Dan Walters Daily: California still must address retiree health care
Though Gov. Jerry Brown boasts of a balanced budget, he still has billions of dollars in unfunded retiree health benefits to deal with, Dan says. (December 17, 2014)
By: The Sacramento Bee
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Dan Walters Daily: California still must address retiree health care - Video
At a Glance: Governor #39;s Budget Proposal
Gov. Gary R. Herbert rolled out his Fiscal Year 2016 budget proposal, which included the largest true increase in student funding in 25 years, a plan to bring hundreds of millions of Utah taxpayer...
By: Governor Gary Herbert
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Boy asks Barack Obama #39;why do people hate you?
http://www.americanconservativedailynews.com Mr Obama, who is currently caught up in a heated and divisive political row over his plans for health care reform, called on the boy, Tyren Scott, in...
By: American Conservative Daily News
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HCM Concept Map
Concept map on the US Health Care System.
By: Ace Smay
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Health Literacy Past, Present, and Future - Russell Rothman, MD, MPP
Russell Rothman #39;s presentation Creating Health Literate Health Care Delivery from the November 6, 2014 Roundtable on Health Literacy Workshop - Health Literacy Past, Present, and Future.
By: Institute of Medicine
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Health Literacy Past, Present, and Future - Russell Rothman, MD, MPP - Video
Designing for Consequence
Lorna Ross, Director of Design at the Center for Innovation at Mayo Clinic, discusses how design can be used as an agent for change in complex systems such as health care.
By: Mayo Clinic
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Sarah Dutton, Jennifer De Pinto, Anthony Salvanto and Fred Backus
Fifty-two percent of Americans say they find basic medical care affordable, but that's down from 61 percent last December. Today, for 46 percent of Americans, paying for medical care is a hardship, up 10 points.
Similarly, just over half of Americans are at least somewhat satisfied with their health care costs, while 43 percent are dissatisfied.
Americans are feeling the cost of their health care. Fifty-two percent say the amount of money they pay for out-of-pocket health care costs -- those not covered by insurance -- has gone up over the past few years, including a third who say those costs have gone up a lot.
Most attribute the rise of out-of-pocket costs to more expensive medical treatment, rather than an increase in the amount of treatment they are receiving.
Even though a majority of Americans are able to keep up with their medical costs, some cannot. Thirty-seven percent say they or one of their immediate family members have had trouble keeping up with their medical bills in the last few years. Those with lower incomes are more likely to have had trouble paying their medical bills.
In addition, 28 percent of Americans say they been contacted by a collection agency because of medical bills. And among those who have had trouble paying their medical bills, nearly two-thirds have been contacted by a collection agency.
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Americans have until Monday to enroll or re-enroll in Obamacare for coverage starting January 1. But many insurance companies offering policies t...
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Vermont Gov. Peter Shumlin (D) has abandoned a years-long push for a universal health-care system in the state after budget analysts said the program would require what he called enormous new taxes.
Shumlin had proposed what he called the Green Mountain Care plan, which would have put Vermont on track to provide publicly-financed health care starting in 2017.
But Michael Costa, Shumlins deputy director of health care reform, concluded the plan would have required an 11.5 percent payroll tax on all Vermont businesses and an income tax hike of up to 9.5 percent. Those taxes wouldnt have covered transition costs to the new system, which would have amounted to at least $500 million.
These are simply not tax rates that I can responsibly support or urge the legislature to pass, Shumlin said in a speech Wednesday. In my judgment, the potential economic disruption and risks would be too great to small businesses, working families and the states economy.
Shumlin blamed slower-than-expected economic growth after the recession that forced the state to make steep budget cuts. Federal funding for the transition would have been $150 million less than initially projected, costs the state would have had to absorb.
Pushing for single payer health care financing when the time isnt right and it would likely hurt our economy is not good for Vermont and it would not be good for true health care reform, Shumlin said. Now is not the right time to ask our legislature to take the step of passing a financing plan for Green Mountain Care.
The administrations budget officials tried to find ways to pay for the program without the tax hikes, though no one could come up with a solution that prevented the tax hikes.
