Daily Archives: October 9, 2012

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ACA: An Impossible Mandate | The Beacon

ACA: An Impossible Mandate

By  | Monday October 8, 2012 at 10:09 AM PDT

Most Americans will be required to have health insurance beginning on January 1, 2014. The type of insurance you have, where you will get it, and what you will pay will be determined not by you and your employer or by free choice in the marketplace, but by government. Here are the biggest problems the mandate will create. (For more details, please consult my book Priceless: Curing the Healthcare Crisis.)

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ACA: An Impossible Mandate | The Beacon.

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How the Hype Became Bigger Than the Presidential Election | Politics News | Rolling Stone

By MATT TAIBBI

OCTOBER 9, 2012 3:20 PM ET

Well, it’s over. Or almost over, thank God. It looks like Obama will probably win, which I guess is good news, compared to the alternative – a Mitt Romney presidency would have felt like four straight years of waking up with a naked Lloyd Blankfein sitting on your face. But it’s not so much the result that matters – it’s the quiet.

What we Americans go through to pick a president is not only crazy and unnecessary but genuinely abusive. Hundreds of millions of dollars are spent in a craven, cynical effort to stir up hatred and anger on both sides. A decision that in reality takes one or two days of careful research to make is somehow stretched out into a process that involves two years of relentless, suffocating mind-warfare, an onslaught of toxic media messaging directed at liberals, conservatives and everyone in between that by Election Day makes every dinner conversation dangerous and literally divides families.

Politicians are much to blame for this, but we in the media have to take responsibility for the damage we do to the American psyche in the name of election coverage. At this very moment, there are people all over the country who are stocking up on canned goods and ammo for the apocalypse they believe will come if Obama is re-elected. For the broadcast business to be successful, viewers need to be not merely interested in our political melodramas, they have to be in an absolute state about them – emotionally invested in the outcome and frightened not to watch what happens next. And any person who’s been subjected to 720 consecutive days of propaganda is not likely to take the news well if he gets the wrong result, whether it’s a victory for Obama or for Romney. By that point, the networks have spent two years finding new ways each day to convince him that the world is going to disintegrate into some commie or Hitlerian version of Mad Max, to keep him coming back and watching ads.

The campaign should start and finish in six weeks, and there should be free TV access to both candidates. And it should be illegal to publish poll numbers. This isn’t as crazy as it sounds – they actually had such a law in Russia while I lived there, and people were much happier. (Well, they were still miserable, because they were Russian, but at least they weren’t stressing about poll numbers.) Think about it: Banning poll numbers would force the media to actually cover the issues. As it stands now, the horse race is the entire story – I can think of a couple of cable networks that would have to go completely dark tomorrow, as in Dan-Rather-Dead-Fucking-Air dark, if they had to come up with even 10 seconds of news content that wasn’t centered on who was winning. That’s the dirtiest secret we in the media have kept from you over the years: Most of us suck so badly at our jobs, and are so uninterested in delving into any polysyllabic subject, that we would literally have to put down our shovels and go home if we didn’t have poll numbers we can use to terrify our audiences. Can you imagine if your favorite news network had to do stories like, “What is the Overseas Private Investment Corporation up to, and what do each of the candidates think about it?” That would be like asking Nineties-era baseball players to take the field without popping greenies – what, you mean play the game sober? Half the on-air talent would have to resign, or do ad work hawking reverse mortgages.

It obviously matters who gets to be president. And it’s perfectly valid for us media types to advocate for the candidate we think is more qualified, based on our reporting. But the hype has gotten so out of control, it’s become bigger than the presidency itself. In every race there are now not two but three dominating figures – the Democrat, the Republican and The Process, and we’re raising whole generations who hate The Process far more than they like either of the candidates. Mainly for grim commercial reasons, we in the media manipulate people to stay wired on hate and panic-focused on the race for every waking moment, indifferent to how much this depresses the hell out of everyone. In doing so, we rob people of their patriotism and their desire to vote. If The Process is so clearly wrong, how right can the candidates be?

