Mess with Texas

You might already know that Texas has the highest percentage of uninsured in the country (25%). That rate is a bit inflated because it counts many illegal immigrants, but that's the reality of the situation (and one shared by many border states). It affects hospital emergency rooms and the insurance premiums that Texans pay. It affects how long you will wait in an emergency room if you need urgent care.

The Austin American-Statesman has a pretty recent article about the plight of several Texans who are without health insurance or have gone without it for some time and suffered financial and/or health-related hardship because of it. It's pretty easy to imagine this happening to a friend or relative.

Whatever you think of the politics of the situation, you'd better protect yourself. Health insurance is not a luxury. It should be as much of a priority as keeping the lights on in your house and food in the fridge. You should not have leather seats in your car or a DVD player or expensive new jeans but no health insurance.

Something has to change in the Lone Star State.

Google Continues Its Plans to Take Over the World

Google has just entered into an agreement with the Cleveland Clinic to develop its personal health record (PHR) platform.

I haven't completely made up my mind, but if we're pushing for portability and independence, then I think that is probably better than having what's also known as an electronic health record (EHR) with one's insurer.

Aetna has a seemingly comprehensive (and I believe the first of such depth) personal health record system that Aetna members may use, and to which their health care activity is automatically added. Members may supplement that with their own entries about family medical history and other pertinent information.

But what if you want to change insurers? If you keep it on Google with your photos and email and other stuff, then it's probably worth the extra work of putting the information in yourself. You may read an article here about Google's plans with the Cleveland Clinic or check out Aetna's PHR here.

Usual and Customary

How do you like the banner ad above this post? Ha ha.

New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo has filed a lawsuit against UnitedHealth Group, as well as subpoenaed the other major insurers in the Empire State regarding pricing practices. When an insured person goes to a health care provider outside of his or her network, reimbursement is based on what are called "usual and customary" rates. Well, there is an obvious conflict of interest if the company that calculates those figures is owned by UnitedHealth.

From the New York Times -

"Citing an example of what he said was a pattern of underpaying for care, Mr. Cuomo said his office had compared the prevailing market rate for a doctor visit to the amount Ingenix had calculated as usual and customary. While doctors in the metropolitan New York City area typically charged $200 for an office visit, he said, Ingenix calculated the rate at only $77. Under a typical plan, the insurer would pay 8o percent of the $77, or only $62. The patient was responsible for covering the remaining $138 balance."

This is a very good reason to get to know the details of your health insurance plane. Once you have an emergency, it's often too late to figure it out until after the bill arrives. That is one of the reasons consumer-directed health plans are effective. They get people thinking about these potential problems before they occur.

Not Just for the Tast of It

Remember that great ad campaign?



"Researchers have found a correlation between drinking diet soda and metabolic syndrome — the collection of risk factors for cardiovascular disease and diabetes that include abdominal obesity, high cholesterol and blood glucose levels, and elevated blood pressure."

This is likely to be another one of those correlations that is not causal. Read the article in the New York Times.

Gastroeconomic Expansion

This is a very interesting past article in the Washington Post -

"Why America Has to Be Fat"

If you take the time to read it, you'll find some startling statistics. You'll also learn that because of how well our economy provides for so many, we now consume more calories than we expend. As the author puts it, "we use[sic] to be paid to exercise at work, now we pay to exercise after work".

So, since we don't exercise at work and we have lots of cheap, high-calorie food around, I guess we have to pay to exercise during our free time. That's just the way it is. There's no miracle gimmick that will let us out of that reality.

Can You Hear Them Now?

From Reuters -

"Heavy Cell Phone Use Tied to Poorer Sperm Quality"

There hasn't been a cause-and-effect relationship determined by the study done by Cleveland Clinic researchers, but I think there just has to be something bad going on with cell phones next to our brains or in our pockets next to our other ones. I don't know what to tell you about how to avoid this. I keep my phone on my desk when I'm at work, rather than in my pocket. I've also tried to replace talking with sending text messages (the verb "texting" sounds awkward to me).

Maybe it's just that nature made dorky people like that Verizon guy with low sperm counts and they happen to spend more time on the phone than having face-to-face conversations.

Writing It Down

From a Good Housekeeping article posted on WebMD -

"When researchers from Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Research followed more than 2,000 dieters who were encouraged to record meals and snacks, they found that the single best predictor of whether a participant would drop weight was whether the person kept a food diary. It trumped exercise habits, age, and body mass index. The number of pounds people lost was directly related to the number of days they wrote in their log. (It's no coincidence that Weight Watchers, one of the most successful diet programs, asks participants to track what they eat.)"

