Take action to reduce heart disease risk:

1.Be physically active
2.Don’t smoke
3.Eat healthy
4.Maintain a normal weight
5.Know your numbers (blood pressure, cholesterol, and triglycerides)

•Know your blood pressure. Years of high blood pressure can lead to heart disease. People with high blood pressure often have no symptoms, so have your blood pressure checked every 1 to 2 years and get treatment if you need it.
•Don’t smoke. If you smoke, try to quit. If you’re having trouble quitting, there are products and programs that can help:
◦Nicotine patches and gums
◦Support groups
◦Programs to help you stop smoking
Ask your doctor or nurse for help. For more information on quitting, visit Quitting Smoking.
•Get tested for diabetes. People with diabetes have high blood glucose (often called blood sugar). People with high blood glucose often have no symptoms, so have your blood glucose checked regularly. Having diabetes raises your chances of getting heart disease. If you have diabetes, your doctor will decide if you need diabetes pills or insulin shots. Your doctor can also help you make a healthy eating and exercise plan.
•Get your cholesterol and triglyceride levels tested. High blood cholesterol (koh-LESS-tur-ol) can clog your arteries and keep your heart from getting the blood it needs. This can cause a heart attack. Triglycerides (treye-GLIH-suh-ryds) are a form of fat in your blood stream. High levels of triglycerides are linked to heart disease in some people. People with high blood cholesterol or high blood triglycerides often have no symptoms, so have both levels checked regularly. If your levels are high, talk to your doctor about what you can do to lower them. You may be able to lower your both levels by eating better and exercising more. Your doctor may prescribe medication to help lower your cholesterol.
•Maintain a healthy weight. Being overweight raises your risk for heart disease. Calculate your Body Mass Index (BMI) to see if you are at a healthy weight. Healthy food choices and physical activity are important to staying at a healthy weight:
◦Start by adding more fruits, vegetables, and whole grains to your diet.
◦Each week, aim to get at least 2 hours and 30 minutes of moderate physical activity, 1 hour and 15 minutes of vigorous physical activity, or a combination of moderate and vigorous activity.
•If you drink alcohol, limit it to no more than one drink (one 12 ounce beer, one 5 ounce glass of wine, or one 1.5 ounce shot of hard liquor) a day.
•Find healthy ways to cope with stress. Lower your stress level by talking to your friends, exercising, or writing in a journal.

Take action to reduce heart disease risk:

1.Be physically active
2.Don’t smoke
3.Eat healthy
4.Maintain a normal weight
5.Know your numbers (blood pressure, cholesterol, and triglycerides)

•Know your blood pressure. Years of high blood pressure can lead to heart disease. People with high blood pressure often have no symptoms, so have your blood pressure checked every 1 to 2 years and get treatment if you need it.
•Don’t smoke. If you smoke, try to quit. If you’re having trouble quitting, there are products and programs that can help:
◦Nicotine patches and gums
◦Support groups
◦Programs to help you stop smoking
Ask your doctor or nurse for help. For more information on quitting, visit Quitting Smoking.
•Get tested for diabetes. People with diabetes have high blood glucose (often called blood sugar). People with high blood glucose often have no symptoms, so have your blood glucose checked regularly. Having diabetes raises your chances of getting heart disease. If you have diabetes, your doctor will decide if you need diabetes pills or insulin shots. Your doctor can also help you make a healthy eating and exercise plan.
•Get your cholesterol and triglyceride levels tested. High blood cholesterol (koh-LESS-tur-ol) can clog your arteries and keep your heart from getting the blood it needs. This can cause a heart attack. Triglycerides (treye-GLIH-suh-ryds) are a form of fat in your blood stream. High levels of triglycerides are linked to heart disease in some people. People with high blood cholesterol or high blood triglycerides often have no symptoms, so have both levels checked regularly. If your levels are high, talk to your doctor about what you can do to lower them. You may be able to lower your both levels by eating better and exercising more. Your doctor may prescribe medication to help lower your cholesterol.
•Maintain a healthy weight. Being overweight raises your risk for heart disease. Calculate your Body Mass Index (BMI) to see if you are at a healthy weight. Healthy food choices and physical activity are important to staying at a healthy weight:
◦Start by adding more fruits, vegetables, and whole grains to your diet.
◦Each week, aim to get at least 2 hours and 30 minutes of moderate physical activity, 1 hour and 15 minutes of vigorous physical activity, or a combination of moderate and vigorous activity.
•If you drink alcohol, limit it to no more than one drink (one 12 ounce beer, one 5 ounce glass of wine, or one 1.5 ounce shot of hard liquor) a day.
•Find healthy ways to cope with stress. Lower your stress level by talking to your friends, exercising, or writing in a journal.

