Tag Archives: health

Obamacare Continues to Not Be Doomed

by beauwolford Posted on May 9, 2016

Mother Jones

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Veronique de Rugy predicts disaster for Obamacare once again:

The bottom line is that after slow start, insurance companies find themselves having to increase premiums a fair amount. It seems that while for now subsidies may cover the pain for individuals, they probably won’t be able to after this year, at which point insurance companies will have to stomach the full cost of their losses due to the expiration of the reinsurance and risk-corridor programs. There soon won’t be enough subsidies to offset the premium hikes.

We’ve heard this pretty much every year: insurers are requesting huge premium increases! We’re doomed! Perhaps a bit of perspective would be helpful:

Insurers lowballed their Obamacare prices initially, coming in with premiums that were less costly than CBO projections. Higher prices were always inevitable.
Every year, insurers request big increases. They don’t get them. They get moderate increases.
Whatever happens, this is the free market at work, not some defect in Obamacare. If high premiums are truly what conservatives care about, we can fix that any time we want. Just ask Canada how to do it—or Sweden or Germany or Spain or Japan or pretty much any other advanced country on the planet.

Life isn’t perfect. Obamacare isn’t perfect. Health care is an expensive service, and health care insurance is expensive too. But so far Obamacare has done a pretty good job of keeping costs reasonably well contained. I’d wait until the end of the year before yet again declaring that it’s a failure and yet again being wrong.

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Obamacare Continues to Not Be Doomed

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High-Risk Pools Don’t Work, Have Never Worked, and Won’t Work in the Future

by GaryULNmsilfnrv Posted on April 28, 2016

Mother Jones

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Even among conservative voters, Obamacare’s protection of people with pre-existing conditions has always been popular. In a recent Kaiser poll, it garnered 74 percent approval from Democrats, 70 percent approval from independents, and 69 percent approval from Republicans.

Technically, this protection is guaranteed by two different provisions of Obamacare: guaranteed issue, which means that insurance companies have to accept anyone who applies for coverage, and community rating, which means they have to charge everyone the same price. But popular or not, Paul Ryan wants nothing to do with it:

In election-year remarks that could shed light on an expected Republican healthcare alternative, Ryan said existing federal policy that prevents insurers from charging sick people higher rates for health coverage has raised costs for healthy consumers while undermining choice and competition.

….”Less than 10 percent of people under 65 are what we call people with pre-existing conditions, who are really kind of uninsurable,” Ryan, a Wisconsin Republican, told a student audience at Georgetown University. “Let’s fund risk pools at the state level to subsidize their coverage, so that they can get affordable coverage,” he said. “You dramatically lower the price for everybody else. You make health insurance so much more affordable, so much more competitive and open up competition.”

It’s true that the cost of covering sick people raises the price of insurance for healthy people. That’s how insurance works. But there’s no magic here. It costs the same to treat sick people whether you do it through Obamacare or through a high-risk pool—and it doesn’t matter whether you fund it via taxes for Obamacare or taxes for something else. However, there are some differences:

Handling everyone through a single system is more efficient and more convenient.
High-risk pools have a lousy history. They just don’t work.
Implementing them at the state level guarantees a race to the bottom, since no state wants to attract lots of sick people into its program.
Ryan’s promise to fund high-risk pools is empty. He will never support the taxes it would take to do it properly, and he knows it.

This is just more hand waving. Everyone with even a passing knowledge of the health care business knows that high-risk pools are a disaster, but Republicans like Ryan keep pitching them anyway as some kind of bold, new, free-market alternative to Obamacare. They aren’t. They’ve been around forever and everyone knows they don’t work.

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High-Risk Pools Don’t Work, Have Never Worked, and Won’t Work in the Future

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Here’s Why Kids Are Still Getting More Obese

by GregoryDittmer Posted on April 28, 2016

Mother Jones

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According to a 2015 New York Times analysis of government and private-sector data, the number of calories consumed annually by the average US child declined 9 percent between 2004 and 2013. And yet, researchers from Duke and Wake Forest have found that trend has not improved the child obesity situation.

Using body mass index data from the National Health Examination Survey, which tracks randomly selected households with health exams and surveys every two years, the researchers calculated moderate (class 1), mid-level (class 2) and extreme (class 3) obesity rates among kids aged 2 to 19. Here’s what they found, from a paper they published in the peer-reviewed journal Obesity.