Calorie Counting

New York City's Board of Health is pushing for restaurants with 15 or more locations to display the caloric content of menu items. The reason is that most people have no idea how many calories are in many of the things they regularly eat.

Restaurants associations, of course, don't want people to eat less. They don't want people to be dissuaded from eating rich, salty, mmm rich and salty, where was I? Oh yeah, restaurants and their associations would rather people be kept in the dark and continue to eat regularly meals that they should have only once in a while. I've mentioned Cheesecake Factory as a prime offender, where single menu items often contain an entire day's worth of calories and even more fat, and whose management refuses to list nutritional information for the food it serves.

"'Most people underestimate calorie content by a lot,' said Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, the city’s health commissioner, adding that he considered the rules a potent weapon in the crusade against rising obesity rates. 'Even dietitians get a lot of it wrong.'"

Ten Commandments of Personal Finance

I thought this was a concise list of some basic rules to follow.

1. Create a Savings Plan
2. Do Not Spend More Than You Make
3. Do Not Try to Keep up with the Joneses
4. Limit the Amount of Debt on Your Credit Card Bills
5. Pay Monthly Bills on Time
6. Avoid Get Rich Quick Schemes
7. Protect Yourself Against Risk
8. Teach Your Children to Handle Money Wisely
9. Plan for Retirement
10. Legally Protect Yourself and Your Family

Check out the entire article here.

Whealth

"If you have not consciously made the decision to be rich, excellent, and healthy, then you have unconsciously made the decision to be poor, mediocre, and unhealthy."

-Wallace D. Wattles, self-help author

One of the things I like about HSAs and high deductible health plans is that they make consumers more conscious of health care issues and spending.

There's Some Good News and There's Some Bad News

Well, the good news is that I had a delicious sandwich for lunch. The bad news is that there was bacon on that sandwich, and if someday that contributes to my having a heart attack, I'm not too encouraged by the trends in emergency room care.

Emergency room waiting times are up to an average 30 minutes! And up to 25% of heart attack patients wait 50 minutes or more. Less than 20% of visitors to emergency rooms are thought to be in need of immediate care, by the way. Wow, people sure are stupid!

It turns out that ERs are closing as usage is rising. There just isn't room for patients. Resources and time are used moving patients around when they are needed treating sick people.

Dr. Art Kellermann, a spokesman for the American College of Emergency Physicians, uses the analogy of an airport having planes parked all over the runway, but it's more like airports having planes parked all over their runways as airports are shutting down across the country.

So, if you think about how terrible it is to fly now, just remember that it'll be like that if you need emergency care, but it's like an airport where people go and clog up the lines and have keys and change in their pockets when they go through the metal detector and they sit in the seats at the terminal and they stand in the way as you try to board the plane, and they even fly sometimes, even if they weren't really going anywhere. Plus people who are flying to Hawaii pay the same as those flying to the next state over. AND you're pants are open in the back so everyone can see your butt.

Read the depressing article in Forbes, if you really want to.

Cold Fighting Techniques

Some of these are obvious, but I think worth the read:

1.) Soap and Water
2.) Probiotics
3.) Exercise
4.) Fruits and Veggies
5.) Avoid Germs
6.) Vitamin C
7.) Echinacea
8.) Green Tea
9.) Zinc
10.) Sleep

Read the whole article here.

14 Years! 14. Years!

This is not very surprising, but maybe if people keep hearing this stuff they'll make some changes-

"People with four healthy lifestyle behaviors -- not smoking, physical activity, moderate alcohol consumption, and eating five servings of fruit or vegetables a day -- live an average of 14 years longer than people with none of those behaviors, a new British study contends."

Read the entire article in U.S. News & World Report.

Lose Weight by Eating More

Gotta love those Top Ten Lists. My brother forwarded me this one from Men's Health about how to lose weight (fat) and increase muscle mass. A diet of protein and vegetables is a pretty easy way to avoid the junk that this list points out. Barry's rule has been sabotaged in my own house by gifts of cookies and boxes of candy. If you don't have it in your house, you don't eat it. There are lots of other interesting lists on the left hand side of the page you can check out if you want to spend even more time on the Internet than you already do.

