March 30, 2014

can someone explain to me why Americans are so against

protecting people? remember when Ronald Reagan got
seniors covered against the cost of catastrophic illness?

oh my goodness the screaming. Congress could not repeal it
fast enough. I really do not understand.

now I was pretty young then and didn't really pay attention
until the screaming started. But was the law that bad?
as I remember it was seniors paid the first 300 dollars
and everything was covered after that.

March 30, 2014

the NYT on different ACA exchanges.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/28/us/politics/deadline-near-health-signups-show-disparity.html?hp&_r=1



WASHINGTON — The online insurance marketplace in Oregon is such a technological mess that residents have been signing up for health coverage by hand. In Texas, political opposition to President Obama’s health law is so strong that some residents believe, erroneously, that the program is banned in their state.
But in Connecticut, a smoothly functioning website, run by competent managers, has successfully enrolled so many patients that officials are offering to sell their expertise to states like Maryland, which is struggling to sign people up for coverage.
The disparities reveal a stark truth about the Affordable Care Act: With the first open enrollment period set to end Monday, six months after its troubled online exchanges opened for business, the program widely known as Obamacare looks less like a sweeping federal overhaul than a collection of individual ventures playing out unevenly, state to state, in the laboratories of democracy.

Jobs and Health Bills Make for Busy Day at CapitolMARCH 27, 2014
The White House said on Thursday that more than six million people have signed up for private plans, a significant political milestone for the Obama administration. Independent analysts estimate that an additional 3.5 million Americans are newly insured under Medicaid — figures the law’s backers hail as a success.


But those numbers may not reveal much. Federal officials do not know how many of those who selected plans were previously uninsured, or how many actually paid their premiums. Independent experts warn that the intense focus on national numbers is misguided, and that it will take years to fully assess the law’s impact, much less deem it a success or a failure.

“The whole narrative about Obamacare — ‘Will they get to six million? What is the percentage of young adults going to be?’ — has almost nothing to do with whether the law is working or not, whether the premiums are affordable or not, whether people think they are getting a good deal or not,” said Drew Altman, president of the Kaiser Family Foundation, whose analysts are closely tracking the measure.


more at the link .... interesting article ....

March 30, 2014

great news !! treatment found that tricks body into killing cancer tumor.

http://nypost.com/2013/03/27/one-drug-to-rule-them-all-researchers-find-treatment-that-kills-every-kind-of-cancer-tumor/

Researchers might have found the Holy Grail in the war against cancer, a miracle drug that has killed every kind of cancer tumor it has come in contact with.
The drug works by blocking a protein called CD47 that is essentially a “do not eat” signal to the body’s immune system, according to Science Magazine.
This protein is produced in healthy blood cells but researchers at Stanford University found that cancer cells produced an inordinate amount of the protein thus tricking the immune system into not destroying the harmful cells.

With this observation in mind, the researchers built an antibody that blocked cancer’s CD47 so that the body’s immune system attacked the dangerous cells.
So far, researchers have used the antibody in mice with human breast, ovary, colon, bladder, brain, liver and prostate tumors transplanted into them. In each of the cases the antibody forced the mice’s immune system to kill the cancer cells.
“We showed that even after the tumor has taken hold, the antibody can either cure the tumor or slow its growth and prevent metastasis,” said biologist Irving Weissman of the Stanford University School of Medicine in Palo Alto, California.

more at the link.

March 28, 2014

Mike Rogers MI-08 is going to retire

any chance we can pick up the seat?

March 27, 2014

oh my goodness ... longest held deathrow inmate freed .. japan

http://news.msn.com/world/japan-orders-longest-held-death-row-inmate-freed?ocid=ansnews11

emphasis added by me.

TOKYO (AP) — A Japanese court on Thursday ordered the release of the world's longest-serving death row inmate, saying investigators had likely fabricated evidence and ordering a retrial in a murder case that left the man behind bars for nearly half a century.

snip

Hakamada was sentenced to death in 1968, but was not executed because of a lengthy appeals process. It took 27 years for the Supreme Court to deny his first appeal for a retrial. He filed a second appeal in 2008, and the court finally ruled in his favor on Thursday.

snip

The court said DNA analysis obtained by Hakamada's lawyers suggested that investigators had fabricated evidence. It ordered a retrial in the case, making Hakamada only the six death row inmate to get a retrial in Japan's history of postwar criminal justice. Four of the previous inmates were acquitted in their retrials, while the fifth case is still pending.


snip

Thursday's ruling underscores Japan's much-criticized closed interrogations, which rely heavily on self-confession. Hakamada had confessed in a closed interrogation.


wow .....