From “Prevalence of Obesity and Severe Obesity in US Children, 1999-2014,” Skinner et al, 2016.

The “overweight” rate—which encompasses the above “obese” categories as well as slightly overweight kids—also nudged upward from an already-high level: 28.8 percent from 1999 to 2000, compared with 33.4 percent from 2013 to 2014, the study found. The authors broke out data by age, gender, and race, and not a single group showed a statistically significant decline in obesity or being overweight over the time frame. (The authors used standard definitions from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: Overweight kids fall between the 85th and 95th percentiles compared with peers of the same age and gender, while obesity starts above the 95th percentile.)

So, despite the above-mentioned drop in calorie intake, our kids are still packing on too much weight too fast. What gives?

I put the question to Barry Popkin, a veteran obesity researcher and professor of nutrition at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Public Health. (He wasn’t involved in the paper). He said that while kids have eased up on problematic items like sugary sodas in recent years, they’re “not shifting the quality of their diets toward healthy foods.” Instead, “we continue to see our children mainly eat what we would call junk food,” relying heavily on cookies and other grain-based sweets, along with plenty of salty snacks, fruit juice (which acts an awful lot like soda in our bodies), and other sugary beverages.

A recent analysis of another big federal data set, the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), bears out Popkin’s claim. When infants transition from baby food to solid food, they still tend to get plied with plenty of processed junk and few vegetables, the study found (more here). The report noted that 40 percent of babies get brownies or cookies, and that French fries and chips are the most common form of vegetables kids eat by the time they’re two years old.

But obesity doesn’t exist just because of individual choices by parents and kids. On the policy front, the US government “has yet to aggressively do more than try to make some minor changes in a few programs,” Popkin added. For example, Congress and President Barack Obama reformed the school food environment in important ways back in 2010, cutting down on the once-ubiquitous availability of sugary snacks and beverages, but public school cafeterias are still constrained by tight budgets to churning out plenty of highly processed food. (More here on the the modest US lunch reforms and the brewing congressional backlash against them.) In Brazil, by contrast, “70 percent of all food served in schools must be real food that is healthy,” Popkin said.

And then there are chemical factors not directly related to food choices. Chemicals like bisphenol A (BPA) and phthalates are ubiquitous in food packaging and all manner of consumers products; yet there’s “strong mechanistic, experimental, animal, and epidemiological evidence” that at tiny doses they mess with our endocrine systems and can trigger obesity and diabetes, warns the Endocrine Society. Kids can be saddled with a higher risk of obesity before they’re even born, when their pregnant moms are exposed to BPA.

Add all of this to stubbornly low rates of physical activity among kids and the long decline of time and resources devoted to physical-education classes and even recess, and it’s no wonder our childhood obesity problem persists.

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Here’s Why Kids Are Still Getting More Obese

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Flint and America’s Corroded Trust

by EmersonDingle Posted on April 26, 2016

Mother Jones

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It’s been the subject of protests and debates, but if anything is improving in Flint, Michigan, it’s hard for any of us on the ground to see.

One of the city’s lead pipes has been replaced for the benefit of the press, but more than 8,000 additional service lines are likely corroded and still leaching toxic lead. It took a mom, a pediatrician, and a professor in Virginia to discover Flint’s children were being poisoned. It took cable television to get the nation to give a damn.

Sabrina Hernandez bathes her granddaughter, Hazel, with bottled water.

And that’s not all. An outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease has killed at least 9 people and infected 87 others over the last two years. The state knew. The city knew. The county knew. The federal government knew. But the public was never told. Legionella bacteria may still be in pipes and hot-water heaters, waiting for warm weather to spawn. People are frightened in this hardscrabble town of 99,000 about an hour’s drive north of Detroit. And still, the government tells them nothing.

The city’s pipe inspector at the water plant won’t return calls.

The county health director won’t come to his door.

The mayor is busy in a meeting with Jada Pinkett Smith.

Republican Gov. Rick Snyder gives interviews assuring citizens that the water is now safe for washing and tells me he would bathe his own grandchildren in it. The governor has no grandchildren.

