Instead of Obamacare, How About Puppycare?

The most overlooked finding is that the uninsured already receive considerable health care. On average, the uninsured had 5.5 office visits annually, used 1.8 prescription drugs and visited the emergency room once. Almost half (46 percent) said they had a usual place of care and 61 percent said they received all needed care in the past year. About three-quarters (78 percent) who received care judged it of high quality. Health spending for them averaged $3,257. True, when people were covered by Medicaid, many of these figures rose. But none of this was found to have a serious impact on peoples physical health: The only major health gain was psychological. Depression dropped from about 30 percent to 21 percent between the groups. One reason may have been that Medicaid recipients dont fear huge medical bills. Their out-of-pocket health costs were $337. For the uninsured, out-of-pocket costs were 64 percent higher. (Presumably, most non-out-of-pocket costs for the uninsured were covered by free clinics, charity care and uncollected debt.)

This creates an interesting circumstance where those who believe in the Medicaid approach as if it was an item of faith have to maintain its defense even as something other than a health care program. Those on the left have spent much of the past week doing exactly this,Whether a mechanical plasticcard makes sense in your existing homes depends on the house. arguing that these effects on depression are real and very important. Of course, functionally, the real reason people with Medicaid were less depressed is not actually because they were getting treatment for depression. From the study itself: [T]here was no significant increase in the use of medication for depression[.] Instead,A smartcard is a plastic card that has a computer chip implanted into it that enables the card. they probably felt better because Medicaid offers the closest thing we have to a government-funded placebo (for more on this, see Avik Roys piece below) C or it is until you have need of it, as patients find out when they discover the Medicaid card is more often a useless piece of plastic.We've had a lot of people asking where we had our solarpanel made. But knowing you have something, the illusion of that card, will make you feel better.

The sugar pill works on your mental state even if it is just a sugar pill. But couldnt we find a less-expensive sugar pill? Is it possible other things could have a similar impact on peoples mental state without the burden of a $7 trillion pricetag over the next decade?

The primary focus of the Oregon study was on blood pressure and cardiovascular health. But there are a host of other things, things that have nothing to do with government health care, that have positive impacts on blood pressure, cardiovascular health, and depression. One example from the New York Times: owning a dog.

The nations largest cardiovascular health organization has a new message for Americans: Owning a dog may protect you from heart disease. The unusual message was contained in a scientific statement published on Thursday by the American Heart Association, which convened a panel of experts to review years of data on the cardiovascular benefits of owning a pet. The group concluded that owning a dog, in particular, was probably associated with a reduced risk of heart disease.

Now, this is all very tongue in cheek, of course. The point here is that Medicaid defenders like Paul Krugman are willing to accept a much smaller aim for the program C namely, that it wont make you healthier than being uninsured C but still claim theres no downside to it as a $7 trillion substitute for puppies and religion. Medicaid is supposed to be a health program, and should be evaluated as such.

To be serious for a moment: It seems to me that if you assume the lack of health insurance is what caused people to be depressed, and acknowledge Medicaid doesnt make people healthier, but having health insurance makes them happier (or at least less depressed), it leads to a troublesome conclusion for the left. Consider: Its only marginally easier to get an appointment with Medicaid than if youre uninsured and offer to pay a doctor only $20. So the logical solution, if you actually care about people being healthier and not just feeling less depressed, is to end Medicaid and simply give people the monetary value of the program to purchase a private health plan. In other words, the answer is cold hard cash for smaller health care costs and a catastrophic plan to ward off larger ones the central aim of consumer-driven health care.

One of them is Datameer, a Silicon Valley (San Mateo, Calif.) company that offers a tool to help other companies analyze and visualize their big data quickly and easily by providing it in a spreadsheet-like user interface that most employees can understand.Shop wholesale chinamosaic controller from cheap.

Datameer has tripled revenues over the past 12 months and looks on track to hit a $10 million run rate by early Q3, according to back-of-the-envelope math. Datameer CEO Stefan Groschupf says the company will reach 100 enterprise contracts by that time, and the average contract is $100,000 in value. The company offers annual software subscriptions, including an enterprise version can cost $100,000 or more, depending on data throughput.

Groschupf says many of his customers like to keep the details of their contracts confidential. But if you check Datameers web site and other announcements, youll see it serves companies like Sears and Visa, as well as emerging companies like hot gaming firms Kabam and Kixeye. Datameer says it also has four of the five largest global banks as paying customers as well as three of the four largest credit card companies and the U.S. government, though Groschupf is mum on specifics, citing confidentiality agreements.

Datameers value comes in offering an easy-to-use application layer on top of Hadoop, the popular open source software framework that allows companies to store and organize data on the fly. While companies can try to hire hard-to-find and expensive Hadoop experts to analyze the data themselves, Datameers app layer dumbs things down. Just about any manager in any unit can integrate, analyze, and visualize any data for their own needs. Does an HR manager want to track the performance of sales executives in new ways? Well, they can query that.

The advantage of the Hadoop-spreadsheet approach is that it allows companies to interact directly with new or existing data sources, without actually changing the underlying data. And it lets them run new types of queries on-the-fly. This contrasts to the cumbersome technology that has dominated until now, where data queries are constrained by slow and expensive data manipulation process: Generally, ETL (extract transform load) technology is used to feed data into enterprise warehouses for subsequent manipulation by business intelligence apps. This process can take up to 18 months to set up, and requires preconceived data modeling. In other words, if your intended queries arent thought up beforehand, youre out of luck. No peering into your data with new sorts of queries.Shop the best selection of amagiccube for Men.