If we did this right, people would come out of presidential elections exhilarated, maybe even stoked to get involved in their local races for county sheriff or D.A. (Such races would likely have more of an impact on their day-to-day lives: For the most part, when it comes to our daily routines, the president might as well be on Mars.) Instead, most of us come out of the election exhausted, in desperate need of a couple of Ambiens and determined to spend the next two years buried in Hulu reruns, afraid to even pass a news channel while couch-surfing our way to Storage Wars or a Lifetime movie.

What makes us feel pessimistic about the world, ultimately, is the way the media encourage us to believe that our fate hangs on the every move of the promise-breaking, terminally disappointing Teflon liars in Washington. And that’s a shame, because feeling optimistic shouldn’t require turning off the TV or tuning out The Process. What we are witnessing, after all, is the world’s greatest contest for power, an amazing fairy tale full of iconic moments that we’ll watch no matter how much Sean Hannity or Chris Matthews screams at us. But it would be awesome, next time, if we could find a way to turn down the volume.

This story is from the October 25th issue of Rolling Stone.

RELATED

How the Hype Became Bigger Than the Presidential Election | Politics News | Rolling Stone.

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Marcia Ishii-Eiteman ~ Genetically Modified Food Industry’s Dirty Little Secret | Shift Frequency

Marcia Ishii-Eiteman ~ Genetically Modified Food Industry’s Dirty Little Secret | Shift Frequency.

Genetically Modified Food Industry’s Dirty Little Secret

By Marcia Ishii-Eiteman, Pesticide Action Network

09 October 12

 s a scientist at Pesticide Action Network, I am frequently asked these days to explain what genetically engineered (GE) crops have to do with pesticides. When I answer that GE crops both contain and drive up pesticide use, I am often met with earnest incredulity. We seem to need to believe that GE technology is the best thing since sliced bread.

On a radio program just last week, a caller voiced his genuine hopes to me that GE crops would provide a green solution to the woes of the world since he’d heard that these crops increase yield, cure blindness and reduce pesticide use. I was sorry to have to disappoint him on all counts, since GE crops have consistently failed to improve yield, have done nothing to date for Vitamin A deficiency-related blindness and have driven increases in pesticide use since their introduction some sixteen years ago.

On this last point, a new study on GE crops out last week added yet more weight to the body of evidence contradicting the GE crop industry’s long-standing myth. Published Friday in the journal Environmental Sciences Europe, the Washington State University (WSU) study offers a simple but devastating finding: GE seeds dramatically increase pesticide use, and that use will grow unless we change the course of our food and farming system.

So here it is, the pesticide industry’s dirty little secret: GE seeds are no green solution to the world’s food needs, but are rather the growth engine of the world’s biggest pesticide companies. In point of fact, the latest wave of GE crops is expected to drive a 25-fold increase in the use of one particularly nasty pesticide (2,4-D) in corn over the next seven years.

Analyzing USDA data, the study—authored by WSU research professor Charles Benbrook, a former National Academy of Sciences’ executive director—shows that GE crops have driven up overall pesticide use across the country, with 400 million more pounds applied from 1996 to 2011. Just last year, GE crops used 20 percent more pesticides on average than non-GE crops. The adoption of herbicide-resistant crop technology has been the primary driver, contributing to a 527 million pound increase in herbicide use during the same period. And the increase in pesticide use is expected to continue, if USDA approves the next wave of GE herbicide-resistant crops.

Back to the future: new GE seeds and old pesticides

These new data remind us that – notwithstanding the marketing tactics of Monsanto, DuPont and Dow – our farmers and agroecosystems remain tethered to the pesticide treadmill in ways that we all pay for in one way or another.

At least two-dozen types of weeds are now resistant to glyphosate, the main ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup. Farmers throughout the southeast and, increasingly, the Midwest, are abandoning entire fields to these ‘superweeds.’ In California, the most agriculturally productive and diverse state in the nation, weeds have developed resistance to both glyphosate and paraquat, infesting up to an estimated million acres, with the area and type of resistant weeds continuing to rise. As weeds become increasingly resistant to RoundUp, farmers use greater quantities of the product and eventually resort to older, even more dangerous pesticides. And as the Benbrook study notes, farmers are on the hook for these less effective, increasingly hazardous and expensive products.