March 26, 2014

not sure if this guy is real or not

sometimes I look thru Politico and saw this.
http://www.politico.com/blogs/media/?ml=bl_db


MSNBC is in serious trouble
By DYLAN BYERS | 3/26/14 12:01 PM EDT
This is the story of MSNBC in a nutshell: It rose to prominence on its criticism of George W. Bush, peaked during Barack Obama's historic 2008 campaign, and, by criticizing Republicans and championing liberal causes, sustained its viewership in the years that followed.
MSNBC suffered harder loses in 2013 -- in terms of both viewership and revenue -- than either of its competitors at Fox News and CNN, according to Nielsen data featured in a new Pew Research report. Prime-time viewership declined by a staggering 24 percent (nearly twice the loss sustained by CNN and four-times that sustained by Fox News). Daytime viewership fell by 15 percent, even as it rose at both of the other networks.

On the revenue side, MSNBC was projected to decline by 2 percent, while both CNN and Fox News were projected to experience growth of 2 percent and 5 percent, respectively. MSNBC was expected to bring in $475 million in revenue: less than half what CNN will make and roughly one-quarter of what Fox News will make.

Conventional wisdom has it that cable news doesn't have much of a future: The audience is old and getting older, the television landscape is growing more and more fractured, appointment viewing is becoming a thing of the past, etc. Certainly, every cable news network lost viewers last year. But this version of events often ignores the incredible revenue gains made each year by Fox News (like a rocket) and CNN (far more gradual, but we're still talking billions).

more at the link ....

March 14, 2014

this just makes me ill.

If convicted, the doctor faces a sentence about between three months and three years. FGM is illegal in Egypt. It was banned by President Hosni Mubarak's government in 2008. The practice is remains widespread however. Statistics suggest that 98% of Egyptian girls have undergone the procedure.

According to the director of the Egyptian Center for Women's Rights Nihad Abualqmassan, efforts to halt FGM in Egypt stopped during the rule of the Muslim Brotherhood. She said of the case, and the broader struggle to end the practice "this will continue to need a lot of work and effort by the state to apply the law. Most cases don't get to the prosecutor unless the girl suffers health consequences."
According to the World Health Organization, as of 2008, 130 million girls have been cut.

A growing international campaign against the practice was given a boost last month on International Zero Tolerance for FGM Day (February 6) with the introduction of a new initiative by the British government backed by the Guardian newspaper. With the help of social workers, law enforcement, and widespread cultural education, the aim is to eliminate the practice in one generation. It is based on the campaigns to end footbinding, which were successful in China in the early 20th century.



I am at a loss for words. I truly am.

http://www.clarionproject.org/news/egypt-doctor-trial-after-botched-fgm-kills-14-year-old

March 11, 2014

really stupid question IRT Unions.

mostly cuz I know squat about unions.
a guy at work was talking about unions and RTW states,
and he asked why would anyone belong to a union
in a right to work state?
he was not talking to me specifically and no one could
give him an reply, someone mentioned health insurance
and possibly retirement bennies.

any help appreciated.

March 9, 2014

why is American internet so slow?

http://theweek.com/article/index/257404/why-is-american-internet-so-slow


According to a recent study by Ookla Speedtest, the U.S. ranks a shocking 31st in the world in terms of average download speeds. The leaders in the world are Hong Kong at 72.49 Mbps and Singapore on 58.84 Mbps. And America? Averaging speeds of 20.77 Mbps, it falls behind countries like Estonia, Hungary, Slovakia, and Uruguay.
Its upload speeds are even worse. Globally, the U.S. ranks 42nd with an average upload speed of 6.31 Mbps, behind Lesotho, Belarus, Slovenia, and other countries you only hear mentioned on Jeopardy.
So how did America fall behind? How did the country that literally invented the internet — and the home to world-leading tech companies such as Apple, Microsoft, Netflix, Facebook, Google, and Cisco — fall behind so many others in download speeds?
Susan Crawford argues that "huge telecommunication companies" such as Comcast, Time Warner, Verizon, and AT&T have "divided up markets and put themselves in a position where they're subject to no competition."