The Pursuit of Happiness

No big surprise here. If you're happy, you're healthy. There's a lot of talk these days about inflammation being a cause of many ailments. Being unhappy can lead to that. Here's some news from a study of 3,000 people in Britain.

"In the study, published in the American Journal of Epidemiology, women who reported more positive emotions had lower blood levels of two proteins that indicate widespread inflammation in the body. Chronic inflammation is believed to contribute to a range of ills over time, including heart disease and cancer."

Part of effective preventive medicine is addressing people's happiness.

"We need to help people to recognize the things that make them feel good and truly satisfied with their lives, so that they spend more time doing these things."

Old Lame Song

I guess "Auld Lang Syne" means something like "times gone by" in old Scottish. Here are the lyrics you'll never remember -

Should old acquaintance be forgot
And never brought to mind
Should old acquaintance be forgot
And days of Auld Lang Syne

I decided, for the first time (I think), to write down some 2008 resolutions. I like to challenge and improve myself throughout the year, but why not take yet another opportunity to do just that?

Writing things down is a great way to focus on them and make sure that they happen. I have made it a habit of mine to write down movies I would like to see, music I should buy, places I want to visit around Miami (where I now live), restaurants that have been recommended to me by others, etc.

So, make a list on your Blackberry, or write down some goals on a piece of paper and stick it in your wallet. You might be surprised how much it helps to look at those goals. I'm really hoping "Be more PUNCTUAL" will help me. I know what you're thinking, "more" punctual doesn't make sense. You're either punctual or you're late. Hey, people, I'm trying. Let's work our way up to full-blown punctual.

Cah-lee-faw-ni-a

Those Left Coasters might be annoying sometimes with their preachiness and ballot initiatives, but they do tend to be ahead of the curve, especially on health issues.

Now, from the people who brought you smoking bans... the Sugar Tax. San Francisco's mayor, Gavin Newsom, is proposing a tax on sugary sodas and warning labels for highly caffeinated drinks (like Red Bull, which is now banned in France and about whose contribution to high blood pressure I have written on this blog).

"Newsom says obesity accounts for tens of millions of dollars in city health care costs. He cites a recent San Francisco Health Department survey that found nearly a quarter of the city's 5th, 7th and 9th graders were overweight and that high sugar drinks make up a tenth of a kid's daily calorie count."

Good Eats

I came across a reference to this article on mental_floss.com. Great website. The Men's Health's article outlines foods that affect your mood. The one of which I took note most was the fact that sushi and other fish are great mood boosters. It got me thinking that I always feel great when I eat sushi or other fish. I have been trying to work more seafood into my diet. Of course, it's easier when you live in a warm climate and don't have to worry about stinking up the house...

MQOTD

I like this. I'm a big proponent of taking pride in every little thing, though this often renders one an anal perfectionist.

"The victory of success is half won when one gains the habit of setting goals and achieving them. Even the most tedious chore will become endurable as you parade through each day convinced that every task, no matter how menial or boring, brings you closer to fulfilling your dreams."
— Og Mandino: Author, The Greatest Salesman in the World.

Forget the Spoonful of Sugar AND the Medicine

Honey has now been proven to be better for a kid's cough than cough medicine. Dr. Ian Paul, of Penn State, was prompted to perform the study after finding in an earlier one that a placebo was just as effective as traditional cough medicines containing dextromethorphan and diphenhydramine.

Since it's cheaper and has no side-effects, it'd be pretty silly not to buy honey instead of cough syrup. You don't want people to say you're silly, do you? I know I don't.


From ABC News.com -

"The researchers enrolled 105 children, between ages 2 and 18, in their randomized, partially double-blind study. On the first night of the study, the children received no treatment. Parents then answered questions about their children's sleep and cough, as well as the quality of their own sleep. The second night, the children were given either honey-flavored cough syrup or honey -- or nothing at all. Parents then reanswered the questions in the survey.

Parents whose children received the honey rated their kids' sleep and symptoms as better -- and their own sleep as improved as well.

Healing Powers of Honey

Paul says that the type of honey plays a role in the treatment.

'Darker honeys have more antioxidants than lighter honeys, and we wanted the best chance to see improvements,' he says, noting that lighter honeys would probably also benefit kids. 'At least locally [buckwheat honey] is available. I can get it here at the local supermarket.'

Honey is also generally less expensive than over-the-counter medications, he says, and bring none of the side effects like dizziness or sleepiness."