Jon Walker writes about the decision of private health insurers in Massachusetts to withhold offers for new plans in the state’s Health insurance “Connector.” That follows the Boston Globe report of a decision by Massachusett’s insurance regulator to deny most of the requests by insurers to raise their insurance premiums.

Jon traces the problem to the absence of a public option, which could guarantee consumers an alternative/safety net if the private insurers withhold their products. He also faults the ability of private insurers to sell insurance outside the exchange/Connector. I think he’s right, but there’s an even more fundamental problem at work here, and it reminds me of what happened in California’s electricity market.

The short version is that Massachusetts appears to be inadvertently fostering an artificial shortage in health insurance. And they’re doing it for the same reasons that California authorities inadvertently created or exacerbated artificial shortages in electricity that repeatedly caused blackouts during the 2000-2001 crisis.

We’ve seen this before, and unless Massachusett’s Governor and regulators are smarter than California’s Governor and Public Utility Commission, this is not going to turn out well. So what’s going on?

One way to think about this is to ask how the Massachusetts Connector, its health insurance exchange and the model for the exchanges in the national health bill, is supposed to work. The academics who sold this concept to Republican Governor Romney and the Democratic Legislature convinced officials that private health insurers would charge reasonable prices if they were forced to compete in a transparent “market” by offering more or less uniform products whose quality and features were ensured by regulatory oversight. In other words, the competition itself would lead to efficient prices.

On top of this, state insurance regulators would retain some limited authority to review premiums charged by the insurers. But that implies that the scheme’s creators weren’t convinced the market would produce fair prices. They’d have to be limited by regulation.

When the State’s regulators disallowed almost all of the insurers’ proposed premium increases for the Connector/insurance exchange, the State was effectively saying, “the exchange market doesn’t work, and we can’t rely on the consumers shopping on the exchange market to drive prices down to reasonable/fair/efficient levels.” In short, the entire premise of the “market structure” just collapsed.

But if the flawed insurance market can’t produce efficient prices, then by definition we’re in a regulatory cost-of-service paradigm. There is a whole body of literature and a hundred years or experience explaining how you regulate utility rates.

The essential principle is a “regulatory bargain,” in which the service provider — the utility — is obligated to serve (think guaranteed issue in the insurance sector), but the regulator has an equally important obligation to set rates at levels that will allow the utility/service provider to recover all of its prudently incurred costs plus a reasonable opportunity to earn a reasonable rate of return of/on capital. The profits from these rates have to be sufficient to allow a reasonably managed firm to attract sufficient capital to continue meeting the provider’s obligation to serve.

In this regulatory framework, when Massachusetts authorities rejected the insurers’ proposed premium increases, the insurers translated that to mean the State had broken the regulatory bargain. In their view, the regulators were not allowing them to pass on rapidly rising health care costs and were thus forcing the firms to do business while losing money. In essence, they’re saying, “we cannot stay in business by operating at a loss, so we will withdraw from the market.”

Of course, regulators disagree; they claim that lower premiums would be sufficient to recover costs, and costs don’t appear to be rising as fast as proposed premium increases. In a large state, such regulatory decisions usually take months to consider and document, after combing the utility’s books and extensive contested hearings. It’s not clear that happened here.

But of course, the designers of the health insurance market never assumed that all suppliers might react to a negative decision by withholding supply and creating a shortage. They expected the market to drive prices down to marginal costs, but it didn’t. Now what?

In California, when the Governor and PUC failed to understand this problem, that convinced lots of electricity suppliers to withhold power from the market, causing artificial shortages. The State dug in its heels, the market collapsed, and the lights went out because many suppliers refused to operate without being paid. [Different generators were withholding for different reasons, some legitimate, some not.]

Eventually, two of the largest utilities in the world were driven into insolvency/bankruptcy, along with several independent power companies. The state took over power contracting for the bankrupt utilities, and it spent almost 10 years trying to get out of the terrible contracts they negotiated. But ratepayers still had to pick up the tab when the smoke cleared.

And what happened to Governor Gray Davis? He got Terminated.

So good luck to Massachusetts officials. If your market doesn’t work to set reasonable prices, then you need to acknowledge that and start thinking like serious regulators; you’re going to have to get a lot deeper into cost-of-service regulation than you ever imagined.

