My interest in health care policy was spurred by researching women’s health care issues and discovering more women than men die from heart disease. Heart research, however, was primarily conducted on men. I approached Cedars-Sinai Hospital and helped establish theWomen’s Heart Center there. Under the guidance of Dr. Noel Bairey Merz, the staff is conducting groundbreaking research. From this point, I naturally became interested in how the Affordable Care Act (ACA) will help women, and as a mother, how it will affect young people.

The law is particularly important to American women. Formerly, a healthy young woman could legally be charged premiums 150 percent higher than a young man of the same age and health. Pregnancy was considered a “pre-existing condition” commonly used to deny coverage for some women. Under early provisions of the ACA however, 45 million womenstarted receiving preventative services from both private insurance and Medicare. These services included prenatal care and well-baby visits, as well as mammograms, cervical cancer screenings, flu shots and domestic violence screenings. The improvements in prescription drug coverage under Medicare saved 2 million women $1.2 billion in 2011 alone. And over 1 million uninsured, young adult women were able to receive coverage through their parents.

Young people benefited at the outset. Nearly a third of young adults have no health carecoverage. Already the ACA prohibits insurance companies from denying coverage to individuals under 19-years-old based on pre-existing conditions. Young people are now free to stay on their parents’ policies until they are 26-years-old. Because of this early ACA provision, over 3 million young, previously uninsured adults gained insurance. Compare this with the 41 percent of young adults who forewent needed medical/health care because of costs prior to the ACA. Under the ACA, young people making less than $43,000 will also have tax credits available to them to make coverage affordable.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/barbra-streisand/affordable-care-act_b_4546482.html?ncid=edlinkusaolp00000003

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A Reminder For The Little People:

Barbra Streisand’s diva ways apparently extend from her performances to her palace.

Sources tell Confidenti@l the Grammy Award-winner made ridiculous and patronizing demands on interior decorators who recently worked on her $100 million Malibu mansion.

We have learned “The Send in the Clowns” singer allegedly behaved like one by constantly squabbling with workers over prices, refusing to eat while decorators were in her house, and barring workers from even looking at her.

“They were told by a friend of hers, ‘Now children, you cannot make eye contact with Babs. You know that she does not like that. Do not look at her while you’re here,’ ” reveals our source.

http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/gossip/confidential/babs-isn-fab-interior-decorators-streisand-mansion-article-1.1530397

So the more Drone missions killing babies the "more morals" he has? The more broad NSA/Snowden chasing re authorization by his signature over and over is what most Americans want because he has more morals?

In that case he is surely the most more bestest moraled American president ever  

Yes. I am an ignorant fool.

The FBI’s creeping advance into the world of counterterrorism is nothing new. But quietly and without notice, the agency has finally decided to make it official in one of its organizational fact sheets. Instead of declaring “law enforcement” as its “primary function,” as it has for years, the FBI fact sheet now lists “national security” as its chief mission. The changes largely reflect the FBI reforms put in place after September 11, 2001, which some have criticized for de-prioritizing law enforcement activities. Regardless, with the 9/11 attacks more than a decade in the past, the timing of the edits is baffling some FBI-watchers.

“What happened in the last year that changed?” asked Kel McClanahan, a Washington-based national security lawyer.

McClanahan noticed the change last month while reviewing a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request from the agency. The FBI fact sheet accompanies every FOIA response and highlights a variety of facts about the agency. After noticing the change, McClanahan reviewed his records and saw that the revised fact sheets began going out this summer. “I think they’re trying to rebrand,” he said. “So many good things happen to your agency when you tie it to national security.”

http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2014/01/05/fbi_drops_law_enforcement_as_primary_mission#sthash.dTe9DVfT.TBA85khX.dpuf

off topic of course.

Mankind is organic, fluid, predatory like its many societies through out History has proven. A form of communication replacing a type of service does not equate to the fall of all man made societies, but to improve upon.

I guess I chose to see a half full glass 

You could be right about "Ronny", but are you aware of what is happening now in reality of this world, not a parallel one?
Everything I post are what the law is doing. If you take 30 seconds of your time checking the links you will see it is not so much about making a black man look bad, but recording and pointing at the the law of unintended consequences.
I personally believe there is no way it was not by design. No one can be that bad, stupid with so much money if not on purpose. 

NO mistakes.
try this:

www.obamacare.com
www.barackobama.com

They own it. Full.

So... pessimism is driving the price of bitcoin up? NNooooo!!! 

So contraception is the solution to fight poverty?

. . . It’s so cold that the National Weather Service in Miami has issued a freeze watch for the Everglades. You know, home of alligators and giant pythons. And even alligator-eating pythons. Sub-freezing air will also extend southward across the border of Texas into Mexico.

It’s so cold that in places like Chicago, high temperatures on Monday could break current record lows.

Sure, schools are accordingly shut across the Midwest, but when Atlanta’s schools close, you know something’s a little out of hand.

Simply put, this is the kind of cold you don’t want to mess around with.



As crazy as it sounds, global warming may be at least partly to blame.