The iconic Vehicle City sign hangs over the entrance to downtown Flint.

On February 19, the Rev. Jesse Jackson led more than 500 people past abandoned General Motors plants to the Flint water tower in protest of the water crisis in Flint.

That irony is not lost on Sabrina Hernandez, a 39-year-old bartender who is helping raise her one-year-old granddaughter, Hazel. In January, state health inspectors came to the downtown bar where Hernandez works and instructed staff not to serve ice cubes or rinse lettuce with city water. Hazel, on the other hand? Well, go right ahead and rinse her off, the governor declares.

“It’s like living in a Third World country,” Hernandez says. “What are they going to do to us next? It makes you think, was this because we are poor?”

A nighttime raid. A reality TV crew. A sleeping seven-year-old. What one tragedy in Detroit can teach us about the unraveling of America’s middle class.

It would be easy to blame Snyder for this man-made catastrophe. And he does deserve much of the blame. Flint is the consequence of his bookish managerial style, his insistence on “relentless positive action.” And it was Snyder who stripped Flint’s mayor and City Council of power and replaced them with a string of emergency managers who had absolute authority over Flint’s finances and political decisions. It was Snyder’s emergency manager who, in a cost-saving measure, decided to go off the Detroit water system and pipe in water from the notoriously polluted Flint River instead.

Snyder knew the water was bad. Everybody knew the water was bad. E. coli and boil notices and mysterious rashes were immediately the stuff of headlines. Michigan officials began secretly trucking in water for a state building in Flint. The water from the Flint River was so corrosive that General Motors workers noticed it rusted their parts. After six months, GM switched its plant back to using Detroit water.

The Flint City Council soon voted to do the same, but the vote was ceremonial. The City Council had no real influence anymore. Jerry Ambrose—Flint’s fourth emergency manager in less than four years—vetoed the resolution, calling it financially “incomprehensible.”

Flint residents at an environmental rally at the First Trinity Missionary Baptist Church. Also in attendance was hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons, one of many celebrities to visit the city after its water crisis made headlines.

Locals wait to enter First Trinity Missionary Baptist Church for an environmental rally with Mayor Karen Weaver and celebrity Russell Simmons. A number of high-profile celebrities have gone to Flint since the water crisis became national news.

Volunteers hand out free cases of water.

In fairness, Flint has a long history of being financially incomprehensible. In 2002, hollowed out by three decades of industrial decline, Flint had a $30 million operating deficit. The mayor was recalled and an emergency financial manager was installed. Even though power was returned to elected officials, the books were never balanced and the city routinely blew multimillion-dollar holes in its budget. The new mayor, accused of bribery and lying about the city’s finances, resigned for “health reasons.” Enter Snyder and his band of bean counters.

All the while, Detroit’s water utility was fleecing Flint, charging one of the poorest cities in the United States an average of $910 a year per household, nearly three times the national average. It is worth remembering that former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick was sentenced to 28 years in federal prison for, among other things, bid-rigging in the water department.

Dusable Lewis, 18, showers in his house in northern Flint. Dusable lives with his mom and his son Dusable Jr., who is less than a year old. Until last month, the baby and his mother had been drinking the Flint water.

So in 2013, Flint’s civic leaders pushed for the construction of their own water system running parallel to Detroit’s. It wasn’t necessary; Detroit’s water was perfectly fine, if overpriced. But think of the jobs. Think of the money. The chamber of commerce wanted it. The trade unions wanted it. The contractors wanted it. The Democratic City Council rubber-stamped it. So did the Democratic mayor. And so, the Republican governor’s people signed off on the new multimillion-dollar water system even though Vehicle City was broke.

How would Flint pay for this redundant infrastructure when it had no money? Simple, borrow the money from Hazel’s future. Then raise her grandmother’s water bill—charging even more for the substandard Flint River water than for the Detroit water.

The savings to the city would be funneled back into upgrading Flint’s mothballed water treatment plant as well as provide a revenue stream toward the new water system. Just one problem—the necessary upgrades weren’t made to the old plant before people were served water from a river known as a dumping ground for corpses and car batteries.

