Tag Archives: olympic

No, the Summer Olympics Will Not Be Leaving Rio

by Daniella76U Posted on May 19, 2016

Mother Jones

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Last week, as Brazil was grappling with the ouster of President Dilma Rousseff, University of Ottawa professor Amir Attaran called on the International Olympic Committee to postpone this summer’s Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro—or move them elsewhere—due to the continued threat of the Zika virus. He argued in the Harvard Public Health Review that exposure to the mosquito-borne virus in the heart of Rio, where he said the number of suspected cases has reached 26,000, could result in a “full-blown global health disaster” and should prompt Olympic officials to take action as a “precautionary concession.”

“Simply put,” wrote Attaran, a legal and medical scholar, “Zika infection is more dangerous, and Brazil’s outbreak more extensive, than scientists reckoned a short time ago.”

For months, would-be Olympians have expressed their concerns about the virus. Some even have refused to participate in this year’s Games. On May 12, the World Health Organization and the Pan American Health Organization reiterated a series of precautions for athletes and tourists planning on attending the Games, like avoiding impoverished and overcrowded parts of Rio and urging pregnant women to not visit Zika-stricken areas. And on Tuesday, after Attaran’s article had prompted a new level of scrutiny, WHO chief Dr. Margaret Chan told reporters the Olympics should go ahead as scheduled: “You don’t want to bring a standstill to the world’s movement of people.”

But at this point, is it even possible to move the multibillion-dollar spectacle? I got in touch with two Olympic insiders—A.D. Frazier, who served as chief operating officer of the Atlanta Olympic Committee, and Olympic historian David Wallechinsky—to see what they thought about a last-minute change. They were…less than optimistic. “Just forget it,” Frazier said. “The International Olympic Committee won’t cancel unless Rio goes completely bankrupt.” Wallechinsky was even more blunt: “I understand that this is no joke, but in terms of moving them at the last minute, unless there was suddenly an epidemic of people falling over dead in Rio, it’s not going to happen.”

Here are the three main reasons why:

It would be unprecedented. Wallechinsky, president of the International Society of Olympic Historians, noted that the only times the Olympics have been canceled were during World War I and World War II. They’ve endured violence before and during the Games: Ten days before the 1968 Summer Games in Mexico City, for example, police and military officers opened fire into a crowd of student demonstrators, killing and wounding hundreds; at the 1972 Summer Games in Munich, 11 members of the Israeli team were killed by terrorists; and in 1996, a bombing during the Atlanta Games killed two and injured more than 100. (Atlanta COO Frazier recalled being briefed about dozens of bomb threats each day during the 17-day event.)

Still, Wallechinsky admitted that Rio 2016’s Zika problem is a unique one. The closest parallel that he could think of came two years ago, when Africa’s Ebola crisis spurred concerns at the summer Youth Olympic Games in Nanjing, China. Officials from China and the International Olympic Committee announced that athletes from affected areas would not be allowed to compete in combat sports or swimming out of fear that athletes could transmit the virus. The event took place as scheduled, but three athletes were unable to compete.

There’s too much cash riding on Rio 2016. “Sponsors and the TV networks have put so much money into these Olympics being in Rio that it’s impossible to imagine moving them at this late date,” Wallechinsky said. The organizing committee, Frazier noted, would have locked in place sponsorship deals and contracts for buses, hotels, and other infrastructure long before the event. Moving the Olympics to a new host city would require advanced notice not just for top international sponsors that typically support the Games, but also for local sponsors like the ones in Brazil helping fund Rio 2016, Wallechinsky said. Local and international sponsor deals account for 52 percent of the Rio Organizing Committee’s revenue, or $962 million, making it the dominant source of funding. (The bulk of those sponsorship agreements were made in 2014, right around the time of World Cup, which was also held in Brazil.)

Earlier this year, organizers trimmed expenses by $500 million to balance its $1.85 billion operating budget, eliminating thousands of seats from venues and taking away televisions from rooms in the Olympic Village. Still, economists project that the overall costs for this year’s events could reach more than $10 billion. “You can’t just pick up and move carte blanche,” Wallechinsky said.