The next cycle of the treadmill is especially frightening. 2,4-D-resistant corn is the first in a new flood of industry products currently under consideration by USDA. If the agency approves it and other 2,4-D crops, use of this hazardous pesticide in corn is expect to surge 25-fold over the next seven years, putting farms, farmers and rural communities in harm’s way. The chemical has been linked to birth defects, neurological damage and cancer, and children are especially susceptible to its effects. For these reasons, 70 medical doctors and health professionals joined Pesticide Action Network this summer in urging EPA to reject Dow AgroScience’s application for new uses of 2,4-D.

What now?

Monsanto, Dow and other major pesticide companies stand to benefit the most from the continued use of glyphosate and surge in 2,4-D and other chemical sales that will accompany the next round of herbicide-based GE crops. So it should come as no surprise that the largest opponents of California’s ‘Right to Know’ballot initiative to label GE foods are the pesticide companies, together spending nearly $20 million to blanket the airwaves with false and misleading ads about the initiative. I am heartened, however, by recent polls showing Californians resolute in their demand that GE food be labeled.

Of even greater importance, perhaps, is the fact that people are asking serious questions about this technology, and its place in our food and farming systems. Finally we are having a genuine public conversation about genetic engineering, pesticides, our health, our rights and who should control what we eat and how we grow our food: corporations or communities. True, we should have had this conversation sixteen years ago, before the first GE seeds were ushered to market by our public agencies, without adequate safety or efficacy testing. But here and now is still a very good place to start.

Marcia Ishii-Eiteman is a senior scientist and director of the Sustainable Food Systems Program at PAN. Before joining PAN in 1996, Marcia worked in Asia and Africa for 14 years. She developed farmer field schools in ecological pest management, sustainable agriculture and community-based rural development projects in Southeast Asia, and women’s health, literacy and resource conservation projects on the Thai-Cambodian and Somali-Ethiopian borders. Marcia holds a PhD in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from Cornell University and a B.A. in Women’s Studies from Yale University. She has written extensively on the ecological, social and political dimensions of food and agriculture and was a lead author of the UN-sponsored International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development. Ph.D., Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Cornell.

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/271-38/13874-genetically-modified-food-industrys-dirty-little-secret

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Darden tests limiting worker hours as health-care changes loom – OrlandoSentinel.com

orlandosentinel.com/business/os-darden-part-time-workers-20121007,0,1505128.story

OrlandoSentinel.com

Darden tests limiting worker hours as health-care changes loom

By Sandra Pedicini, Orlando Sentinel

7:15 PM EDT, October 7, 2012

 

In an experiment apparently aimed at keeping down the cost of health-care reform, Orlando-based Darden Restaurants has stopped offering full-time schedules to many hourly workers in at least a few Olive Gardens, Red Lobsters and LongHorn Steakhouses.

Darden said the test is taking place in “a select number” of restaurants in four markets, including Central Florida, but would not give details. The company said there has been no decision made about expanding it.

In an emailed statement, Darden said staffing changes are “just one of the many things we are evaluating to help us address the cost implications health care reform will have on our business. There are still many unanswered questions regarding the health care regulations and we simply do not have enough information to make any decisions at this time.”

Analysts say many other companies, including the White Castle hamburger chain, are considering employing fewer full-timers because of key features of the Affordable Care Act scheduled to go into effect in 2014. Under that law, large companies must provide affordable health insurance to employees working an average of at least 30 hours per week.

If they do not, the companies can face fines of up to $3,000 for each employee who then turns to an exchange — an online marketplace — for insurance.

“I think a lot of those employers, especially restaurants, are just going to ensure nobody gets scheduled more than 30 hours a week,” said Matthew Snook, partner with human-resources consulting company Mercer.

Darden said its goal at the test restaurants is to keep employees at 28 hours a week.

Analysts said limiting hours could pose new challenges, including higher turnover and less-qualified workers.

“It’s a real problem for restaurants,” said Howard Penney, a restaurant analyst and managing director for Hedgeye Risk Management.

Darden, the world’s largest casual-dining company and one of the nation’s 30 largest employers, said it offers health insurance to all its approximately 185,000 employees. Many are offered a limited-benefit plan. That type of coverage is being phased out under health-care changes, which will ban annual limits for most plans.

