Was 1911 Health Care Better Than Obamacare? – This Forgotten Day in Houston – Video

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Was 1911 Health Care Better Than Obamacare? - This Forgotten Day in Houston
March 19, 1911: On this day, the State Medical Institute #39;s rather wordy ad made quite the promise: "Pay Us When You Are Completely Cured." What are your thoughts on this philosphy 104 years...

By: Houston Chronicle

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Was 1911 Health Care Better Than Obamacare? - This Forgotten Day in Houston - Video

Medicaid Expansion Supporters Protest at Legislative Plaza (TNReport.com) – Video

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Medicaid Expansion Supporters Protest at Legislative Plaza (TNReport.com)
The Moral Movement for Health Care, a coalition of students, clergy and individuals, protested, prayed and sang gospels songs at the Tennessee Capitol today, calling on the General Assembly...

By: tnreporttv

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Medicaid Expansion Supporters Protest at Legislative Plaza (TNReport.com) - Video

D.C. home health-care workers organize to seek $15 an hour

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Paula Wilson has worked as ahome health-care aide in D.C. for 18 years. When she started in the profession in the 90s, she made $8 an hour. She was laid off from an agency in 2013, where she made $10.75 per hour, and now makes about$13 an hour working part-time for an elderly patient with Alzheimers.

She says the wages are not enough to pay rent or even take her son to the movies,and she was evicted from her apartment a couple of years ago. She and her son now live with her mother in the Capitol Heights area.

This is my job, this is my duty, Wilson said. Its an unacceptable wage.

Wilson joined hundreds of other D.C. home health-care workers Wednesday night at a town hall-style meeting in a Fort Totten church to rally for a $15 wage. The rally, which featured a keynote speech from U.S. Labor Secretary Thomas Perez, was the Districts workers official foray into the national Fight for $15 movement a movement inspired by the fast-food industrys push for higher wages.

D.C.s atleast 6,000 home health-care workers workfor about26 health-care agencies. Theywereorganized by Service Employees International Union 1199, the regional chapter of a national labor union thatput on Wednesdaysevent, though few of the workers are members of the union. D.C. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D) and the Rev. Graylan Hagler, a longtime activist andpastor of Plymouth United Congregational Church, where the event took place, also spoke at the event.

We need a million more [home health-care workers] in the next 10years, Norton said. They may have a hard time getting more of them if theyre not paying them.

The demand forhome health-care workersis fast growing in the United States, with more being needed as baby boomers grow older. The Bureau of Labor Statistics expects the country will need an additional 1 million such workers by 2022. According to a recent reportfrom the National Employment Law Project, the nations 2million home health-care workers took home an average salary of $18,598 in 2013, compared to the nationalaverage of $46,440 for salaried workers that year.

No one who works a full-time job should have to live in poverty, said Perez, who rallied workers to organize, with references to Selma and the words of Martin Luther King Jr.: You are not babysitters, you are professionals doing some of the most important work.

The Districts home health-careindustry made headlines last year when a long federal investigation revealedthat D.C. operators of home-care agencies and personal-care assistants had been running a Medicaid scheme, swindlingtaxpayers out of tens of millions of dollars. Because of the investigation, someagencies were cut off from Medicaid funding and, during this time, many homehealth care workers say they werent paid.

In December, some of D.C.s health-care workers filedsuit against three home-care agencies alleging that workers werent paid for all of their time and were not provided sick days. The suit, in which Wilson is a plaintiff, was later expanded to a class-action suit.

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D.C. home health-care workers organize to seek $15 an hour

Insuring undocumented residents could help solve multiple US health care challenges

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Latinos are the largest ethnic minority group in the United States, and it's expected that by 2050 they will comprise almost 30 percent of the U.S. population. Yet they are also the most underserved by health care and health insurance providers.

Latinos' low rates of insurance coverage and poor access to health care strongly suggest a need for better outreach by health care providers and an improvement in insurance coverage. Although the implementation of the Affordable Care Act of 2010 seems to have helped (approximately 25 percent of those eligible for coverage under the ACA are Latino), public health experts expect that, even with the ACA, Latinos will continue to have problems accessing high-quality health care.