Possible sites would need a “pickup squad” of organizers, fast. Two years ago, rumors surfaced that organizers were considering moving the Rio Games to London—host of the 2012 Olympics—out of concern for Brazil’s preparation. But finding a replacement site at this late stage with available venues is just one piece of the puzzle, Frazier said. Preparing the surrounding roads and infrastructure for a massive influx of athletes, business personnel, and spectators, as well as coordinating a flawless 17-day spectacle in three months with thousands of contractors and vendors, would pose a virtually impossible challenge for the “pickup squad” of organizers who would have come together at the last moment.

And that’s putting aside the travel schedules for the spectators and athletes themselves, as well as the need for safe, comfortable accommodations for athletes at an Olympic village. “The village itself is too complex to start in three months,” Frazier said. “If you’re talking about 15,000 athletes and officials and their safety, do you think somebody would organize a totally secure Olympic village in three months? No, not a chance.” He added that since the Munich Games, the security of the venues and athletes’ housing has been a pressing issue for organizers. Moving an event is one thing, but Frazier noted that moving an entire Games—opening ceremony and all—is “folly.”

“You can’t do it. Two years ago, I would’ve felt differently,” Frazier said. “Today they’ve got three months to go, man. Only a fool would take on the responsibility of taking the Games away from Rio.”

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No, the Summer Olympics Will Not Be Leaving Rio

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What’s in the new McNugget? No one will tell me

by JosefinaWithnell Posted on April 27, 2016

What’s in the new McNugget? No one will tell me

By on Apr 27, 2016Share

Will someone please tell me what’s in the new McNugget? For the love of the Hamburglar, I just cannot figure it out.

An allegedly improved version of America’s favorite lump of fried poultry debuted at some 140 McDonald’s restaurants in Oregon and southwestern Washington in March, a spokesperson for the company told Crain’s on Wednesday. The new nuggets, according to the company, “are made with a simpler recipe that parents can feel good about while keeping the same great taste they know and love.” According to Crain’s, the rest of the country will get to enjoy the crispy little pillows of mystery ahead of the Olympic Games in August.

But McDonald’s has not provided any specific details about the contents of this new, “cleaner” nugget. And in the post-Chipotlegate era, how can we be sure that “simpler” necessarily means “cleaner” — or even “healthier?” Grist embarked on an investigative journey.

The first clue: A McDonald’s in Portland, Ore., shared a photo of what is presumably the new nugget. But it hasn’t responded to my questions regarding what, exactly, is pictured here:

It was time to go up the chain. I called the McDonald’s global corporate office multiple times. I left several messages with the McDonald’s U.S. corporate office. I sent an email. I even tweeted at the McDonald’s corporate account — no response, although the account tweets every few minutes at its loyal and vocal fans.

You’d think that McDonald’s, a company with a less-than-stellar transparency record, would jump at the chance to talk about the “cleaner” McNugget! But no one seems to want to tell me what makes this McNugget different than the old McNugget, and I’m certainly stumped. If you find out, I’d love to know.

UPDATE: McDonald’s got back to us! What’s in the McNugget? “100% white meat chicken, no artificial flavors or colors and our signature seasonings and crispy breading.  The Chicken McNuggets we are testing in Portland have no artificial preservatives.” Rest easy tonight, dear reader.

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What’s in the new McNugget? No one will tell me

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L’Oreal is about to 3D print human skin — because you’re worth it

by Brigida42R Posted on May 18, 2015

It puts the lotion in the basket

L’Oreal is about to 3D print human skin — because you’re worth it

By on 18 May 2015 4:06 pmcommentsShare

Here’s some The Silence of the Lambs-level horror to ruin your day: One of the most popular cosmetics brands in the world grows human skin, and is actively researching technology to increase its production. Using samples donated by French plastic surgery patients, the cosmetics powerhouse L’Oreal already raises more than 54 square feet of skin per year to test its products, which provides an alternative to animal testing. And now, to help speed up production, the company is turning to 3D printing.

Bloomberg Business has the story:

L’Oreal needs human skin. Lots of it. That’s why the French cosmetics giant earlier this month announced that it’s partnering with bioprinting startup Organovo to figure out how to 3D print living, breathing derma that can be used to test products for toxicity and efficacy. “We’re the first beauty company Organovo has worked with,” says Guive Balooch, global vice president of L’Oreal’s tech incubator.

This isn’t L’Oreal’s first foray into skin production. Looking to avoid animal testing, the company started farming derma back in the 1980s. In Lyon, France, it runs lab facilities the size of three Olympic swimming pools, dedicated entirely to growing and analyzing human tissues.

