Monthly Archives: March 2013

…through self-insurance according to an article at MedPageToday.  Many businesses are quite concerned about their ability to pay for the Affordable Care Act.  They’re looking for ways around it so they can stay in business, keep all their employees, without raising prices too high.  From the referenced article, here’s how self-insurance works:

To employees, medical self-insurance looks like a regular health plan. Self-insured employers pay for most worker health costs directly, though they contract with an insurer or other company to administer claims. The employers also buy coverage known as stop-loss for claims exceeding a certain amount. Brokers say a growing number of firms see such plans as low-cost alternatives to conventional coverage because they’re exempt from ACA requirements such as insurance taxes and specified benefits.

For example, if an employer doesn’t want to pay for sex-change operations, they could exclude that as a covered service.

Read the rest.

Hormone replacement therapy at the time of menopause fell out of favor a decade ago.  One of the concerns was that such therapy caused breast cancer.  Some investigators question the association.  Details are here.

…according to Joanna Blythman.  Some dietitians are upset.  Blythman writes:

Of course, the processed food industry works ceaselessly to convince us that we must eat highly refined starchy foods, such as breakfast cereals and white bread, trumpeting that they give us energy. But all food gives us energy. Contrary to what we have been led to believe, there is no dietary “need” to eat starchy carbohydrates at all.

I agree with that last statement.  That’s how a healthy adult can live two months without any food whatsoever: any carbohydrate we need (glucose) can be made from our stores of protein and fat.

…please read this post at Science-Based Medicine.  You may change your mind.  I’m surprised the Texas Medical Board hasn’t been able to rein him in.

For every dollar spent on this, we borrow 40¢ that will have to be paid back by the taxpayers.  This is so crazy, I question whether the story is even accurate.  A snippet:

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded $1.5 million to study biological and social factors for why “three-quarters” of lesbians are obese and why gay males are not, calling it an issue of “high public-health significance.”