After 18 months of denials from Snyder’s bureaucrats, Flint went back on Detroit’s water system in October last year. Hazel’s grandmother is still being overcharged. Of course she is: Those bond payments begin this year, and if Flint defaults it could create another financial emergency, and the city might once again go back into the hands of a Snyder-appointed emergency manager. Last week, Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette indicted three mid-level managers for covering up the extent of the problem, and Synder promised to drink the water for a month to assuage fears. But public trust is already corroded.

The Flint River during a snowstorm. Many of the residents I spoke with couldn’t believe that the Flint River was even considered a source of water. It‘s long had a reputation as a place to abandon cars, dead bodies, and pollutants.

Guests receive bottled water with personalized labels at a girl’s birthday party.

Police lights illuminate a sign warning residents that boiling water does not remove lead. These billboards can be found all over Flint.

Flint’s water crisis has become a symbol that resonates across America—but a symbol of what? Of working­-class decline? Disregard for a majority-black population? Bloated government? The push to cut and privatize public services? Even as Flint became front-page news and federal water safety protocols were exposed to be laughable, the Obama administration proposed slashing a quarter of a billion dollars from the Environmental Protection Agency’s testing budget to help meet spending cuts imposed by Congress. Experts warn there are many other cities—Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Newark, New Jersey, for instance—with water that is as bad or worse.

Is Flint an outlier or a harbinger of a Mad Max future of crumbling roads, joblessness, and poisoned water? One thing is for sure: The rage felt by the residents of Flint is little different from the rage felt in other quarters of America—the feeling that you’re losing ground, that the deck is stacked against you and the people on top don’t give a damn.

“I don’t want to sound like a conspiracy theorist or anything,” Hernandez says. “But it makes me wonder if it’s not intentional. This community, we don’t have a voice. Nobody listens to the poor people that are, you know, barely making it.”

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Flint and America’s Corroded Trust

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Should I Throw This Out? A Complete Guide to Storing Pantry Items

by ThorstenLeake3 Posted on April 24, 2016

Make healthy home cooking a habit by stocking the essentials.

Americans spend less time cooking than people in any other developed nation. Only 60 percent of U.S. dinners were cooked at home last year, and about one-third of Americans eat fast food weekly.12

Theres nothing wrong with eating out occasionally. But studies and anecdotal evidence suggest that home cooking encourages healthier eating.3In one study of 9,500 people, the group who cooked the most consumed more fiber, fewer carbohydrates, and less sugar.4Cooking is probably the most important thing you can do to improve your diet. Its the collapse of home cooking that led directly to the obesity epidemic,says Michael Pollen, food activist and author ofCooked: A Natural History of Transformation.5

Cooking from scratch not only encourages healthier eating but can also help save money, and it may be better for the environment, especially if a home chef chooses sustainable ingredients when possible.67The best reasons to cook at home are simple: its pleasurable and the results are often delicious. In fact, 80 percent of Americans say that they enjoy cooking.

So why are people taking to the kitchen less regularly? Perhaps because it requires planning. A spin through the drive-through or stroll down the chip aisle is tempting when the cupboards are bare. Thus, a well-stocked pantry, refrigerator, and freezer can help make cooking on a regular basis easier and more enjoyable. The first step is to take stock of whats already there.

Assess the Reserves

Nearly all food products can go bad, and less-than-optimal conditions can speed up the process. Take inventory by examining and smelling whole grains, flours, oils, nuts, seeds, herbs, and spices. Toss anything that looks bad, smells rancid, is expired, or has lost color or potency.

Then list what needs to be replaced and what additional staples will make cooking easier. Focus on items that can be incorporated into multiple meals. Stumped? List 10 meals that you regularly prepare (or would like to) and the required ingredients. Though many items should be bought fresh, such as milk products and produce, almost everything else are excellent candidates to buy in large quantities and keep on hand in a pantry, refrigerator, or freezer.

Stock the Staples

Use the following list of basic ingredients and storage tips to guide your own individualized inventory of essentials.

Note:the expiration dates are estimated assuming that a pantry meets optimal conditions. Food can have a significantly shorter shelf life in warmer, brighter, and humid environments, such as a cupboard near the stove, hot pipes, heater, or refrigerator.