In an op-ed released by Shumlins office, he called the move to scrap universal care one of the most difficult decisions of my public life.
Instead of universal health care, Shumlin said he would pursue other avenues to reduce health-care costs, such as paying for quality of outcomes rather than quantity of services, and improving information technology systems.
Republicans cheered the decision to abandon the push for a single-payer system. Lt. Gov. Phil Scott (R) called the move a definitive step in the right direction for Vermonters, Vermont businesses and Vermonts economy.
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WEDNESDAY, Dec. 17, 2014 (HealthDay News) -- Many American parents don't think their teen and young adult children are able to manage their own health care, a new survey finds.
The nationwide poll of parents of children ages 13 to 30 found that a large number believe children should stop seeing their pediatrician and begin going to an adult-focused primary care doctor at age 18 (42 percent). Some thought their children should transition to adult care even before age 18 (27 percent).
However, only 30 percent of parents said their children actually did so by age 18, according to the University of Michigan C.S. Mott Children's Hospital National Poll on Children's Health.
"Making this transition is something virtually all teens and young adults will have to do, but this poll makes it clear that many parents are doubtful that their kids are ready to make the leap at age 18," Emily Fredericks, associate professor of pediatrics, said in a university news release.
While most parents believed their teen and young adult children know how to take medications, they were less confident about their children's ability to do things such as make a doctor's appointment, fill out medical history forms or go to the emergency department, the survey found.
"Less than half of parents think their older teens, 18 to 19 years old, know how to make a doctor's appointment, and only one-quarter of parents believe their teens know what their health insurance covers," Fredericks said.
"This perceived lack of skills may explain why so few teens transition their care by age 18. Parents may realize that becoming an adult at age 18 is not a guarantee that their young adult is suddenly ready to manage their own health care," she added.
Parents can help their teens prepare for this transition by encouraging them to be more involved in their health care. Ways to get them involved include having them make appointments, ask and answer questions during health care visits, and learn what is covered by health insurance, Fredericks suggested.
"Age alone shouldn't be the only factor. Instead, parents and health care providers can partner with adolescents to gradually teach them the self-management skills they need to successfully navigate the health care system," she said.
"Our poll results indicate that transition needs to be a learning process, not a point in time where suddenly teens are ready to be independent when it comes to their health," Fredericks concluded.
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Syracuse, N.Y. -- Critics of genetically modified organisms are criticizing SUNY ESF's announcement that it had genetically engineered an American chestnut tree resistant to blight.
"Genetically engineered chestnuts and other trees are an unnecessary, undesirable, and hazardous product of the techno-obsessed mindset that assumes genetic codes are like Lego sets that can be engineered to our specifications," said Rachel Smolker, a member of the Campaign to STOP Genetically Engineered Trees, in a statement issued today. "The impacts of these engineered chestnuts will be completely unpredictable."
After 25 years of research, scientists at SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry announced last month they had created a new strain of blight-resistant American chestnut that could restore the once-abundant tree to the forest. Researchers said they had inserted a wheat gene that could help chestnuts withstand the blight that wiped out up to 5 billion of the trees in the United States.
The Global Justice Ecology Project has also criticized the SUNY-ESF research, saying it had been supported in part by corporations who want to profit from genetically engineered crops, including Monsanto and ArborGen.
"A look at the partners and funders of this program at SUNY ESF over the years reveals some very disturbing bedfellows," said the group's executive director, Anne Petermann, in an article titled "This Holiday Season say NO to GMO Chestnuts."
ESF's American Chestnut Research and Restoration Project website lists Monsanto and ArborGen as donors.
The latest criticism follows a letter to the editor to Syracuse.com last month, in which Martha Crouch, a biologist with the Center for Food Safety, said release of the tree in the wild is premature.
"The researchers' dream could become a nightmare if something goes wrong," Crouch wrote. "Genetically engineered trees will be difficult to recall once they spread."
One Washington Post columnist has come to the defense of the SUNY ESF research, saying the restoration of the tree could provide an important source of food in the nutrient-rich nuts -- the kind that used to be roasted like in that Christmas song.