This particularly aspect of climate change science is not yet definitive, but here’s what may be going on:

1) The Arctic rapidly warming: It’s always going to be colder at the North Pole than it is in Miami, but the difference in temperature between those two places may already be shrinking. The Arctic is quickly losing sea ice, which is being replaced by relatively warmer open ocean. Liquid water tends to trap heat more effectively than ice, which in turn discourages the future formation of ice. It’s a feedback loop that is not working in our favor, and as a result, the Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the world.

2) The jet stream is slowing down: The coldest air in the Northern Hemisphere is typically trapped in the far northern Arctic by the jet stream. However, with a little help from climate change, that barrier is starting to break down. As the temperature contrast between the warmer tropics decreases, the jet stream, whichexists due to that contrast, weakens and becomes more elongated and chaotic. Think of navigating a car through slow-moving traffic: it’s a lot less straightforward to find a quick route from point A to point B.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/01/06/thank-global-warming-for-freezing-you-right-now.html

"Excessively high temperatures" are "already" harming public health nationwide, Pres. Obama declared on Nov. 1, 2013, two months before today's assault by record low temperatures.

In his executive order on climate change, Obama warned that too much rain - and not enough rain - also dictated that executive action against climate fluctuations:

"The impacts of climate change -- including an increase in prolonged periods of excessively high temperatures, more heavy downpours, an increase in wildfires, more severe droughts, permafrost thawing, ocean acidification, and sea-level rise -- are already affecting communities, natural resources, ecosystems, economies, and public health across the Nation. These impacts are often most significant for communities that already face economic or health-related challenges, and for species and habitats that are already facing other pressures."

What's more, climate control "requires" action "by the Federal Government" (as opposed to the federal government), Obama declared:

"Managing these risks requires deliberate preparation, close cooperation, and coordinated planning by the Federal Government, as well as by stakeholders, to facilitate Federal, State, local, tribal, private-sector, and nonprofit-sector efforts to improve climate preparedness and resilience; help safeguard our economy, infrastructure, environment, and natural resources; and provide for the continuity of executive department and agency (agency) operations, services, and programs."

But, today's Accuweather.com forecast warns that the imminent danger in the U.S. is cooling, not warming:

"This brutal cold will bring danger to millions from the northern Plains to the Midwest and down into the Tennessee Valley. Overnight lows are forecast to dip well below the zero-degree mark in these areas, even dropping to 30 below zero in parts of Minnesota and North Dakota."

http://cnsnews.com/mrctv-blog/craig-bannister/executive-order-excessively-high-temperatures-already-harming-public#sthash.LCjkBU8h.dpuf
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Jan. 6th 2014

Earth's mountains, while well understood in some ways, are poorly understood in others--especially when it comes to erosion. Now, scientists have taken a closer look at the coupling of climate and erosion on a global scale, revealing that under a cool climate, erosion rates increase significantly.

In order to learn a bit more about the effect of global cooling and glaciation on topography over the last three million years, the researchers compiled data from 18,000 rock samples. This allowed them to globally estimate temporal and spatial variations in erosion rates.
During mountain erosion, rocks travel from about 10 kilometers depth in the crust to the Earth's surface. During this process, the rocks cool from great depths to the surface. Thermochronology exploits small quantities of radioactive uranium contained in the rock decay in a time-dependent process. This data can converted into an erosion rate using computer models.
"On a global scale, erosion rates span four orders of magnitude in the last eight million years from one hundredth millimeter up to ten millimeters a year," said Todd Ehlers, one of the researchers in a news release.
The researchers found that six million years ago, increase of erosion rates was expressed at all latitudes, but was most pronounced in glaciated mountain ranges. This seems to suggest that glaciers played a significant role. They also discovered that erosion rates accelerated more in the last two million years with the most substantial changes at higher latitudes that have all been glaciated in the past few million years.
The findings have important implications for improving our understanding of the coupling between climate and erosion. More specifically, they show how a cooler climate can actually increase erosion rates.

The findings are published in the journal Nature.

http://www.scienceworldreport.com/articles/11893/20140101/mountain-erosion-accelerates-cooling-climate-impact-glaciers.htm
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Enough is enough! We need a new type of carbon tax. Now!

Everybody’s featuring their “graphs and charts of the year,” like The Atlantic and the Washington Post (be sure to see Vice-President Joe Biden’s “Graph of the Year” on Amtrak ridership). Well, the chart above could perhaps qualify as the “chart of the century” because it illustrates one of the most remarkable achievements in human history: the 80% reduction in world poverty in only 36 years, from 26.8% of the world’s population living on $1 or less (in 1987 dollars) in 1970 to only 5.4% in 2006. (Source: The 2009 NBER working paper “Parametric Estimations of the World Distribution of Income,” by economists Maxim Pinkovskiy (MIT) and Xavier Sala-i-Martin (Columbia University).

What accounts for this great achievement that you never hear about? AEI president Arthur Brooks explains in the video below, summarized here:

It turns out that between 1970 and 2010 the worst poverty in the world – people who live on one dollar a day or less – that has decreased by 80 percent (see chart above). You never hear about that.

It’s the greatest achievement in human history, and you never hear about it.