Dry Goods

Transfer dry goods to airtight glass or stainless steel containers and mark with purchase dates. Weevil larvae, the microscopic eggs of small insects, are often present in grain products. To eradicate them, freeze flours for four days before storing.8

Dry Herbs, Spices, and Seasonings

For the best bargains and freshness, buy seasonings in the bulk section and transfer them to small, airtight glass jars away from the stove. Buy spices whole when possible and grind with a coffee grinder as needed. Keep larger quantities of frequently used seasonings, such as salt, pepper, cinnamon, and chili powder. For the rest, buy in small quantities or store larger quantities in the freezer and transfer them to the spice rack as needed.9

Oils, Nuts, and Seeds

These foods are fragile and degrade when exposed to air, light, and high temperatures.10For that reason, buy only what you can use before the expiration date. Keep water out of oil jars to prevent mold growth. Smell oils, nuts, seeds, and nut butters before eating and toss any that smell rancid.11

Liquid Condiments

With a few exceptions (notably broth, mayonnaise, and horseradish), opened condiments can be kept at room temperature, but most of them retain flavor and last longer in the refrigerator. Store condiments in the door of the fridge, which is too warm for milk or eggs.12Shake or stir before using.

Canned and Jarred Goods

These items can have long shelf lives, but they are safest, most nutritious, and taste best when eaten within the first year of storage. As a rule, high-acid foods such as tomatoes and sauerkraut expire before low-acid items like beans.13To preserve flavor in leftover canned goods, transfer them to a glass or plastic storage container for refrigeration and eat within three to four days.14

Spoiled canned and jarred food may contain the dangerous botulinum toxin, which causes a rare but serious illness if ingested. To be safe, examine cans and jars before opening. Do not open or eat the contents of:

Bulging cans
Rusted cans
Cans with dents in the seams
Jars with air bubbles
Jars containing discolored or moldy food15

Root Cellar Vegetables

Store onions, garlic, and shallots in paper bags punched with holes. Keep potatoes in covered, ventilated baskets, boxes, or bags. They can be kept in the pantry, but for extended freshness, store them in a cold room, such as a basement, that stays between 40 and 60.

Once you have a list, its time to shop. Ingredients in grocery store bulk bins are often cheaper and fresher than pre-packaged ingredients. A local co-op, buying club, or wholesale club may offer even better deals on bulk items. Filling up the pantry may feel daunting and expensive if the shelves were sparse to begin with. Remember, buying in bulk can save money in the long run, especially if it prevents pricy restaurant trips. But items must be stored properly and used before they expire to get the most bang for your buck.

Create a system to take regular inventory and routinely replenish supplies. Tech-savvy home chefs can download one of the many pantry-management smart phone apps designed to help home cooks take stock of ingredients. Old-fashioned pen and paper works great, too. Just make a list of items that need to be stocked monthly, quarterly, yearly, and longer. Then routinely check the quantity and quality of supplies.

Cooking is a creative pursuit that activates the senses and relieves stress.16It encourages people to connect with their food and nature and gather around the table to savor delicious meals. A well-stocked pantry expands options and allows for inventive meals all week long.

Written by Abby Quillen. Reposted with permission from Fix.com.

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.

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Should I Throw This Out? A Complete Guide to Storing Pantry Items

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Earth Week Daily Action: Eliminate 3-5 Toxic Personal Care Products

by MitziDalgleish6 Posted on April 22, 2016

Less is more when it comes to how many creams, lotions, soaps and fragrances you use on your body.

That’s because, the less you use, the more money you’ll save and the healthier you’ll be. Earth Week is the perfect time to take stock of what you use and cut back 3-5 that you don’t really need.

Why bother?

Most personal care products contain a worrisome cocktail of questionable if not downright dangerous chemicals that have been linked to cancer, reproductive failure, learning disabilities and asthma.

Here are some of the worst ingredients your products may contain:

Phthalates – Phthalates are industrial compounds that soften plastics. But they also give perfume its slightly oily texture, give hair sprays their oomph and are found in nail polish and many other products. The problems with phthalates are well documented and include links to abnormal development of reproductive organs in baby boys and premature breast development in young girls, among other ills.

Parabens – Parabens are a preservative common in cosmetics and personal care products. Parabens havealso been linked to allergic dermatitis and skin rashes, and have been found in breast cancer tissue.