And setting rates is more than making consumers happy; you also have to allow premiums that keep the insurers from withholding service or withdrawing completely. Welcome to cost-of-service regulation of essential public services.

Dear Mr. President:
During my shift in the Emergency Room last night, I had the pleasure of evaluating a patient whose smile revealed an expensive shiny gold tooth, whose body was adorned with a wide assortment of elaborate and costly tattoos, who wore a very expensive brand of tennis shoes and who chatted on a new cellular telephone equipped with a popular R&B ringtone.
While glancing over her patient chart, I happened to notice that her “payer status” was listed as “Medicaid”! During my examination of her, the patient informed me that she smokes more than one costly pack of cigarettes every day and somehow still has money to buy pretzels and beer.
And, you and our Congress expect me to pay for this woman’s health care? I contend that our nation’s “health care crisis” is not the result of a shortage of quality hospitals, doctors or nurses. Rather, it is the result of a “crisis of culture”, a culture in which it is perfectly acceptable to spend money on luxuries and vices while refusing to take care of one’s self or, heaven forbid, purchase health insurance. It is a culture based in the irresponsible credo that “I can do whatever I want to because someone else will always take care of me”.
Once you fix this culture crisis” that rewards irresponsibility and dependency, you’ll be amazed at how quickly our nation’s health care difficulties will disappear.
Respectfully,
STARNER JONES, MD

If you agree…pass it on.

Better treatments, early diagnosis and mammogram screenings have dramatically slowed breast cancer, but experts said the focus should now shift to changing behaviors like diet and physical activity.

“What can be achieved with screening has been achieved. We can’t do much more,” Carlo La Vecchia, head of epidemiology at the University of Milan, said in an interview. “It’s time to move on to other things.”

Mr. La Vecchia spoke Thursday at a European breast cancer conference in Barcelona. He cited figures from the International Agency for Research on Cancer, which estimates that 25 to 30% of breast cancer cases could be avoided if women were thinner and exercised more. The agency is part of the World Health Organization.

His comments are in line with recent health advice that lifestyle changes in areas such as smoking, diet, exercise and sun exposure can play a significant role in risk for several cancers.

Dr. Michelle Holmes of Harvard University, who has studied cancer and lifestyle factors, said people might wrongly think their chances of getting cancer depend more on their genes than their lifestyle.

“The genes have been there for thousands of years, but if cancer rates are changing in a lifetime, that doesn’t have much to do with genes,” she told The Associated Press in a phone interview from Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Breast cancer is the most common cancer in women. In Europe, there were about 421,000 new cases and nearly 90,000 deaths in 2008, the latest available figures. The United States last year saw more than 190,000 new cases and 40,000 deaths.

A woman’s lifetime chance of getting breast cancer is about one in eight. Obese women are up to 60% more likely to develop any cancer than normal-weight women, according to a 2006 study by British researchers.

Many breast cancers are fueled by estrogen, a hormone produced in fat tissue. So experts suspect that the fatter a woman is, the more estrogen she’s likely to produce, which could in turn fuel breast cancer. Even in slim women, experts believe exercise can help reduce the cancer risk by converting more fat into muscle.

Yet any discussion of weight and breast cancer is considered sensitive because some may misconstrue that as the medical establishment blaming women for their disease.

Tara Beaumont, a clinical nurse specialist at Breast Cancer Care, a British charity, said her agency has always been careful about giving lifestyle advice. She noted that three of the major risk factors for breast cancer — gender, age and family history — are clearly beyond anyone’s control.

“It is incredibly difficult to isolate specific factors. Therefore women should in no way feel that they are responsible for developing breast cancer,” she said.

Yet Karen Benn, a spokeswoman for Europa Donna, a patient-focused breast cancer group, said it was impossible to ignore the increasingly stronger links between lifestyle and breast cancer.

“If we know there are healthier choices, we can’t not recommend them just because people might misinterpret the advice and feel guilty,” she said. “If we are going to prevent breast cancer, then this message needs to get out, particularly to younger women.”

That means avoiding becoming overweight as an adult. Robert Baan, a cancer expert with the international cancer research agency, said it isn’t clear if women who lose weight can lower their risk to the level of a woman who was never fat.

The American Cancer Society Web site says the connection between weight and cancer risk is complex. It says risk appears to increase for women who gain weight as adults, but not for women who have been overweight since childhood. The cancer society recommends 45 to 60 minutes of physical activity five or more days a week to reduce the risk of breast cancer.

