign up for coverage in new insurance markets.

Two of their questions and our answers:

CAN THEY FINE ME?

Q: "I'm currently unemployed and without health insurance. How does this affect me at this time? ... I'll be fined because I can't afford coverage?" Cat Moncure, Harrisonburg, Va.

A: As long as you don't have income, the government doesn't require you to get health coverage and won't fine you. Specifically, if you don't make enough money so that you have to file a federal tax form, you're in the clear from the law's insurance mandate. The tax-filing threshold is $10,000 for an individual, $20,000 for a family.

But let's say you get a job this year and earn enough so that you have to file a 2014 tax form. Then you'll have to do some math to see whether you have come under the requirement to get health insurance.

If the cheapest policy you can get costs more than 8 per cent of your income, you still don't need health insurance. In that case, you'll get an exemption from the coverage requirement when you file your taxes. If you make more than that, then you will need coverage or face an IRS penalty.

Of course, none of this helps you get health care if you need to see a doctor while you are jobless.

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Health care Q&A: Am I stuck with my job's health plan? Do I need coverage when out of work?

With a few finger taps, draw genetic pedigrees at point of care with new app

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PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:

21-Mar-2014

Contact: John Ascenzi ascenzi@email.chop.edu 267-426-6055 Children's Hospital of Philadelphia

Long before next-generation sequencing technology ushered in today's data-intensive era of human genome information, clinicians have been taking family histories by jotting down pedigrees: hand-drawn diagrams recording how diseases may recur across generations, and offering clues to inheritance patterns.

Now healthcare providers can create those diagrams digitally on an iPad screen with a few finger taps, during a face-to-face encounter with an individual and his or her family. Users can store the pedigrees in a standardized format, make corrections flexibly as they gather new information, and export the diagrams so they can be used in other applications such as electronic medical records.

"Instead of storing a pedigree on a piece of paper in a physical file, we can capture the information with an easy-to-use interface that produces accessible data," said Jeff Miller, lead analyst at the Center for Biomedical Informatics (CBMi) at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. Miller led the CBMi team that developed the Proband app, which made its debut today on the iTunes App StoreSM. Genetic counselors, clinical genetics specialists and others can download the app for a limited-time introductory price of $1.99.

Designed for use as a data collection tool during a genetic counseling interview or in similarly interactive settings, Proband uses a simple, gesture-based interface to make drawing pedigrees as efficient as drawing on paper. Users can quickly create even the most complex family pedigrees simply and easily using standard nomenclature and symbols. "We designed this app for ease of use with options appearing as you need them," said Miller. "Our goal is to make those features contextually relevant, and not to overwhelm the user."

Mindy Li, M.D., a clinical genetics fellow at CHOP, is one of those who helped test the app, providing critiques and feedback to the CBMi development team. "One strength for me as a clinician is being able to set the device on my lap while I conduct an interviewit's a better interaction than if I had to turn toward a computer screen and input the information," she said.

A suggestion of hers that was incorporated, said Li, was to allow for careful spacing and alignment, to make it clear which individuals belong to each generation: "Alignment is importantyou have to see children in their correct generation." An auto-alignment button on the app screen helps to straighten that out. She added, "As health technology in general is moving toward electronic data, it's important to have pedigrees easy to read and easy to integrate." Compared to reviewing traditional hand-drawn pedigrees, she doesn't have to decipher someone else's handwriting or idiosyncratic abbreviations.

Miller and other team members are presenting Proband at the annual meeting of the American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics, March 28 in Nashville.

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With a few finger taps, draw genetic pedigrees at point of care with new app

New disorder: Kids who don't cry

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Grace Wilsey was born with NGLY1 deficiency, which is caused by two mutations in the NGLY1 gene.

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

(CNN) -- What do you do when your baby lies limp in your arms, staring blankly into the distance while never crying?

What do you do when tests show signs of liver damage and your baby's seizures won't stop, but doctors can't tell you what's wrong or how to fix it?

Thanks to the Human Genome Project, which was completed in 2003, identifying new genetic mutations has gotten easier and cheaper. But geneticists often struggle to find patients who share these rare DNA quirks. Studying multiple patients with the same gene mutations and similar symptoms is crucial to identifying a new genetic disorder.

That's why a paper published Thursday in the journal Genetics in Medicine is so remarkable.