Unlike the legendary French women who can chain smoke cigarettes, eat a pound of brie a week, and still not age a day past 25, I occasionally turn to cosmetics for a Bardot-esque complexion. (Best believe this quarter-French mademoiselle is starting to see wrinkles.) So thank you, people of France, for all your breast lifts and tummy tucks that made my flawless complexion possible! Mwah.

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L’Oreal’s Plan to Start 3D Printing Human Skin

, Bloomberg Business.

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L’Oreal is about to 3D print human skin — because you’re worth it

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Beijing’s Air: Now Slightly Less Deadly

by MayaCoy245660 Posted on April 21, 2015

Mother Jones

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Finally, there might be some good news for people inhaling Beijing’s famously filthy air: It’s getting a bit cleaner, according to a new analysis released by Greenpeace today. Pollution levels in the Chinese capital have shown significant improvements, due in part to strict new pollution controls, says the environmental group, which based its analysis on new government numbers.

Beijing’s concentration of the fine airborne particles known as PM2.5—the toxic brew of industrial exhaust and chemicals that contribute to smog—declined by more than 13 percent in the first quarter of 2015 compared to the same period last year, according to the study. Cities in the neighboring province of Hebei, home to extensive heavy industries like steel production, saw their PM2.5 concentrations decrease by an average of 31 percent. Xi’an, the capital of a major coal-producing province, slashed its concentrations by 48 percent, according to the figures supplied by Greenpeace.

Why such steep declines in pollution over the past year? It’s important to keep in mind how awful the starting point was. 2014 was an especially terrible period for skies across China’s northeastern provinces, resulting in unfavorable comparisons to a nuclear winter. The air got so bad that in March 2014, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang declared “war” on smog. A year earlier, my colleague Jaeah Lee and I traveled to China to investigate its push to develop natural gas, and we saw for ourselves the extent of the environmental catastrophe playing out across the country:

While there’s room for some optimism in the new numbers, the picture painted is still pretty grim: 90 percent of the 360 Chinese cities studied by Greenpeace failed to meet the national air quality standard (that number hasn’t shifted since Greenpeace analyzed similar data from 2014). Forty percent of the cities registered air pollution levels that were twice the national standard. And even in Beijing, there’s a long way to go. The World Health Organization recommends a maximum daily concentration of 25 micrograms per cubic meter of PM2.5. That makes Beijing’s average concentrations of more than 90 micrograms per cubic meter alarmingly high.

Still, it’s a step in the right direction. “I think these trends are very positive,” said Angel Hsu, an assistant professor at Yale University who studies China’s environmental performance. But she warned that any statistics emanating from the Chinese government—the source of the pollution data analyzed by Greenpeace—should be taken with a grain of salt. “When you talk about any Chinese data, you’re always a little bit suspicious,” said Hsu, who was not involved in the Greenpeace study.

Hsu attributes the drop in Beijing’s pollution in part to the new air quality controls—the “most comprehensive to date,” she said—enacted by the city’s government, which placed curbs on vehicle use as part of a $21 billion effort to slash pollution levels 25 percent by 2017. “On the vehicle side, I think that has been potentially driving air improvement in Beijing,” Hsu said.

Last month, Beijing shut down the third of four coal-fired power plants inside the city in an effort to clear the air, though Hsu is more doubtful that the drop in pollution levels can be directly tied to reduced coal use: “Perhaps that could also be a source of the drop in PM2.5, but I’m very, very cautious about the coal consumption numbers,” she said, referring to China’s official numbers.

While Hsu said Beijing “can serve as a model for what other cities can do,” she also warned that marginal improvements in one big city could simply be pushing the problem further out into the country, as industry seeks other cities in which to set up shop.

It’s a concern Greenpeace shares. “Armed with this information, the government must now ensure that pollution is not simply relocated to other regions, and that the same strict measures enacted in cities like Beijing are actually enforced across the country,” said Zhang Kai, a Greenpeace climate and energy official, in an emailed statement.

Clean air will continue to be a crucial matter for China’s image on the world stage, as Beijing once again pitches itself as a great place to host an Olympic games—this time, the 2022 winter games. Organizers of the bid recently said $7.6 billion will be spent to fight smog.