Drinking less alcohol might also help. Experts estimate that having more than a couple of drinks a day can boost the risk of breast cancer by 4 to 10 percent.

After studies several years ago linked hormone-replacement therapy to cancer, millions of women abandoned the treatment, leading to a sharp drop in breast cancer rates. Experts said a similar reduction might be seen if women ate healthier and exercised more.

Dr. Holmes, the Harvard expert, said changing diet and nutrition is arguably easier than tackling other breast cancer risk factors.

In the 1980s and 1990s, breast cancer rates steadily increased, paralleling a rise in obesity and the use of estrogen-containing hormones after menopause.

Mr. La Vecchia said countries like Italy and France — where obesity rates have been stable for the past two decades — show that weight can be controlled at a population level.

“It’s hard to lose weight, but it’s not impossible,” he said. “The potential benefit of preventing cancer is worth it.”

Copyright 2010 Associated Press

Important Identity Theft Information

According to Ted Crooks there are 3 FORMS OF IDENTITY THEFT

• Friends and Family
• Amateurs and Small Time Crooks
• Organized Fraud

TYPES OF FRAUD ALERTS

1. 60-90 DAYS
   Anyone can put this type of alert on a credit report, even if you think your identity has been stolen. The length of the alert depends on the credit bureau. The first time you sign up for an alert, you only need to call only one bureau and that bureau will notify the other two. With this type of alert, you are only notified you when someone tries to open a new credit card or a new account in your name.After the initial 90-day period, you must contact all three credit bureaus every 90 days in order to maintain the alert.
2. 7 YEARS
   If your identity has been stolen and you have filed a police report you may obtain an alert for 7 years.

WHEN TO GET A NEW SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBER

If you have massive fraud being committed against you, your ID has been stolen and your Social Security number continues to be used by others, you do have the ability to contact the Social Security Department to get a new Social Security number if you can prove that fraudulent activity has occurred and you have never declared bankruptcy. The process can take a while but it may be necessary.

WHAT IS A CREDIT FREEZE?

Freezes your credit so no one is able to open an account in your name. You must notify the 3 credit bureaus if you are interested. You will be assigned a pin number that enables you to “un-freeze” your account so that you can apply for credit. In some states this service is free if your identity has been stolen. If not, it can be costly. Some states charge $30. Check with your state.

STATES IN WHICH YOU MAY FREEZE YOUR CREDIT REPORT

• California
• Colorado
• Connecticut
• Ilinois
• Louisiana
• Maine
• Nevada
• New Jersey
• Texas
• Vermont
• Washington

HOW CAN YOU PROTECT YOURSELF FROM IDENTITY THEFT?

1. Create an ID Center – Gather credit cards you’re not using and blank checks that you’re going to use, as well as photocopies of the front and back of credit cards and ID documents. Put in a box you can lock.
2. Keep control of your mail – Make sure you’re the only one handling your mail. When you make payments don’t put them in your mailbox with the flag up. Take bills to the post office or pay bills online.
3. Check your invoices – Know where your money is going. Watch your credit card statements in detail. Monitor your phone bill and credit bureau reports.
4. Watch for notices in the mail – Look out for a notice of default on your mortgage or a mortgage that you didn’t know about. This is one of the worst forms of fraud that can hit a consumer. Look for notices of unpaid bills and collections statements. Anything you didn’t expect. Open up everything that comes in the mail first class.
5. Protect your computer – Keep an anti-virus program that is up to date and a firewall on your system.

MILITARY VETERANS CAN BETTER PROTECT THEMSELVES FROM ID THEFT WITH AN ACTIVE DUTY ALERT, A FRAUD ALERT THAT LASTS FOR ONE YEAR

CONTACT NUMBERS FOR ACTIVE DUTY ALERT

EQUIFAX – 800-525-6285
EXPERIAN – 888-397-3742
TRANSUNION – 800-680-7289

IS IT SAFER TO PAY BILLS ONLINE OR THROUGH U.S. MAIL?

According to Ted Crooks, the rate of fraud over the Internet is slightly greater than through U.S. Mail but the difference is very small. Therefore, Suze says, don’t be afraid to pay your bills online.

WATCH OUT FOR PHISHING

A scheme where you’re sent an email that asks you to go to a website to fill out personal information. Don’t respond to requests for personal information. Only provide personal information on websites that you visited yourself. Be sure of the authenticity of websites by typing the name of the website into your web browser.