The paper identifies NGLY1 deficiency as an inherited genetic disorder, caused by mutations in the NGLY1 gene. The researchers have confirmed eight patients with these mutations who share several symptoms, including developmental delays, abnormal tear production and liver disease.

And they credit an "Internet blog" with bringing the patients and scientists together.

Grace's genome

Grace Wilsey's parents knew something was wrong right away. Their newborn daughter was lethargic. Her eyes seemed hollow and unfocused. She refused to eat. Doctors at the hospital ran multiple tests, but couldn't come up with a diagnosis.

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New disorder: Kids who don't cry

Genetic clue to irritable bowel syndrome found

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Home > News > health-news

Washington, March 21 : Researchers have reported a defined genetic defect that causes a subset of irritable bowel syndrome (IBS).

Researchers found that patients with a subset of IBS have a specific genetic defect, a mutation of the SCN5A gene. This defect causes patients to have a disruption in bowel function, by affecting the Nav1.5 channel, a sodium channel in the gastrointestinal smooth muscle and pacemaker cells.

Gianrico Farrugia, M.D., a study author, Mayo Clinic gastroenterologist and director of the Mayo Clinic Center for Individualized Medicine, said that this gives them hope that from only treating symptoms of the disease, they can work to find disease-modifying agents, which is where they really want to be to affect long-term treatment of IBS.

Researchers studied the sodium channel of 584 people with IBS and 1,380 control subjects. The analysis demonstrated that a defect in the SCN5A gene was found in 2.2 percent of IBS patients. The results were confirmed in a genome-wide association study and replicated in 1,745 patients in four independent cohorts of patients with IBS and control subjects.

The research has been published in the journal Gastroenterology.

--ANI (Posted on 22-03-2014)

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Genetic clue to irritable bowel syndrome found

US First Lady Stresses Freedom of Speech in China

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U.S. first lady Michelle Obama told students in China, which has some of the world's tightest restrictions on the Internet, that freedom of speech and unfettered access to information make countries stronger and should be universal rights.

Mrs. Obama was speaking Saturday at Peking University in Beijing during a weeklong trip aimed at promoting educational exchanges between the U.S. and China. The trip also took on political overtones when she was granted a previously unscheduled meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping on Friday.

Mrs. Obama said the free flow of information is crucial "because that's how we discover truth, that's how we learn what's really happening in our communities and our country and our world."

"And that's how we decide which values and ideas we think are best by questioning and debating them vigorously, by listening to all sides of every argument and by judging for ourselves," she said.

China blocks many foreign news sites and social media services such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Its army of censors routinely filters out information deemed offensive by the government and silences dissenting voices.

Though not likely to be well-received by the government, Mrs. Obama's remarks may not draw any strong protest because her speech and a subsequent moderated discussion among 50 students sitting in two identical conference rooms in Beijing and Palo Alto, Calif., but connected via modern technology focused mainly on the value of educational exchanges.

Fulbright scholar Eleanor Goodman from Harvard University's Fairbanks Center for East Asian Research said the first lady probably "felt a need to make that statement."

"It was firm but not overbearing," Goodman said.

Sunny Ni, a Chinese student studying environmentalism at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry, said that she has no problem accessing information for her studies, and that China is improving with free flow of information.

"It's a step-by-step process," Ni said.

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US First Lady Stresses Freedom of Speech in China

Council wants action on freedom campers

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City officials have been too "soft" on freedom campers but any tough new measures to address the issue are at least another year away.

The Christchurch City Council strategy and planning committee yesterday criticised officials for not taking a hard enough line against freedom campers and demanded they get tougher next summer.

How that harder line worked would determine whether a bylaw would be introduced.

Cr Raf Manji said officials had been too "soft" and they seemed to be "dithering" on what to do about the problem. Queenstown-Lakes District Council had introduced a hard-line approach to freedom camping which seemed to be working, yet Christchurch officials had done little.

"We have to get our act together . . . it's just ridiculous," Manji said.

Freedom camping has infuriated many this summer, especially in Akaroa, where there had been many reports of visitors dumping their waste and blocking access to public areas.

Council staff had recommended the committee continue to deal with the issue on a case-by-case basis because a bylaw was not a priority when the council had to deal with other pressing earthquake recovery matters.

The committee said not enough was being done to tackle the issue and questioned whether staff were using all the legal tools at their disposal.

The committee agreed there were tools the council could use to deter freedom camping without the need for a bylaw immediately.

- Fairfax NZ News

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Council wants action on freedom campers