snip


How? The 1996 Telecommunications Act — which was meant to foster competition — allowed cable companies and telecoms companies to simply divide markets and merge their way to monopoly, allowing them to charge customers higher and higher prices without the kind of investment in internet infrastructure, especially in next-generation fiber optic connections, that is ongoing in other countries. Fiber optic connections offer a particularly compelling example. While expensive to build, they offer faster and smoother connections than traditional copper wire connections. But Verizon stopped building out fiber optic infrastructure in 2010 — citing high costs — just as other countries were getting to work.

Crawford told the BBC:

We deregulated high-speed internet access 10 years ago and since then we've seen enormous consolidation and monopolies… Left to their own devices, companies that supply internet access will charge high prices, because they face neither competition nor oversight. [BBC]
Other countries have done more to ensure that the market is open to competition. A 2006 study comparing the American and South Korean broadband markets concluded:
[T]he South Korean market was able to grow rapidly due to fierce competition in the market, mostly facilitated by the Korean government's open access rule and policy choices more favorable to new entrants rather than to the incumbents. Furthermore, near monopoly control of the residential communications infrastructure by cable operators and telephone companies manifests itself as relatively high pricing and lower quality in the U.S. [Professor Richard Taylor and Eun-A Park via Academic.edu]

And the gap between the U.S. and Korea has only grown wider since then.
The idea of a regulated market being more conducive to competition may be alien to free market ideologues, but telecoms and internet is a real world example of deregulation leading to monopolization instead of competition in lots of markets.
So, many — including Crawford and others — are now calling for stronger regulation of the existing market. At The New Yorker, John Cassidy argued last month:

What we need is a new competition policy that puts the interests of consumers first, seeks to replicate what other countries have done, and treats with extreme skepticism the arguments of monopoly incumbents such as Comcast and Time Warner Cable. [The New Yorker]
But he's skeptical we'll get it, noting that: "The new head of the Federal Communications Commission, Tom Wheeler, is a former lobbyist for two sets of vested interests: the cell-phone operators and, you guessed it, the cable companies."


more at the link
think anyone is paying attention?

March 7, 2014

WP article states taht few uninsured are signing up.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/health-insurance-marketplaces-signing-up-few-uninsured-americans-surveys-say/2014/03/06/cdae3152-a54d-11e3-84d4-e59b1709222c_story.html

not sure if this is BS or not, havnt seen anything from HHS.

The new health insurance marketplaces appear to be making little headway in signing up Americans who lack insurance, the Affordable Care Act’s central goal, according to a pair of new surveys.
Only one in 10 uninsured people who qualify for private plans through the new marketplaces enrolled as of last month, one of the surveys shows. The other found that about half of uninsured adults have looked for information on the online exchanges or planned to look.

snip


The findings emerge as the Obama administration has been revising a series of rules that define how the 2010 law works in practice. According to a variety of health-policy experts who support and oppose the law, the changes are in response to consumer hesitancy and political opposition that linger — at least, in the early going — as the law’s major provisions have taken effect.
The rule changes have postponed or relaxed aspects of the law, sometimes to adjust for technical problems, other times to push into the future controversies that have arisen from specific groups of consumers or parts of the health-care industry.

snip

This week, administration officials said that people could keep for three years health plans whose benefits do not meet the law’s standards. Last week, they said the government would pay for people in certain states to collect federal subsidies for insurance policies outside the exchanges. Two weeks before that, they gave medium-size and large employers two additional years before they must offer coverage to their full-time workers.

snip

The McKinsey survey shows that of people who had signed up for coverage through the marketplaces by last month, about one-fourth described themselves as having been without insurance for most of the past year. That 27 percent, while low, compares with 11 percent a month earlier.
The survey also attempted to measure what has been another fuzzy matter: how many actually have the insurance for which they signed up. Under federal rules, coverage begins only if someone has started to pay their monthly insurance premiums. Just over half of uninsured people said they had started to pay, compared with nearly nine in 10 of those signing up on the exchanges who said they were simply switching from one health plan to another.

much more at the link.