Beijing’s reported improvement in air quality comes amid a well-publicized efforts to tackle the problem, directed from the upper echelons of the Communist Party, which sees the pall of smog across the county as a threat to the economy and to social stability for a population increasingly anxious about the environment. Awareness of the problem is on the rise: Under the Dome, a searing documentary about China’s pollution crisis, went viral in March. It attracted hundreds of millions of views before China’s official censors began playing a cat-and-mouse game of trying to ban its various online incarnations.

There’s good news elsewhere, too. Bloomberg reported over the weekend that China has recently scrapped a number of small coal plants, avoiding the release of 11.4 million metric tons of carbon dioxide. That has helped the country cut its emissions for the first time in a decade, according to Bloomberg.

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Beijing’s Air: Now Slightly Less Deadly

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Visiting My Friend in Putin’s Prison Camp

by MarquisLKA Posted on February 17, 2015

Mother Jones

My first stop at Sadovaya Prison Colony No. 2 in central Russia is the visitors’ intake center. I’ve traveled for 14 hours on an overnight train that reeked of fetid socks to see my imprisoned friend, environmental activist Yevgeny Vitishko. By my noon arrival at the colony, I’m already running late, and reams of red tape await before I’ll be able to see him.

I’ve come to these cold mud flats 440 miles south of Moscow for the first interview Vitishko has given in the seven months since February 12, 2014, the day he was sent away in the midst of the Sochi Winter Olympics.

In the years leading up to the event, Vitishko had emerged as one of the competition’s fiercest critics. Along with his little-known organization, the Environmental Watch on North Caucasus (EWNC), Vitishko protested the ecological destruction and crony Kremlin corruption that fed the $51 billion games, the most expensive in history. Now, a year after the closing ceremonies, his dire predictions of environmental havoc have come true—and Vitishko sits in prison. He has been described as the only prisoner of conscience associated with the Sochi Olympics.

Vitishko and I immediately hit it off when we first met in January 2014, in his hometown of Tuapse, 75 miles northwest of Sochi on the Black Sea. A Krasnodar court had recently sentenced him to three years in the Sadovaya penal colony on charges that he’d painted an environmental message on a fence. He remained free on the condition he not leave Tuapse until a long-shot February 12 appeal was set to be heard at a regional court.

We met up at my hotel, one of the town’s neglected Soviet-era spas. The 41-year-old geologist’s white turtleneck and tan made him look like he’s just stepped off a yacht. I hopped in his car and he sped down the narrow hill roads to his favorite coffee joint.

His looming prison sentence gave him, Vitishko said, a “nothing to lose” freedom with his words. With the opening ceremony just 13 days away, Vitishko sipped his cup of Turkish blend and rattled off the Games’ disastrous effects. The Myzmta River, once Sochi’s main water source, was poisoned by toxic construction waste. Wells had dried up, thanks to illegal quarries and dump sites; the weight of newly paved roads, trafficked nearly 24/7 for years by heavy dump trucks and digging machinery, ruined the region’s aquifers. The traffic inundated villagers with dust, affecting residents’ health, livestock, and farms. Sochi’s seaside stadiums decimated the Imereti lowlands, turning a major migratory stopover for endangered birds into a strip of Olympic venues and construction debris. But the longest lasting damage, Vitishko warned, would come from the way the government rewrote environmental law to accommodate Olympic construction.

Bridges over what’s left of the Mzymta river in Sochi Nils Bøhmer/Bellona

After seven years of gumshoeing, Vitishko was preparing to publish a report detailing such findings, cowritten with his friend Suren Gazaryan, once the Olympics kicked into full swing. (Full disclosure: I helped translate EWNC’s report into English.)

“I’m not afraid to go to jail for what I’ve said, and I probably will,” Vitishko told me that day. “If it draws the world’s attention to how the Olympics have destroyed the Black Sea area, I’ll sit in a cell. It’ll just be part of my journey.”

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Visiting My Friend in Putin’s Prison Camp

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Dot Earth Blog: Pope Francis: ‘We Are Custodians of Creation’

by Myrna Posted on May 22, 2014

Pope Francis lays out a religious and scientific argument for caring for the planet. More:  Dot Earth Blog: Pope Francis: ‘We Are Custodians of Creation’ ; ;Related ArticlesNote to Olympic Sailors: Don’t Fall in Rio’s WaterCatastrophic Floods Hit Balkans, Raising Fears for Land Mines and Power PlantsOutlasting Dynasties, Now Emerging From Soot ;

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Dot Earth Blog: Pope Francis: ‘We Are Custodians of Creation’

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Was Crimea Mainly a Diversion From Putin’s Burgeoning Olympic Scandal?

by jex34c67 Posted on March 27, 2014

Mother Jones

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Kimberly Marten suggests that the main reason for Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Crimea was entirely domestic. He needed something to divert public attention from a huge unfolding scandal:

Putin’s scandal was the corruption surrounding the Sochi Olympics. As we all know by now, the construction costs associated with Sochi facilities and infrastructure exceeded $50 billion.

