Science, Technology & Health: October 2013 Archives
It's silly enough that Obamacare requires single men, infertile people, and old people to buy insurance plans that include maternity care, but don't worry! People under age 30 are exempt. Yes, the people who are most fertile and most likely to have babies are exempt from the requirement to buy insurance that pays for having babies.
[Rep. Renee Ellmers (R-NC)]: You also brought up the issue that when you were in Kansas [as health Commissioner and governor] that you fought against discriminatory issues... As far as [ObamaCare's] essential health benefits, correct me if I'm wrong: do men not have to buy maternity care?[Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius]: Policies will cover maternity coverage. For the young and healthy, uh, under ythirty year-olds will have a choice also of a catastrophic plan that has no maternity coverage.
Ellmers: But men are required to purchase maternity coverage.
Sebelius: Well, an insurance policy has a series of benefits whether you use them or not...
Ellmers: And that is why health care premiums are increasing, because we are forcing them to buy things that they will never need. Thank you.
Sebelius: The individual policies cover families. Men often do need maternity care for their spouses and for their families, yes.
Ellmers: A single male, aged 32, does need maternity coverage. To the best of your knowledge, has a man ever delivered a baby?
(HT: James Taranto.)
As a kid I had always been told that airplane wings work under the Bernoulli principle. Everyone has seen the demonstration where you hold a piece of paper under your mouth and then blow across the top: the paper rises! But airplane wings work completely differently and you only need to understand Newton's laws of motion to get it.
Hundreds of Thousands of Health Insurance Policies Canceled in California, Florida, and Pennsylvania
"If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan" said President Obama on August 11, 2009. However, hundreds of thousands of families are having their health insurance policies canceled right now. These folks are being told they have to sign up for new insurance through the Obamacare exchange, which is currently not operational.
Florida Blue, for example, is terminating about 300,000 policies, about 80 percent of its individual policies in the state. Kaiser Permanente in California has sent notices to 160,000 people - about half of its individual business in the state. Insurer Highmark in Pittsburgh is dropping about 20 percent of its individual market customers, while Independence Blue Cross, the major insurer in Philadelphia, is dropping about 45 percent.
For the families who had these policies these cancellations are a major life-changing event. Despite any opposition to Obamacare, one can only hope that these families are not too severely impacted by this completely avoidable disruption to their health care.
Some of the details surprised me, but the overall conclusion did not: even modest results from anti-aging research will be more beneficial than huge results from disease specific research. This makes sense for a couple of reasons:
- Everyone ages, but only a small number of people get any specific disease.
- The low-hanging fruit have already been picked when it comes to specific diseases, but the anti-aging field is very new. There are probably lots of "easy" discoveries waiting to be made.
An analysis, from top scientists at USC, Harvard University, Columbia University, the University of Illinois at Chicago and other institutions, assumes research investment would conservatively lead to a 1.25 percent reduction in the likelihood of age-related diseases. In contrast to treatments for fatal diseases, slowing aging would have no health returns initially, but would have significant benefits over the long term. With even modest gains in our scientific understanding of how to slow the aging process, an additional 5 percent of adults over the age of 65 would be healthy rather than disabled every year from 2030 to 2060The study showed significantly lower and declining returns for continuing the current research "disease model," which seeks to treat fatal diseases independently, rather than tackling the shared, underlying cause of frailty and disability: aging itself.
Lowering the incidence of cancer by 25 percent in the next few decades -- in line with the most favorable historical trends -- would barely improve population health over not doing anything at all, the analysis showed. The same is true of heart disease, the leading cause of death worldwide: About the same number of older adults would be alive but disabled in 2060 whether we do nothing or continue to combat cancer and heart disease individually. The findings are in line with earlier research showing that curing cancer completely would only increase life expectancy by about three years.
"Even a marginal success in slowing aging is going to have a huge impact on health and quality of life. This is a fundamentally new approach to public health that would attack the underlying risk factors for all fatal and disabling diseases," said corresponding author S. Jay Olshansky of the School of Public Health at the University of Illinois-Chicago. "We need to begin the research now. We don't know which mechanisms are going to work to actually delay aging, and there are probably a variety of ways this could be accomplished, but we need to decide now that this is worth pursuing."
The bolding above is mine. Curing cancer would only increase average life expectancy by three years? That's a surprise to me, and actually makes me worry less about cancer than I had previously.
I learned a new term this morning: "climate departure":
A city hits "climate departure" when the average temperature of its coolest year from then on is projected to be warmer than the average temperature of its hottest year between 1960 and 2005.
Assuming the data is right the article doesn't explain why climate departure in any particular city is a particularly worrisome thing. Of course the cities that will be hardest hit are in the equatorial regions -- they'll get even hotter than they are now. That sucks, but they're already too hot for me to want to live there. On the other hand...
Temperate cities in Europe and the United States look a bit better, but we're talking about a difference of maybe 20 years separating Western capitals from Kingston or Lagos. In the long run, 20 years is not much of a difference. The study published in Nature projects 2047 for Washington, D.C., and New York City -- just 34 years from now. Los Angeles will hit the mark the next year and San Francisco the year after. Even the best-off cities, such as Moscow and Oslo, have just 50 years before passing the milestone. That feels like a long time right now, but in historical terms it's not.
Do you think Moscow and Oslo will complain if they get warmer? I doubt it. Even aside from the cities, huge tracts of northern North America and Asia will thaw and become quite attractive.
The universe is not a static place. We humans need to continue to adapt to our planet, just as it adapts to us.
This WSJ article really slams the self-checkout machines at the supermarket, primarily because the customer has to use the screens to look up codes for various fruits and veggies. I find this process to be remarkably easy myself, and always use the self-checkout line unless I have too many groceries to fit on the tiny shelf.
In my opinion the author misses the primary benefits of the self-checkout line.
1. Usually people form a single line that feeds into multiple machines. With a human cashier you have to take your chances in a line that feeds to a single register. Even if some customer fumbles and stalls you won't be stopped for long because one of the other self-checkout terminals will open up.
2. Everyone pays by credit card. The machines appear to have many payment options available, but I never see anyone try to pay by check or food stamps or cash with exact change.
3. The lines never get held up for price checks or because the customer forgot to grab something.
I agree that human cashiers are better than the robots, but human customers are often terrible. Self-checkout lines repel the worst customers.