"It wasn't created for personal profit or for the benefit of corporations or farmers," wrote columnist Tamar Haspel. "It contributes to a wholesome, healthful diet. And it's intended solely for the public good."
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Genetic-engineering critics open fire on American chestnut breakthrough at SUNY ESF
PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:
18-Dec-2014
RJ Taylor 647-228-4358 rj.taylor@utoronto.ca
Lindsay Jolivet Writer & Media Relations Specialist Canadian Institute for Advanced Research 416-971-4876; lindsay.jolivet@cifar.ca
In the decade since the genome was sequenced in 2003, scientists and doctors have struggled to answer an all-consuming question: Which DNA mutations cause disease?
A new computational technique developed at the University of Toronto may now be able to tell us.
A Canadian research team led by professor Brendan Frey has developed the first method for 'ranking' genetic mutations based on how living cells 'read' DNA, revealing how likely any given alteration is to cause disease. They used their method to discover unexpected genetic determinants of autism, hereditary cancers and spinal muscular atrophy, a leading genetic cause of infant mortality.
Their findings appear in today's issue of the leading journal Science.
Think of the human genome as a mysterious text, made up of three billion letters. "Over the past decade, a huge amount of effort has been invested into searching for mutations in the genome that cause disease, without a rational approach to understanding why they cause disease," says Frey, also a senior fellow at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. "This is because scientists didn't have the means to understand the text of the genome and how mutations in it can change the meaning of that text." Biologist Eric Lander of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology captured this puzzle in his famous quote: "Genome. Bought the book. Hard to read."
What was Frey's approach? We know that certain sections of the text, called exons, describe the proteins that are the building blocks of all living cells. What wasn't appreciated until recently is that other sections, called introns, contain instructions for how to cut and paste exons together, determining which proteins will be produced. This 'splicing' process is a crucial step in the cell's process of converting DNA into proteins, and its disruption is known to contribute to many diseases.
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Machine learning reveals unexpected genetic roots of cancers, autism and other disorders
PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:
18-Dec-2014
Contact: Megan McRainey megan.mcrainey@emory.edu 404-727-6171 Emory Health Sciences @emoryhealthsci
Many genetic mutations in visual pigments, spread over millions of years, were required for humans to evolve from a primitive mammal with a dim, shadowy view of the world into a greater ape able to see all the colors in a rainbow.
Now, after more than two decades of painstaking research, scientists have finished a detailed and complete picture of the evolution of human color vision. PLOS Genetics is publishing the final pieces of this picture: The process for how humans switched from ultraviolet (UV) vision to violet vision, or the ability to see blue light.
"We have now traced all of the evolutionary pathways, going back 90 million years, that led to human color vision," says lead author Shozo Yokoyama, a biologist at Emory University. "We've clarified these molecular pathways at the chemical level, the genetic level and the functional level."
Co-authors of the PLOS Genetics paper include Emory biologists Jinyi Xing, Yang Liu and Davide Faggionato; Syracuse University biologist William Starmer; and Ahmet Altun, a chemist and former post-doc at Emory who is now at Fatih University in Istanbul, Turkey.
Yokoyama and various collaborators over the years have teased out secrets of the adaptive evolution of vision in humans and other vertebrates by studying ancestral molecules. The lengthy process involves first estimating and synthesizing ancestral proteins and pigments of a species, then conducting experiments on them. The technique combines microbiology with theoretical computation, biophysics, quantum chemistry and genetic engineering.
Five classes of opsin genes encode visual pigments for dim-light and color vision.
Bits and pieces of the opsin genes change and vision adapts as the environment of a species changes.
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PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:
18-Dec-2014
Contact: Kathryn Ryan kryan@liebertpub.com 914-740-2100 Mary Ann Liebert, Inc./Genetic Engineering News @LiebertOnline
New Rochelle, NY, December 18, 2014--Internet addiction is an impulse-control problem marked by an inability to inhibit Internet use, which can adversely affect a person's life, including their health and interpersonal relationships. The prevalence of Internet addiction varies among regions around the world, as shown by data from more than 89,000 individuals in 31 countries analyzed for a study published in Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, a peer-reviewed journal from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers. The article is available free on the Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking website until January 18, 2015.