80 percent of the world’s worst poverty has been eradicated in less than 40 years. That has never, ever happened before.

So what did that? What accounts for that? United Nations? US foreign aid? The International Monetary Fund? Central planning? No.

It was globalization, free trade, the boom in international entrepreneurship. In short, it was the free enterprise system, American style, which is our gift to the world.

I will state, assert and defend the statement that if you love the poor, if you are a good Samaritan, you must stand for the free enterprise system, and you must defend it, not just for ourselves but for people around the world. It is the best anti-poverty measure ever invented.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ss80iuEBC6A


http://www.allenskillicorn.com/2653/greatest-achievement-human-history-never-hear/

More than 100,000 Americans who applied for insurance through HealthCare.gov and were told they are eligible for Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) remain unenrolled because of lingering software defects in the federal online marketplace, according to federal and state health officials.

To try to provide coverage to these people before they seek medical care, the Obama administration has launched a barrage of phone calls in recent days in 21 states, advising those who applied that the quickest route into the programs is to start over at their state’s Medicaid agency.

State officials, meanwhile, are racing to cope in various ways — some enrolling people based on imperfect data files they received from Washington, others mailing letters urging eligible people to contact the state to sign up.

The chaos is likely to prove temporary because of the state and federal efforts that have just begun to help people enroll and because the coverage can be made retroactive to the first of the year.

Still, the fact that some consumers learned on HealthCare.gov that they could join the two programs but are not yet in them is creating a problem for states and confusion for the consumers. The situation also offers a glimpse of the technical problems that persist with the computer system underpinning the new federal online insurance marketplace more than a month after the Obama administration announced it had largely been fixed.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/healthcaregov-defects-leave-many-americans-eligible-for-medicaid-chip-without-coverage/2014/01/04/f8ed10d2-7400-11e3-8b3f-b1666705ca3b_story.html

When you plant 5000 or 10000 trees in a region where trees were not missing to balance the human impact elsewhere, isn't that also an attack on Mother Nature? What about irrigation? What about the logistic behind those 5000 trees all the way to being adult? People with jobs, cars, restaurants feeding those people, containers with supply for those restaurants for the people taking care of the trees for years, tourists visiting the happy tree land, smiling people picking up the garbage behind them , dropping them in green bins with a "recycle" logo on, sponsored by the Coca Cola company
http://www.coca-colacompany.com/packaging/talking-trash-ocean-conservancy-and-coca-cola-help-keep-the-coast-clear

What is the carbon foot print of a counter carbon foot print enterprise anyway?

Not to worry! Those trees will be provided for free from the patented DNA banks of Monsanto...

Happy Days Are Here Again!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iL0Qt7IF8Q4

If you plan to be on obamacare (kidding as it is the law) don't forget that the system cannot process new babies in your family, death in your family, switching jobs, etc, etc.

AP:
There’s another quirk in the Obama administration’s new health insurance system: It lacks a way for consumers to quickly and easily update their coverage for the birth of a baby and other common life changes.

With regular private insurance, parents just notify the health plan. Insurers will still cover new babies, the administration says, but parents will also have to contact the government at some point later on.

Right now the HealthCare.gov website can’t handle such updates.

It’s a reminder that the new coverage for many uninsured Americans comes with a third party in the mix: the feds. And the system’s wiring for some vital federal functions isn’t yet fully connected.

http://news.yahoo.com/apnewsbreak-adding-baby-plan-not-easy-082827023--politics.html
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Your healthcare and the feds. EXACTLY what we always wanted. Lovely.

Ravenous
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JO98NMMgp0Y

The hapless Australasian Antarctic Expedition is finally homeward bound - and thousands of trees will have to be planted to offset the carbon footprint from the prolonged rescue effort.

The Russian research vessel Akademik Shokalskiy became stuck in thick pack ice some 3000km southwest of Bluff on Christmas Eve.

The 52 passengers, including six New Zealanders, spent eight days trapped before a helicopter from the Chinese ship Xue Long transferred them to Australian vessel Aurora Australis, which will take them to Hobart.

Yesterday, the Australian Maritime Safety Authority said the Xue Long's attempt to manoeuvre through the ice had been unsuccessful and it was now also beset by ice.

The expedition had pledged to plant about 800 kauri trees in Northland to cover its carbon footprint. Environmentalists believe planting trees helps to offset the impact of burning fuels such as diesel.

But former Act Party leader and Herald on Sunday columnist Rodney Hide said that would have to increase to about 5000 trees to make up for the fossil fuels burned in the rescue.

Expedition leader Chris Turney said more trees would be needed than earlier estimated but he was yet to work out how many.

Meanwhile, expedition members were "in fine spirits", and the crews still on the Akademik Shokalskiy and the Xue Long were confident they would break free of the pack ice. The scientific team had been recreating the 1911-to-1913 voyage of Australian explorer Douglas Mawson to Antarctica.

In an interview with AFP yesterday director of the French Polar Institute Yves Frenot criticised the "pseudo-scientific expedition".

Because it had run into difficulties, it had drained resources from the French, Chinese and Australian scientific missions in Antarctica, he said.

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11181470