Alex Ortega, a professor of public health at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, and colleagues conducted an extensive review of published scientific research on Latino health care. Their analysis, published in the March issue of the Annual Review of Public Health, identifies four problem areas related to health care delivery to Latinos under ACA:

"As the Latino population continues to grow, it should be a national health policy priority to improve their access to care and determine the best way to deliver high-quality care to this population at the local, state and national levels," Ortega said. "Resolving these four key issues would be an important first step."

Insurance for the undocumented

Whether and how to provide insurance for undocumented residents is, at best, a complicated decision, said Ortega, who is also the director of the UCLA Center for Population Health and Health Disparities.

For one thing, the ACA explicitly excludes the estimated 12 million undocumented people in the U.S. from benefiting from either the state insurance exchanges established by the ACA or the ACA's expansion of Medicaid. That rule could create a number of problems for local health care and public health systems.

For example, federal law dictates that anyone can receive treatment at emergency rooms regardless of their citizenship status, so the ACA's exclusion of undocumented immigrants has discouraged them from using primary care providers and instead driven them to visit emergency departments. This is more costly for users and taxpayers, and it results in higher premiums for those who are insured.

In addition, previous research has shown that undocumented people often delay seeking care for medical problems.

"That likely results in more visits to emergency departments when they are sicker, more complications and more deaths, and more costly care relative to insured patients," Ortega said.

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Insuring undocumented residents could help solve multiple US health care challenges

Engineered yeast could increase nutritional value of wine while reducing hangovers

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Using a technique that cuts out unwanted copies of a genome to improve the beneficial properties of a compound, researchers working at the University of Illinois College of Agricultural, Consumer, and Environmental Services (ACES) claim to have produced a yeast that could vastly increase the quality of wine while also reducing its hangover-inducing properties.

"Fermented foods such as beer, wine, and bread are made with polyploid strains of yeast, which means they contain multiple copies of genes in the genome," said Associate Professor of microbial genomics at the University of Illinois, Yong-Su Jin. "Until now, its been very difficult to do genetic engineering in polyploid strains because if you altered a gene in one copy of the genome, an unaltered copy would correct the one that had been changed,"

So the researchers developed what they call a "genome knife," which allowed them to slice across multiple copies of a target gene until all the copies were cut, thereby making it impossible for any remaining genomes to correct any altered ones.

After being completely cut, the enzyme RNA-guided Cas9 nuclease was then employed to carry out precise metabolic engineering on strains of polyploid Saccharomyces cerevisiae, a species of common yeast instrumental in winemaking, bread baking, and beer brewing.

This newly-modified strain, the team believes, is a breakthrough of "staggering" proportions. The applications of this compound possibly range in the thousands, given the ubiquity of the species of yeast and its use in a myriad different industries.

"Wine, for instance, contains the healthful component resveratrol, said Associate Professor Jin. "With engineered yeast, we could increase the amount of resveratrol in a variety of wine by 10 times or more. But we could also add metabolic pathways to introduce bioactive compounds from other foods, such as ginseng, into the wine yeast. Or we could put resveratrol-producing pathways into yeast strains used for beer, kefir, cheese, kimchee, or pickles any food that uses yeast fermentation in its production."

But more than this, if winemakers were to clone this new enzyme, then they could use it to improve malolactic fermentation (the conversion of bitter malic acid, naturally present in freshly pressed grapes, into softer-tasting lactic acid) to produce a consistently smoother wine while also removing the toxic byproducts that can cause hangovers.

The scientists see the capability of their genome knife in this situation as an absolute must in engineering the extremely precise engineered mutations required to achieve this improvement in wine fermentation.

"Scientists need to create designed mutations to determine the function of specific genes," said Jin. "Say we have a yeast that produces a wine with great flavor and we want to know why. We delete one gene, then another, until the distinctive flavor is gone, and we know weve isolated the gene responsible for that characteristic."

Optimistically, the researchers also believe that their nascent technology could make genetic engineering and genetically modified organisms more palatable to the wider community.

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Engineered yeast could increase nutritional value of wine while reducing hangovers

Freedom Online – Servers are UP! Big Changes! Submit your Content! – Video

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