Saturday, June 11th, 2011
KAREN CHEUNG, - FierceHealthcare.com
Stephan: Just look at the percentage of top tier companies involved, and you can see how profitable, and profit-oriented the illness profit system is, even as a growing number of Americans are cut off from health care, and even drugs are getting harder and harder to obtain. We must create a single payer system that places our health first.
Even though some hospitals and health systems in the country are consolidating or closing, a new report offers some hope for those in the healthcare industry. Seventy-six percent of Fortune 50 companies are in healthcare or have health divisions, according to a study by PwC Health Research Institute released yesterday.
Healthcare is expected to account for nearly 20 percent of the U.S. gross national product by 2019, according to PwC. Researchers attribute the boom to new products and services that consumers are willing to spend $13.6 billion of their own money on. For example, consumers are willing to spend $8.9 billion total on resources that rate physicians and hospitals, $4 billion on health-related video games, and $700 million on health apps or programs.
‘The healthcare industry is not for the fainthearted. It is a highly regulated, complex industry, built on a system of third-party payments, and operates on principles foreign to companies that have succeeded in other industries,’ said Kelly A. Barnes, US health industries leader in a PwC press statement. ‘The organizations with the greatest potential for success will be those who understand the dynamics of the industry and identify the right niche where they can play a role in making […]
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MARIE DIAMOND, - Think Progress Health
Stephan: The war on women continues. Here's how you know that this is not about abortion it is about controlling women. Notice that there is no recognition of the inherent contradicton in their argument. While these people defend zygotes, once they develop into young humans and get born... they're on their own. These same anti-abortion people do everything they can to cut prenatal care, early childhood development, school lunch programs, and a host of other efforts designed to nurture healthy children.
Longshot GOP presidential hopeful and former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum stomped for votes in Iowa on Tuesday, trumpeting his ‘culture wars
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JEREMY LEMER and CHRISTINE SPOLAR, - Financial Times (U.K.)
Stephan: More on the perpetual state of war trend. It has been going on for a decade, and is enormously profitable for a small group of individuals and corporations. For the rest of the world it is an ongoing disaster that will only end when social progressives vote in the 80% percentile range consistently.
US military operations in Libya are on course to cost hundreds of millions of dollars more than the Pentagon estimated, according to figures obtained by the Financial Times.
Robert Gates, the outgoing secretary of defence, said last month that the Pentagon expected to spend ‘somewhere in the ball park of $750m
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JOAN MCCARTER, - Daily Kos
Stephan: This is all part of the enormous transfer of wealth from the middle class to the rich.
As the deficit obsession continues, here’s some cheery news.
About 6.2 million Americans, 45.1 percent of all unemployed workers in this country, have been jobless for more than six months – a higher percentage than during the Great Depression.
The bigger the gap on someone’s resume, the more questions employers have.
‘(Employers) think: ‘Oh, well, there must be something really wrong with them because they haven’t gotten a job in 6 months, a year, 2 years.’ But that’s not necessarily the case,’ said Marjorie Gardner-Cruse with the Hollywood Worksource Center….
Here’s another problem: more than 1 million of the long-term unemployed have run out of unemployment benefits, leaving them without the money to get new training, buy new clothes, or even get to job interviews.
And, of course, the long-term unemployed not receiving benefits aren’t in a position to buy things, or drive demand that would drive new jobs. Krugman explains it better: ‘We are not, after all, suffering from supply-side problems. We don’t have high unemployment because workers lack the necessary skills, or are stuck in the wrong industries or the wrong locations; the hypothesis that we’re mainly […]
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ERIC W. DOLAN, - The Raw Story
Stephan: Some more good news on the battery front. You just can't avoid thinking, however, what could have happened if a fraction of the money given to oil companies as tax rebates had, instead, gone into alternative energy research.
A new battery design developed by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology could transform the way electric vehicles and the power grid store and discharge energy.
The MIT News Office reported that the new architecture suspends the active electrical components of a battery, such as positive and negative electrodes, as particles in a liquid. This black electric sludge, which resembles petroleum, has been dubbed ‘Cambridge crude’ by its inventors.
The new design, called a ‘semi-solid flow cell,’ could allow electric vehicles to refuel by pumping the used electric sludge out and replacing it with fully charged electric sludge. Researchers say the new battery design should also make it possible to reduce the size and the cost of a complete battery system, making electric cars more competitive with contemporary gas-powered cars.
The new battery architecture is described in a paper published May 20 in the journal Advanced Energy Materials. It combined the basic structure of flow batteries with the high energy potential of lithium-ion batteries.
‘The demonstration of a semi-solid lithium-ion battery is a major breakthrough that shows that slurry-type active materials can be used for storing electrical energy,’ Yury Gogotsi, Distinguished University Professor at Drexel University and director of Drexel’s Nanotechnology Institute, said. […]
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