About 25 percent of Darden workers are full time, meaning they work more than 30 hours a week. Though employees say Darden already offers traditional health insurance to full-timers, Janney Capital Markets analyst Mark Kalinowski said the cost of providing that could become higher for Darden under the Affordable Care Act. Because that law requires everyone to have health insurance, more workers will likely choose its coverage, Kalinowski said.

“Even a modest jump up in the amount of employees that decide they want the insurance you’re offering could have a meaningful impact on your bottom line,” he said.

Under the system Darden is testing, employees are to be scheduled for no more than 28 hours each week. They can run over that if things get busy, but Darden acknowledged they are not supposed to exceed 30 hours.

At a new Olive Garden in Stillwater, Okla., former busboy Keaton Hasty said employees were routinely limited to 29 1/2 hours.

“It was 29 1/2, and they’d kick you out,” said Hasty, a college student who now works at a pharmacy. “They’d always print off a little slip every day and say who was getting close.”

And Michael Walker said when he applied for a job at a new Olive Garden in Hammond, La., he was told that except for a few “key training positions,” only part-time jobs were available for hourly workers.

“Without having full health care … I don’t see that as an option,” Walker said. He decided to stick with his current job at another restaurant.

Darden told analysts last year it would consider changing its mix of part-time and full-time employees to reduce costs.

Darden has been aggressively keeping labor costs down. It has cut bartenders’ pay and required servers to share tips with them. It also has eliminated busboy positions at Red Lobster and reduced the number of servers working each shift at that chain.

Labor costs as a percentage of sales have dropped steadily from 33.1 percent in fiscal 2010 to 30.8 percent in the most recent quarter.

spedicini@tribune.com or 407-420-5240

 

Copyright © 2012, Orlando Sentinel

 

Darden tests limiting worker hours as health-care changes loom – OrlandoSentinel.com.

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Government Dependency Will End in Chaos-Ron Paul

Government Dependency Will End in Chaos PDF Print E-mail

The media insists on characterizing statements about dependency on government handouts as controversial, but in truth such statements are absolutely correct.  It’s not that nearly half of Americans are dependent on government; it’s actually more than half.  If one includes not just people on food stamps and welfare, but also seniors on Medicare, Social Security and people employed by the government directly, the number is more like 165 million out of 308 million, which is 53%.

Some argue that Social Security and Medicare benefits are a right because people pay into these programs their whole lives, or that we need a government safety net in place for people who fall on hard times.  However, this all becomes a moot point when the funds people depend on become worthless due to government default or rampant inflation.

This is less an issue of dignity or dependence on government, and more about thedeceitfulness of government promises.

The Fed recently announced that it plans to keep interest rates near zero and keep buying near worthless assets from banks indefinitely.  This enables Congress to spend without having to take deficits or the debt seriously and there is every indication they intend to spend with impunity until the system collapses.  There are no brakes on the runaway train.  The federal debt ceiling law does nothing to limit spending. The ceiling will have to be raised yet again perhaps before the year is out.  What is happening in Greece with austerity measures and riots in the street will happen here within a decade according to some realistic estimates if we do not find some way to fiscally restrain our government.

There is little point in a debate about being entitled to healthcare or food or shelter from fellow taxpayers if the whole system has collapsed.  And, with the way our politicians have taken over and mismanaged vast amounts of resources, collapse seems almost unavoidable.  Yet the number of Americans who have significant dependency on government is dangerously high, and I honestly fear for them.

Worse, corporate welfare is also at an all time high with no signs of diminishing.  Though it is hard to quantify, Tad Dehaven at Cato has estimated that the government spends nearly twice as much on corporate welfare than on social welfare.  Both parties are equally guilty.  More and more, the business sector is learning to rely on taxpayer largesse in one form or another.  They used to be solely concerned with providing a better product to the consumer at a better price.  Now, success on Wall Street depends entirely too much on having the best lobbyists on K Street.  If one includes the employees of “private” businesses who depend on government contracts, grants or bailouts, there are even more people dependent on government in some way.