….Putin has stayed in power for so long because he has been able to control the snake-pit of competing informal political networks that surround the halls of power in Russia….Members of that network told some Americans privately in 2013 that they believed some kind of reckoning over corruption in Sochi would happen this spring, perhaps when it became clear that tens of billions of dollars in state loans could not be repaid….The public might never have known or understood what was happening, but Putin would have lost face where it matters most—inside Kremlin walls, where he is supposed to be the great informal network balancer. Putin’s Crimean adventure neatly shifted the conversation to other topics, and no one is likely to bring it up again anytime soon.

….Diversion could not have been Putin’s only motive. There are certainly deep nationalist, historical, and triumphalist reasons for Putin’s actions, as Joshua Tucker wrote about here in The Monkey Cage last week. But it is striking how little Putin gained in Crimea. The region was subsidized by the rest of Ukraine, and he will now have to fund those subsidies out of the Russian state budget. Russian generators are now keeping the Crimean capital of Simferopol lit, as Ukraine turns off the electricity flowing in from the mainland. Crimea does have a crucial Russian naval base, but Putin already controlled that base without needing to occupy Crimea, because of a treaty that lasted through 2042.

The only thing that surprises me about this is that it’s presented as a novel thesis. I thought this was widely taken for granted. Obviously there were international triggers for Putin’s actions—the EU association agreement, the downfall of Yanukovich, the expansion of NATO, etc.—but it’s still striking that Putin was willing to give up so much on the international stage for something that, as Marten says, gets him almost nothing in return. By nearly any measure, Crimea simply isn’t much of a plum. If this was his idea of reasserting the Russian empire, Putin has a mighty cramped view of empire.

But it was massively popular domestically. Whatever else you can say about it, it’s certainly gotten the Russian public firmly on Putin’s side for the time being. I don’t know if anyone can say for sure that this was his primary motive—frankly, I’m not sure Putin himself even knows what his primary motive was—but it seems almost certain that it was a significant one. After all, Putin would hardly be the first world leader to shore up his public standing with a lovely little war abroad.

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Was Crimea Mainly a Diversion From Putin’s Burgeoning Olympic Scandal?

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Today We Bring You a Nerd’s Eye View of the Olympics

by Aaron Darek Posted on February 21, 2014

Mother Jones

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A couple of days ago I whined about the annoyingly widespread humanization of Olympic athletes. Enough! We all know that what’s really important about sporting events is statistics, and the more obscure the better. So here are my candidates for nerdiest Olympic coverage so far. First up is Ryan Wallerson’s look at the best athletes of the Sochi games. Not by measuring scores or times or anything normal like that, but by measuring which athlete scored the most standard deviations from the mean in their event. The winner is Poland’s Kamil Stoch in ski jumping:

Next up is a look at which countries have done the best. Not by crudely counting medals or per capita medals or any of that nonsense. This chart looks how countries have done so far compared to how many medals they were predicted to win. The big winner, at 183 percent, is the Netherlands, thanks to their kick-ass performance in speed skating. The most dismal performance so far is from South Korea, at 31 percent. But there are still two days left!

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Today We Bring You a Nerd’s Eye View of the Olympics

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The Hillary Papers: Yet Another Conservative Bombshell That Strikes Out

by Amilianp2t Posted on February 11, 2014

Mother Jones

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Jonah Goldberg watched the NBC Nightly News last night and was unhappy that they didn’t devote more time to Obama’s delay of the employer mandate. There’s a reason for that, of course: it’s not really very important and most people don’t care about it. Sure, all of us partisan junkies care about it, but that’s about it. To everyone else it’s a minor administrative rule change.

