WASHINGTON – – President Barack Obama’s push to revamp the costly and inefficient U.S. healthcare system was facing delay even before Tom Daschle, who was chosen to head the initiative, withdrew his nomination as health secretary. With the administration and Congress preoccupied with righting the foundering economy, work on Obama’s promise to make affordable care available for all Americans has been limited in Obama’s first weeks in power. Health care reform advocates are pushing for quick action and want Congress to act by the end of the year, well before lawmakers start political maneuvering for congressional elections next year. But the Democratic-led Congress is taking longer than expected to approve Obama’s economic stimulus plan, which has topped $900 billion in the Senate, and Obama has to cope with a budget deficit some estimate could top $1 trillion this year. Creating a comprehensive plan to control soaring healthcare costs and cover 46 million uninsured Americans has eluded previous administrations and is an ambitious goal for lawmakers with so much on their plates. Daschle’s decision to withdraw from consideration as Health and Human Services Secretary on Tuesday, citing a political backlash over his late income tax payments, […]
Last summer, Keith Blessington had just been told that he was eligible for private health insurance to replace his government-funded COBRA coverage when it ran out. People Who Read This Also Read Then, the 55-year-old New Hampshire resident was diagnosed with late-stage stomach cancer, and everything changed. Although the COBRA coverage paid for most of the cost of his initial surgery, by the time he got out of the hospital having had half his stomach and eight cancerous lymph nodes removed, Blessington found himself ineligible for virtually any private health insurance, because his cancer was now a daunting preexisting condition. Blessington is still one of the lucky ones, because he managed to secure insurance through New Hampshire’s high-risk insurance pool. However, the coverage is costly, $1,120 a month to be exact. Just to survive while he was unable to work, Blessington borrowed $40,000 on his credit card and cashed out his 401K retirement plan. ‘I have enough money for another month or so to live on. My savings are gone,’ Blessington, a freelance accountant, said recently. This is just one of 20 heartbreaking stories in a new Kaiser Family Foundation/American Cancer Society report called […]
By simply laying down a 10-centimetre blanket of DIME Hydrophobic Materials sand beneath typical desert topsoils, the new super sand stops water below the roots level of the plants and maintains a water table, giving greenery a constant water supply. 3000 tons/day is already being produced. 1 ton of silicate coated sand would probably be good for 10 square meters. 4 days of production to cover one square kilometer. More factories will be needed made to scale this up to address the water crisis in the Middle East, Africa, India and China. So the sand is inside polyethylene sheets like this roll of fiberglass insulation. The waterproof sand is the filler. Some people are concerned about plastic being used on such a large scale or the environmental effect of the plastic. Yet they are also concerned that plastic will sit in landfills forever. They can select a plastic that will not decompose. This is rolls of plastic with waterproof sand buried under the topsoil to create an artificial water table. This is the first use of nanotechnology to make a major impact on a major problem. Ironically it is similar to the first product that claimed […]
Signs abound that the battered economy is causing serious damage to the mental health and family lives of a growing number of Americans. Requests for therapists have soared, Americans say they’re stressed out, and domestic-violence and suicide hotlines are reporting increased calls. There has been a sharp rise in mental trauma even among those who still have jobs: The demand for therapists surged 40 percent from June to December – driven largely by money-related fears – at ComPsych, which runs the nation’s largest employee-assistance mental-health program, says ComPsych chairman and CEO Richard Chaifetz. Nearly half of Americans said they were more stressed than a year ago, and about one-third rated their stress level as ‘extreme in surveys out in September from the American Psychological Association. That was before the stock-market dive. Meanwhile, financial advisers say they’re finding themselves in a new abnormal ‘normal. John Jones, a financial planner at ComPsych, says he’s referring many more workers to counselors. ‘They start crying. They tell me they’re not eating or sleeping. One even said about his family, ‘They’d be better off without me,’ ‘ Jones says. Many colleagues around the nation are having the same experience, he adds. […]
During the past few months, the crisis in journalism has reached meltdown proportions. It is now possible to contemplate a time when some major cities will no longer have a newspaper and when magazines and network-news operations will employ no more than a handful of reporters. There is, however, a striking and somewhat odd fact about this crisis. Newspapers have more readers than ever. Their content, as well as that of newsmagazines and other producers of traditional journalism, is more popular than ever - even (in fact, especially) among young people. The problem is that fewer of these consumers are paying. Instead, news organizations are merrily giving away their news. According to a Pew Research Center study, a tipping point occurred last year: more people in the U.S. got their news online for free than paid for it by buying newspapers and magazines. Who can blame them? Even an old print junkie like me has quit subscribing to the New York Times, because if it doesn’t see fit to charge for its content, I’d feel like a fool paying for it. This is not a business model that makes sense. Perhaps it appeared to when Web advertising […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