Synthetic Fragrances – Fragrances and preservatives are the main ingredients in cosmetics. Ironically, fragrances are also the most common cause of skin problems, like contact dermatitis. They also trigger asthma and less dangerous responses, like sneezing and itchy eyes. More than 5,000 different kinds of fragrances are used in makeup, shampoo, soap and lotion.

Triclosan – Public health officials are raising alarms about this chemical because its antibacterial properties may be giving rise to a group of “super germs” that cannot be controlled by available antibiotics. Doctors believe it’s important to build up natural resistance to germs, but triclosan inhibits our ability to do so.

Next Steps

During Earth Week, go into your bathroom and put every single cosmetic and personal care product you use out on the counter. Deodorants, mascara, shampoo, body lotion, foundation, blush, acne treatment, insect repellent, sunless tanning lotion, antiaging cream…put it all out where you can see it and get the full scope of what you’re buying and applying.

You should notice two things:

First, there may beat least 20 products you put on your body almost every day, and as many as 40 you use regularly!

Second, many of those products are “doubles,” in the sense that you may be using two or more products at the same time, when one would do just fine.

Weed out the doubles. Do you need a face cleanser, a face toner, a face serum and a skin “brightener?” Wouldn’t it be just fine to wash your face, put on a little lotion and then whatever make-up you feel you need?

Speaking of make-up, do you need lotion, foundation, blush AND bronzer? Since so many foundations have lotion in them and so many bronzers add blush to your cheeks, can you just use those two?

Look at everything you use and get rid of the doubles (or triples).

Now, check ingredients. Again, put everything aside that contains phthalates, synthetic fragrances, parabens and triclosan.

If that gets rid of just about everything you use, don’t worry. You can get started on a new path to using fewer but healthier products as soon as you clean out the cupboard.

You can find safer products at most food coops, online, and at health food stores. Care2 has also pulled together lots of recommendations. Check out these posts to help you set up a better beauty and health regimen.

Related:
 Get the Lead Out of Your Lipstick
12 Non-toxic Nail Polish Brands
Good Scents: Natural Perfumes
DIY Deodorant Recipe That Works

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.

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Earth Week Daily Action: Eliminate 3-5 Toxic Personal Care Products

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Obamacare Notches Another Win. Are You Tired of Winning Yet?

by Maurici0519 Posted on April 5, 2016

Mother Jones

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I’ve mentioned before that one of the reasons Obamacare signup rates are below projections is because employer coverage is above projections. Back in 2010, analysts assumed that employers would steadily drop health coverage and simply pay their employees to buy insurance on the exchanges. But that hasn’t happened—and that’s a good thing.

Now the New York Times has joined the party, so maybe everyone else will start to get this too:

The surprise turnaround adds to an emerging consensus about the contentious health law: It has not upturned the core of the country’s health insurance system, even while insuring millions of low-income people.

….About 155 million Americans have employer-based health insurance coverage in 2016, according to an analysis released by the Congressional Budget Office last month. The number will fall to 152 million people in 2019, the C.B.O. estimates, but will remain stable through 2026. Slightly more than half of people under 65 will be enrolled in employment-based coverage.

Employers seem to be staying the course even more strongly than they did before the law. The percentage of adults under 65 with employer-based insurance held firm for the last five years after steadily declining since 1999, according to an analysis of federal data released last month by the Kaiser Family Foundation, which closely tracks the health insurance market.

The CDC has been tracking health coverage for years, and their numbers show that private coverage (not including exchanges) has gone up since Obamacare went live. These numbers include both employer coverage and private coverage purchased off-exchange, but employer coverage is by far the biggest component and there’s no special reason to think that off-exchange individual coverage has increased much. This provides a very strong indication that the employer market has stayed healthy, and the CBO report confirms this.

If you want to know how Obamacare is doing, don’t look at Obamacare enrollments compared to early projections. Instead, look at the total uninsured rate compared to early projections. That’s the only number that provides a comprehensive look at all forms of health insurance and how they’ve done compared to predictions. When you do that, you’ll find that Obamacare is actually doing a little better than anyone thought it would.

To paraphrase a prominent politician, I wonder if Obamacare’s critics are tired of losing all the time? If so, come on over to the side of light and goodness. You’ll win so much you’ll get tired of winning.