But he was also unhappy with another segment:

The highlight of the night was Andrea Mitchell’s “report” on the Washington Free Beacon’s big take-out on the “Hillary Papers.” Her discomfort was palpable. She assured viewers that the “inflammatory excerpts” weren’t necessarily in context (Mitchell the Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent for NBC who spent much of the last year covering Sarah Palin is a great stickler for context and eschews anything inflammatory). Hillary Clinton, the front runner for her party’s presidential nomination was treated like the victim. Thank goodness she didn’t joke about putting traffic cones up on the George Washington bridge!

By chance, I happened to see that segment. What struck me was less Andrea Mitchell’s “discomfort” than the fact that this supposed bombshell seemed like a total nothingburger. When it was over, I sort of shrugged and wondered what the point was. Here’s a bit of the transcript from Mitchell’s report about the Diane Blair papers:

Tonight, the once-private papers of the woman Hillary Clinton has previously described as her closest friend are getting a lot of attention….Thanksgiving, 1996, Blair quotes Clinton saying “I’m a proud woman. I’m not stupid. I know I should do more to suck up to the press. I know it confuses people when I change my hairdos. I know I should pretend not to have any opinions, but I am just not going to. I’m used to winning and I intend to win on my own terms.”

….September 9, 1998, Bill Clinton had finally admitted his relationship with Lewinsky. Blair writes of Hillary, “she is not trying to excuse him; it was a huge personal lapse.” But she says to his credit, he tried to break it off, tried to pull away.” Blair did not survive to provide context for her diary. Now Republicans say her notes are fair game.

Um, OK. Is that supposed to be damaging? The entire Beacon story is here, and I guess there are some outtakes that can be spun as unflattering toward Hillary, but that’s about it. It’s a bit of tittle tattle about who Hillary was annoyed with at various points in time, and not much more. And even that depends for its power on just how accurately Blair represented Hillary’s views.

Maybe I’m demonstrating a lack of imagination here, but I’m having a hard time seeing this as especially damaging or bombshellish. For the most part, it strikes me as confirming that Hillary was pretty much who we thought she was: tough-minded, goal-oriented, sometimes defensive, and not always sure how to handle the tsunami of invective that beset the Clinton presidency. If you’re a Hillary hater, it will be yet more evidence that she’s Satan incarnate, but for the rest of us, I’m not sure what’s really new here.

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The Hillary Papers: Yet Another Conservative Bombshell That Strikes Out

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Study: Health Care Reform Likely to Reduce Bankruptcy and Catastrophic Debt

by CaridadBollinge Posted on February 11, 2014

Mother Jones

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Today’s email brings word of an interesting new paper from Bhashkar Mazumder of the Chicago Fed and Sarah Miller of Notre Dame. They set out to measure the effect of the Massachusetts health care reform on bankruptcy and personal debt, a subject that’s topical for a number of reasons:

The Massachusetts plan is quite similar to Obamacare, so results from this study are suggestive of the impact that Obamacare will eventually have.
One of the primary purposes of universal health insurance is to relieve the financial stress of large unpaid medical bills.
Massachusetts is a good case study because its reform affected everyone, not just those below the poverty line.

The authors take advantage of the fact that health care reform had bigger effects on some groups than others. Most middle-aged people, for example, were already insured, so the Massachusetts reform affected them only modestly. Conversely, young people had relatively low insurance rates, so they were more heavily affected. Ditto for counties, some of which had higher initial rates of uninsurance than others.

The study exploits a very large data set of consumer finance based on reporting from credit bureaus, which provided a sample of nearly 400,000 individuals to look at. Its conclusion is unsurprising:

We find that the reform significantly improved credit scores, reduced the total amount past due, reduced the fraction of debt past due, and reduced the probability of personal bankruptcy. We find particularly pronounced reductions in the probability of having a large delinquency of over $5,000. These effects tend to be larger among individuals whose credit scores were low at the time of the reform, suggesting that the greatest gains in financial security occurred among those who were already struggling financially.

The charts below, excerpted from the study, illustrate the effect of health care reform, which was implemented in the period shown by the yellow bars. Despite the severe recession that followed, the amount of current debt stayed pretty flat while the amount of debt more than $10,000 past due declined sharply. Obamacare is not as universal as the Massachusetts reform, so its effects will probably be less pronounced. Nonetheless, it will not only provide routine health care for millions of Americans who aren’t currently getting it, it will also make their lives far less financially precarious. That sounds like a win to me.

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Study: Health Care Reform Likely to Reduce Bankruptcy and Catastrophic Debt

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