Government does not create resources when it taxes people and prints money; it merely redistributes the wealth, while supporting a massive, wasteful bureaucracy along the way.  Government is a giant, blood-sucking parasite on our otherwise healthy economy.  For too long we have entrusted too much economic power and influence to irresponsible politicians in Washington.  It’s the chaos that ensues after they run the system into the ground that will be so painful for so many people.  But realigning our economy with the free market and away from government mandates and handouts must happen in order for it to thrive again.

The answer is not to keep asking government to do more.  The answer is to extricate our economy and ourselves from the grasp of Washington DC as much as possible now, before our dependency becomes our downfall.

Government Dependency Will End in Chaos.

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350 million people have depression in world: WHO – FRANCE 24

350 million people have depression in world: WHO
More than 350 million people suffer from depression globally, the World Health Organization said, ahead of World Mental Health Day on Wednesday, calling the disease a "global phenomenon". One of the best ways to treat depression was to talk openly about it, the WHO said, adding that medicine was not the only solution.

More than 350 million people suffer from depression globally, the World Health Organization said, ahead of World Mental Health Day on Wednesday, calling the disease a “global phenomenon”. One of the best ways to treat depression was to talk openly about it, the WHO said, adding that medicine was not the only solution.

AFP – More than 350 million people suffer from depression globally, the World Health Organization said, ahead of World Mental Health Day on Wednesday.

“It is not a disease of developed countries, it is a global phenomenon. It’s present in both genders and in rich and poor populations,” Dr Shekhar Saxena, head of the WHO’s mental health and substance abuse department, told reporters in Geneva.

No region is free from the disorder and around five percent of the world’s population suffers depression in the course of a year, the health expert said.

Fifty percent more women suffer symptoms than men, said Saxena, who added that post-natal depression affected one in five mothers and one in 10 of all young mothers in the developed world.

According to the UN’s global health arm, depression is more than just a bout of the blues, rather a “sustained feeling of sadness for two weeks or more” which interferes with “work, school or home”.

At its worst, depression can lead to suicide, the WHO expert said, citing a “very clear correlation”.

Nearly one million people take their lives every year and more than half of them have depression, Saxena said, although he noted that it was not the sole cause.

“Depression has existed for centuries, the news is, we’re not doing anything about it,” said Saxena, noting that the shame associated with having the illness meant that fewer than half of those with depression received the care they need.

The figure dropped to less than 10 percent in many countries, he added.

Effective treatment was available, Saxena said, but health workers needed to do more to spot the signs of depression in people who complained of other symptoms, particularly in children as young as 12 and young adults who they did not expect to have the illness.

One of the best ways to treat depression was to talk openly about it, the WHO said, adding that medicine was not the only solution.

“It should not be taken for granted that depression means taking pills,” Saxena said.

 

350 million people have depression in world: WHO – FRANCE 24.

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One in five Americans reports no religious affiliation, study says – The Washington Post

By , Published: October 8

One-fifth of U.S. adults say they are not part of a traditional religious denomination, new data from the Pew Research Center show, evidence of an unprecedented reshuffling of Americans’ spiritual identities that is shaking up fields from charity to politics.

But despite their nickname, the “nones” are far from godless. Many pray, believe in God and have regular spiritual routines.

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One in five Americans reports no religious affiliation, study says – The Washington Post.

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The Meningitis Catastrophe & Compounding – The People’s Pharmacy®

Please don’t get the wrong idea. I love the idea of compounding pharmacies. After all, my grandfather’s scale and beaker hold a place of honor in our living room. He was a pharmacist at the turn of the 20th century and used a mortar and pestle to turn herbs into medicine.

Before drug companies took over the world of pharmaceuticals, pharmacists actually used to make many of the medicines they sold to customers. It was routine for a pharmacist in the 1940s and 1950s to make remedies to treat diarrhea, coughs or fungal infections like athlete’s foot. In fact, there was no distinction back then between a standard pharmacy and a “compounding” pharmacy. All pharmacists were trained in the art of making medicine.