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Obamacare Notches Another Win. Are You Tired of Winning Yet?

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The unexpected ways climate change harms your health

by AlyciaX57289953 Posted on April 4, 2016

A man rests during a heat wave in Manhattan, New York. Reuters/Eduardo Munoz

The unexpected ways climate change harms your health

By on 4 Apr 2016commentsShare

Climate change is bad for your health. There’s no question that the impacts of a warming world — harsher heat waves, increased flooding — will put a strain on our nation’s public health. Take one example: studies predict some 11,000 additional heat-related deaths during summers about 15 years from now.

But other health-related climate consequences have proven more difficult to tease out and thus more difficult to quantify. The White House released a scientific report on Monday that draws on research from eight federal agencies to provide the most comprehensive look yet at climate’s health impacts.

“I don’t know that we’ve seen something like this before, where you have a force that has such a multitude of effects,” U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy told reporters when previewing the report. “As far as history is concerned, this is a new type of threat that we’re facing.”

Here are some of the more unexpected consequences of climate change identified in the report:

Americans are at greater risk of eating contaminated food. Higher temperatures and more extreme weather create perfect conditions for dangerous contaminants to make their way into the food supply. For example, researchers found a link between higher ocean temperatures and mercury accumulation in seafood. Warmer weather and flooding also raises the chance for foodborne illnesses like salmonella.

More of the water we drink may be unsafe. The same problems in food affect water quality, with extreme weather and floods raising the risk of bacteria, pathogens, and other contaminants. Plus, higher temps give harmful algae the opportunity to thrive in new, more widespread parts of the country. Compounding the problem is when flooding overwhelms our existing and quite creaky water infrastructure.

Mosquitoes and ticks will be more than an itchy nuisance. Mild winters and early warmer seasons allow insects to travel further and faster, carrying illnesses like Lyme Disease with them.

Disasters will compromise mental health for already-vulnerable populations. Just think about the stress that extreme weather events like Hurricane Katrina or Superstorm Sandy add to people’s lives: displaced families, economic losses, ruined livelihoods. For children, the elderly, and pregnant women, who are among the most vulnerable, these conditions can lead to post-traumatic stress, anxiety, and depression.

The air you breathe is dirtier. Fossil fuels make our air dirtier — that’s obvious. But greenhouse gases can impact air quality in other ways. Climate change affects weather and precipitation patterns, changing how smog and particulate matter moves over cities. More wildfires add pollution  to the air, too.

Lives are literally at stake if we don’t act on climate change. Even a small global change in average temperature can hurt people at the extremes, and the same holds true for health — affecting the poor, indigenous, very young, and very elderly people the most.

“The public health case for climate action is really compelling beyond words,” Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Gina McCarthy said. “It’s not just about glaciers and polar bears. It’s about the health of our kids.”

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The unexpected ways climate change harms your health

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Is This the Most Astonishing Obamacare Result Ever?

by DonnieDeLaConda Posted on March 31, 2016

Mother Jones

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Phil Price points us today to an intriguing chart from the Department of Health and Human Services. It shows readmission rates within 30 days of a hospital stay for Medicare patients—including both “official” readmissions and short-term “observations”—and it’s pretty stunning. When Obamacare passed, readmission rates started to fall dramatically almost instantly. They fell most sharply for a subset of conditions specifically targeted by Obamacare, and by a smaller amount for other conditions. If this is accurate, it means that hospitals could have done something about readmission rates all along, but they just hadn’t bothered. Only after Obamacare provided an incentive to get their readmission rates down did they do anything about it.

So how should we think about this? I’ll confess to some skepticism because the chart is almost too perfect. For four years the readmission rate is dead stable. Then, in a single month between December 2010 and January 2011 it suddenly drops by a full percentage point, and continues dropping for two years. This decline started about eight months after the passage of Obamacare, and it’s hard to believe that hospitals could react that quickly.

Then, the very instant that penalties begin for high readmission rates, everything stabilizes again. Apparently America’s hospitals unanimously decided that once they’d hit a certain level, that was good enough and they wouldn’t bother trying to improve even more.

