New taxes on drug makers, lower prescription-drug costs for seniors and restrictions on tax-free medical spending accounts are among a slate of health-law provisions that kick in Saturday.
The changes show how the law will begin to reshape American health care, even as opponents try to overturn the measure in Congress and the courts.
Although House Republicans are threatening to starve the law of funding and stage a symbolic repeal vote, those actions aren't likely to block any significant pieces of the law aimed at consumers for 2011. That's because the changes generally involve new rules and don't require spending.GOP Mistaken, Americans Don’t Want to Dismantle Obamacare
The new Republican House majority coming to Washington next week is ready to dismantle the health care reform law.
Majority opinion is on their side, they say. The most recent evidence they point to comes from last week’s CNN Opinion poll, which showed public opposition to reform, while slipping slightly since its November high water mark, exceeded proponents by a 50-43 margin.
But a closer reading of the poll by U.S. News and World Report opinion editor Robert Schlesinger puts those results in a new light. One of every four people who said they were opposed to reform said it didn’t go far enough. If you add those people to those supporting reform, a clear majority of Americans – 56 percent – are opposed to Republican efforts to dismantle or defund the bill.
People forget that some of the most virulent opposition to health care reform came not from Tea Party activists making headlines with town hall meeting protests, but from frustrated health care reform activists who backed either a single-payer insurance system (“Medicare for all”) or a public option that would compete with private insurance companies. Conservative Democrats in the Senate refused to consider those options during the debate.
Yet between 2003 and 2009, no less than 17 different opinion polls, including ones taken by the New York Times, the Associated Press-Yahoo, Quinnipiac, the Washington Post/ABC News and Kaiser Family Foundation, showed either a majority or a plurality of Americans backing a single-payer system, according to Wikipedia. For many of the activists pushing single-payer, the public option was a compromise plan.Healthcare reform implementation timeline
Incentivize Your Way to Good Health in 2011
Over the last decade or so, some companies have made sporadic efforts to adopt workplace wellness programs, some of which had incentives of various sorts attached. Their hope was that the cost of rewarding good behavior would be dwarfed by the cost savings that come from lower medical costs and higher productivity later on.
Two things have happened recently that will probably bring more incentives to more people.
First, the new health care law explicitly grants permission to employers to offer rewards of at least 30 percent of the total cost of health insurance to employees. Those winnings, often in the form of lower premiums, will go to people who join wellness programs and hit certain health goals.
Second, UnitedHealth Group, one of the nation’s largest insurance companies, now has its own program, called Personal Rewards. Companies like Pitney Bowes and Jones Lang LaSalle, a real estate services firm, have signed up.This Year, Change Your Mind
Whether it is by learning a new language, traveling to a new place, developing a passion for beekeeping or simply thinking about an old problem in a new way, all of us can find ways to stimulate our brains to grow, in the coming year and those to follow. Just as physical activity is essential to maintaining a healthy body, challenging one’s brain, keeping it active, engaged, flexible and playful, is not only fun. It is essential to cognitive fitness.
Men with Type 1 diabetes may eventually have a way to provide tissues for their own beta-cell transplants, reseachers have found. Stem cells that normally grow into sperm can be prodded to change into insulin-producing beta-cells instead, researchers from the Georgetown University Medical Center in Washington reported at the recent Philadelphia meeting of the American Society of Cell Biology.
If the technology can be scaled up and improved, it could eliminate many of the problems now associated with the use of stem cell technology and pancreas transplants. Transplants of whole pancreases or of isolated beta cells have a strong tendency to be rejected, so researchers must use powerful immune-suppressive drugs.The world's fattest mom eats 30,000 calories for Christmas
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