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Sunday, March 30, 2014

Health Insurance Rates Are Going Up Next Year, But It"s Nothing to Panic Over

The LA Times has a piece today about the next battleground for Obamacare: rate increases for 2015. The warnings are already coming thick and fast:

WellPoint Inc., parent of California’s leading health insurer in the exchange, Anthem Blue Cross, has already predicted “double-digit-plus” rate increases on Obamacare policies across much of the country.

…. Health insurers aren’t wasting any time sizing up what patients are costing them now and what that will mean for 2015 rates. Hunkered down in conference rooms, insurance actuaries are parsing prescriptions, doctor visits and hospital stays for clues about how expensive these new patients may be. By May, insurance companies must file next year’s rates with California’s state-run exchange so negotiations can begin.

I hope everyone manages to restrain their hysteria over this. Here in California, we’ve played this game annually for years. Health insurers in the individual market propose wild increases in their premiums—10 percent, 20 percent, sometimes even 30 percent—and then dial them back a bit after consumer outrage blankets the media and the Department of Insurance pushes back. But even then, we routinely end up with double-digit increases. Just for background, here are the average annual rate increases requested by a few of California’s biggest insurers over the last three years:

Anthem Blue Cross: 10.7%

Aetna: 12.1%

Blue Shield: 15.4%

HealthNet: 12.0%

And this doesn’t include changes in deductibles or out-of-pocket maximums. Add those in, and the annual proposed increases are probably in the range of 15-20 percent. Obamacare, of course, limits both those things, which means that in the future insurance companies will have to put everything into rate hikes instead of spreading the increases around to make them harder to add up.

Bottom line: if we end up seeing double-digit rate increases, it will be business as usual. Insurance companies will all blame it on Obamacare because that’s a convenient thing to do, but the truth is that we probably would have seen exactly the same thing even if Barack Obama had never been born. Let’s all keep our feet on the ground when the inevitable huge rate increase requests start flowing in.

MoJo Blogs and Articles | Mother Jones

Health Insurance Rates Are Going Up Next Year, But It"s Nothing to Panic Over

Sunday, February 23, 2014

The 46 Year Pregnancy - National Geographic Documentary - Extraordinary People

Friday, January 10, 2014

Steubenville Rapist Released After 10 Months, While Activist Who Exposed Him Faces 10 Year Sentence

The disparity in sentences reveal a perversion of justice.

One of the two teens convicted in the notorious 2012 Steubenville rape case cover-up, where a 16-year-old girl was sexually assaulted after an alcohol-fueled party, has been released after just 10 months Fox News reported.

Ma’Lik Richomond, 16, was released for “good behavior.” His family released a statement explaining how hard the last 16 months have been for their son and asking for the media to respect his privacy.

Yet, there was no apology made to the victim, triggering a response from her attorney Robert Fitzsimmons, Channel 7 WTRF reported:

“Although everyone hopes convicted criminals are rehabilitated, it is disheartening that this convicted rapist"s press release does not make a single reference to the victim and her family — whom he and his co-defendant scarred for life. One would expect to see the defendant publicly apologize for all the pain he caused rather than make statements about himself. Rape is about victims, not defendants. Obviously, the people writing his press release have yet to learn this important lesson,” he said.

Meanwhile, in a clear case of justice gone bad, the 26-year-old activist Deric Lostutter who leaked the evidence that helped convict the two boys in a published video is facing more jail time than the rapists themselves, after the FBI raided his house in April, according to PolicyMic.

Lostutter initially denied he was the man behind the masked video, but decided to come forward because he was appalled by the reaction of the young kids involved. He now faces up to ten years imprisonment for his role in obtaining tweets and social media posts which exposed the details of the rape as well as threatening action against the Steubenville football players and school officials accused of covering up the crime.

The video was posted to the football team website and brought national attention to the rape story.