Maybe. But even for those of us who believe in incentives, this is the damnedest response to a new incentive I’ve ever seen. I guess my advice is to treat this with cautious optimism. It looks like a great result, but as with most Obamacare outcomes, it’s too early to tell for sure how things are going to work out. When we have five or ten years of experience, we’ll start to be able to draw some concrete conclusions. Until then, we can say how things seem to be going so far, but not much more.

Excerpt from:

Is This the Most Astonishing Obamacare Result Ever?

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3 Laws Congress Needs to Pass to Reduce Toxic Chemicals

by ChristeEAW Posted on March 28, 2016

Toxic chemicals are abound in many of the most common products we use every day. From breast cancer and reproductive failure to attention deficit disorder and various birth defects, we know that toxic chemicals can harm our health and impact future generations.

Though some laws are already on the books to reduce our exposure to these dangerous compounds, much more is needed to keep us safe and healthy. Here are three laws Congress can and should pass that would reduce our toxic exposures.

Overhaul the Toxic Substances Control Act – “TSCA” (pronounced toss-ka) was passed in 1976 to regulate the chemicals used in everyday products. However, when TSCA was passed, we knew far less about the impact chemicals have on our bodies, and there were fewer chemicals in circulation. Today, there are over 80,000 chemicals on the market. Only 200 have been tested for safety, reports Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families. And current law allows chemical manufacturers to keep the ingredients in some compounds secret, so it’s hard for consumers to know what they’re actually exposed to. A broad coalition of health, environmental and consumer organizations is urging Congress to reform TSCA by:

* Clearly requiring the law to protect the public and the environment from unsafe chemicals

* Require the Environmental Protection Agency to assess various chemicals and empower EPA to order companies to test the toxicity of their chemicals.

* Expedite the regulation of particularly toxic chemicals which bioaccumulate in our bodies, with a particular focus on PFOA, the chemical in Teflon-type products and asbestos

* Give consumers the right to know what they’re exposed to.

You can read a complete description of the demands the public is making to strengthen TSCA here.

Pass a strong Personal Care Products Safety Act – Currently, the personal products we use, like shampoo, soap and cosmetics, are regulated by provisions of the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act, which was passed over 75 years ago in 1938. The law was engineered by the cosmetics and personal care products industry so thatthe US Food and Drug Administration was NOT given the authority to require ingredients used in these products to be tested for safety. “As a result,” says Jamie McConnell, Director of Programs & Policy at the non-profit research organization Women’s Voice for the Earth, “today it is perfectly legal for cosmetics to contain harmful ingredients like formaldehyde (a known carcinogen), toluene (linked to birth defects), phthalates (also linked to birth defects and reproductive harm), styrene (a carcinogen), and even lead (a potent neurotoxin).”

Women’s Voices and many other health advocacy groups are urging Congress to pass a strong Act that:

* Gives the FDA the authority to get unsafe products off the shelves

* Directs the FDA to assess the safety of a minimum of 5 cosmetic chemicals a year, including those that contain formaldehyde

* Requires full ingredient disclosure, as well as a domestic telephone number or email on product labels to make it easy for consumers to find out what’s in the products they buy.

You can see a complete rundown of the recommended strong provisions for the Act here.

Require GMO Labeling – Right now, companies are not required to let consumers know when the food they produce is made with ingredients tainted by genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Earlier this year, industry attempted to pass legislation dubbed the “DARK” act, because it would have explicitly “Denied Americans the Right-to-Know.” That legislation was defeated, but companies still don’t have to disclose the presence of GMOs in their products. Several states, including Vermont, Connecticut and Maine, and 65 countries around the world, including all of the European Union, Russia and even China, require labeling. Polls show that nearly 90 percent of Americans support labeling to indicate the presence of GMOs.

Legislation has been introduced in the Senate that would ensure that consumers can find GMO ingredient labeling on food packaging. The “Biotechnology Food Labeling Uniformity Act” would specifically:

* Enable Americans to see whether a food has been prepared with GMO ingredients

* Require manufacturers to disclose the presence of GMOs

You can learn more about the benefits of GMO labeling, and keep abreast of the status of legislative action, on the Just Label It website.

Related
5 Shocking Facts about Your Cosmetics
4 Potential Health Risks of Eating GMO Foods

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.

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3 Laws Congress Needs to Pass to Reduce Toxic Chemicals

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