In the article "Internet Addiction Prevalence and Quality of (Real) Life: A Meta-Analysis of 31 Nations Across Seven World Regions," Cecelia Cheng and Angel Yee-lam Li, The University of Hong Kong, present 164 Internet addiction prevalence figures, with an overall global prevalence estimate of 6.0%. Prevalence ranged from a low of 2.6% in Northern and Western Europe to a high of 10.9% in the Middle East. The authors describe factors associated with higher Internet addiction prevalence and how it relates to individuals' quality of life.
"This study provides initial support for the inverse relationship between quality of life and Internet Addiction (IA). It, however, finds no support for the hypothesis that high Internet accessibility (such as the high penetration rates in northern and western Europe), promote IA," says Editor-in-Chief Brenda K. Wiederhold, PhD, MBA, BCB, BCN, Interactive Media Institute, San Diego, California and Virtual Reality Medical Institute, Brussels, Belgium.
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About the Journal
Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking is an authoritative peer-reviewed journal published monthly online with Open Access options and in print that explores the psychological and social issues surrounding the Internet and interactive technologies, plus cybertherapy and rehabilitation. Complete tables of content and a sample issue may be viewed on the Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking website.
About the Publisher
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GTA 5 BMX Montage "Miles" | edit by Futurist
MAKE SURE YOU LIKE OUR FACEBOOK PAGE!!! https://www.facebook.com/RSPproHD Subscribe to our channel #39;s for the latest GTA 5, BF4 and Call of Duty Advanced Warf...
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Sunrise at the edge of space captured by a World View test flight. (Credit: World View Enterprises)
On a commercial flight in October for its customers Tencent and Moon Express, World ViewExperience managed to capture a breathtaking video of the sunrise as seen from the edge of space, around 100,000 feet above the Earths surface.
World View, a spinoff of Paragon Space Development, is a space tourism startup that aims to take passengers high enough into the air over 100,000 feet to the edge of space where people are actually able to see the curvature of the Earth itself. The company will also be providing opportunities for companies and organizations looking to do research in the upper atmosphere.
The capsule itself is intended to be a luxury experience, featuring WiFi capabilities and an open bar. Passengers have no need to worry about their drinks floating away as there wont be any of the experience of zero-gravity. The capsule itself is lifted by a large balloon, which takes about an hour and a half to reach full altitude. The six passengers will then spend about two hours experiencing the Earth from that altitude before making the 40 minute return glide back to the surface.
World Views engineers recently made headlines as partof a joint project with Paragon that sent Google Google executive Alan Eustace on a record-breaking space dive. That project, World View CTO Taber MacCallum told me at the time, went a long way to helping develop the companys technology.
Right now, the company aims to begin flying in late2016. Tickets for flights are currently $75,000, and potential travelers arealready putting down deposits for tickets.
Check out the full sunrise video below:
Follow me onTwitterorFacebook. Read my Forbes bloghere.
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Assassin #39;s Creed IV Black Flag Freedom Cry DLC Walkthrough Part 3 :: All Missions (PC)
Assassin #39;s Creed IV Black Flag Freedom Cry DLC Walkthrough Part 3 for PC in High Definition (1080p) includes all single player missions. Subscribe :: http://goo.gl/sbEaQO Channel :: http://www.you...
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FCS Day 76 - Freedom! Channel Spotlight
Freedom! Channel Spotlight, day 76! - To get a spotlight leave a comment below help your fellow partners! Today #39;s featured channels: MimpyDimpy https://www.youtube.com/user/mimpydimpy/featur.
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Freedom to Manage Your Website
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We ain #39;t gonna stop/ Freedom
Freedom Songs from my family because the struggle continues. Yet, we still have joy.
By: BlackGirlSpeaks
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Press Freedom Fight: Reporter James Risen Faces Subpoena in CIA Whistleblower Case
http://democracynow.org - In one of the most significant press freedom cases in decades, the United States government has confirmed that it will seek limited testimony from New York Times reporter...
By: democracynow
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Press Freedom Fight: Reporter James Risen Faces Subpoena in CIA Whistleblower Case - Video