Tuesday, January 7, 2014

Archaeologists Discover 5000 Year Old Egyptian Artifacts That Came From Space

space This may be old news to some, but for many it wont be. A study published in the Journal of Archaeological Science in December of 2013 found that the earliest known (according to the study) iron artifacts that date back to circa 3200 BC, from two burials in northern Egypt were made from meteoritic iron, and shaped by careful hammering of the metal.(1) After hammering pieces into thin sheets before being rolled into tubes, the nine beads that were found were originally strung into a necklace with other materials like gold and gemstones. This discovery reveals the value of these materials in ancient times. It also reveals that in the fourth millennium BC, metal workers had mastered the smithing of meteoritic iron, well before what was previously thought.

The beads were excavated in 1911, found in a cemetery, and are believed to be the earliest known iron artifacts. A total of nine beads were retrieved, and the necklace beads were found in their original order. Since both tombs securely date back to Naqada, 3400-3100 BC, the beads predate the emergence of iron smelting by nearly 2000 years, and other known meteoritic iron artefacts by 500 years or more.

Professor Thilo Rehren from Hamad bin Khalifa University in Qatar was the lead author of the paper. They used x-ray methods to determine whether the 5,000 year old beads were actually meteoric iron, and not magnetite, which can often be mistaken to be corroded iron due to similar properties.

“The really exciting outcome of this research is that we were for the first time able to demonstrate conclusively that there are typical trace elements such as cobalt and germanium present in the beads, at levels that only occur in meteoritic iron. We are also excited to be able to see the internal structure of the beads, revealing how they were rolled and hammered into form. This is very different technology from the usual stone bead drilling, and shows quite an advanced understanding of how the metal smiths worked this rather difficult material” – Professor Rehren

There is a lot of mystery surrounding Egypt, but the fact that they made cosmic jewelery is pretty cool. We don’t often reflect on just how advanced civilizations were in these times. Even today, how the pyramids were built, the mathematical precision and the astronomical alignments that correlate with them are astonishing. If we wanted to do something like that today, even with all of our technology, it would still be almost impossible to recreate. There is a lot of evidence to suggest that these ancient civilizations were much more advanced than we are. I find it quite amusing that they knew that the Earth was round, before we even believed it to be flat!

Ancient Egyptians were fascinated with the sky, and according to Joyce Tyldesley, who co-authored a study on the same findings that was published in the journal Meteoritics and Planetary Science, “the sky was very important to the ancient Egyptians, something that falls from the sky is going to be considered as a gift from the gods.” (2)

While we are on the topic of meteorites, just a year earlier a group of scientists claimed with certainty that tiny fossils uncovered inside a meteorite found in Sri Lanka in late December 2012, are proof of extraterrestrial life. The paper was published in the Journal of Cosmology by Chandra Wickramasinghe, the director of the Buckingham Centre for Astrobiology at the University of Buckingham in the United Kingdom. The study was conducted alongside researchers at the School of Mathematics at Cardiff University and from the Medical Research Institute in Colombo, Sri Lanka. Obviously, the study is surrounded by much controversy, you can read more about that and view the study here.

Earlier this year, a group of scientists claimed with certainty that tiny fossils uncovered inside a meteorite found in Sri Lanka in late December 2012, are proof of extraterrestrial life. A paper was published in the Journal of Cosmology (1)(3) by Chandra Wickramasinghe. Wickramasinghe is the director of the Buckingham Centre for Astrobiology at the University of Buckingham in the U.K. The study was conducted alongside researchers at the School of Mathematics at Cardiff University and from the Medical Research Institute in Colombo, Sri Lanka. – See more at: http://www.collective-evolution.com/2013/09/16/extraterrestrial-fossils-uncovered-inside-meteorite-found-in-sri-lanka/#sthash.f8ZWevQe.dpuf

Sources:

(1) http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305440313002057

(2) http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/maps.12120/full

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/05/130531-egyptian-bead-meteorite-jewelry-science–gerzeh/

http://phys.org/news/2013-08-earliest-iron-artifacts-outer-space.html

Collective-Evolution

Archaeologists Discover 5000 Year Old Egyptian Artifacts That Came From Space