These days most chain pharmacists (and pharmacy technicians) are so busy with insurance hassles, drive thru windows, and a huge volume of prescriptions to fill that they don’t have the time or resources to actually compound a lot of pills, creams and emulsions. As a result, a cottage industry has grown up in the United States involving compounding pharmacies. They create bio-identical hormones to deal with menopausal symptoms and a variety of other products that are tailored to specific patients’ needs.

When such pharmacies make a small number of products for people in their community, the consequences of a compounding error are likely to be limited to only those few products. But over the last few decades we have seen the growth of larger compounding facilities that sell products to a much wider audience. Some advertise on the Internet or even send sales representatives to doctors’ offices promoting special formulations. Some of these products have not been approved by the Food and Drug Administration. Others are copies of commercially available products and are sold at a steep discount. This makes them attractive to physicians who get to charge a fee for injecting a particular product. With drug shortages creating havoc for hospitals and clinics around the country, compounding pharmacies sometimes fill the void.

And this leads us to the terrible meningitis outbreak caused by fungal contamination of injectable methylprednisolone. At the time of this writing it is estimated that as many as 13,000 patients could have been exposed to spinal steroid injections containing the fungi aspergillus and exserohilum. Over 100 people in nine states have become ill and eight are dead. The toll is likely to rise over the next several days and weeks. Over 17,000 vials of the spinal steroid were shipped to doctors’ offices, clinics and surgical centers in 23 states.

How could this happen? Compounding pharmacies are not regulated the way drug companies are. Even if they have lots of employees and advertise on the web, they do not get the same oversight a pharmaceutical manufacturer might. Kevin Outterson, an associate professor of law at Boston University, was quoted in the New York Times as saying, “The Food and Drug Administration has more regulatory authority over a drug factory in China than over a compounding pharmacy in Massachusetts.”

That is a sad commentary on the oversight of this cottage industry. The Supreme Court has restricted the ability of the FDA to monitor compounding pharmacies. States are limited in their ability to inspect these production facilities the way the FDA does and regulate what drugs are compounded and in what quantities. So there is a kind of legal limbo that has evolved in which some compounding pharmacies may slip between the cracks. If the FDA doesn’t have the authority to oversee their manufacturing processes and the state they operate in does not have the resources to do so adequately, consumers are pretty much on their own.

This does not mean that we should give up on local compounding pharmacies. A community pharmacy that serves its customers with care and caution is a valuable resource. Pharmacists can create liquid medicine or drug-containing gummy candy that is tasty and easier for a child to take than a large pill. Pharmacists can formulate special doses to help people discontinue antidepressant medications that would otherwise cause unpleasant withdrawal symptoms. Injectable drugs, on the other hand, need special care. And large compounding pharmacies that advertise on the Internet may not always get the oversight you deserve. Perhaps it is time for patients and physicians to insist that the FDA take a more active role in monitoring drug manufacturing here at home as well as abroad.

Patients will also need to be more vigilant when interacting with the pharmacist. These days they are overworked and overextended. In our book, Top Screwups Doctors Make and How to Avoid Them we document that as many as 1 out of 5 prescriptions may have an error or deviate from the physicians’ written orders (Journal of the American Pharmacists Association, March-April, 2009). Although most errors are not life-threatening, far too many can lead to harm.

Top 10 Pharmacist Screwups:

• Not counseling patients
• Dispensing the wrong drug
• Dispensing the wrong dose
• Ignoring drug interactions
• Not standing up to doctors (when a mistake is made)
• Trusting all generic drugs
• Relying on inadequate labels and leaflets
• Not reporting errors
• Switching drugs without patient approval
• Not supervising techs carefully

Be proactive! Ask your pharmacist for specific instructions on how to take your medicine (with food or on an empty stomach). It can make a big difference when it comes to drug effectiveness. Find out about food and beverage interactions. Make sure your pharmacist explains carefully the most common and most dangerous side effects of your medicine. WRITE THEM DOWN! Do not rely on that little slip of paper that may be included in your bag. It will likely get lost easily. Ask your pharmacist to double check for drug incompatibility with any other medicines you are taking. And finally, make sure you have received the right medicine in the right dose and the instructions match those your doctor gave you. Do not just grab and go the next time you pick up your prescription!

 

The Meningitis Catastrophe & Compounding – The People’s Pharmacy®.