Benefits of implementing a wellness program

Wellness care and healthy lifestyle haven't been subjected to close scrutiny to see if they really do bring down health costs for businesses.  Yes, it's in every health/business bottom line article you see, but where is the research? "Free" preventive services aren't free and aren't preventive--those costs are built into the insurance.  Besides, if something is found during prevention, then it becomes diagnostic and treatment follows, and that isn’t free.  Someone has to pay.  Health costs keep going up, and I've been hearing this for at least 25 years. 

When they got people to stop smoking, the obesity rate went up. Where's the savings? And if  enough people live longer because of exercise and normalized weight, they just cost more in their 80s and 90s because they didn't die in their 70s.

Whether or not they reduce costs—which I doubt--these programs are becoming very intrusive and often are not optional.  The “choice” to participate now may mean that the employee is charged higher premiums for NOT participating.  Some choice, right?  And the spouse who doesn’t work at the company has to also submit.  I hate tobacco in all forms, but I don’t like it that an employee can’t smoke in his own home because of the company’s “wellness” plan.

Infantilizing Marco Rubio

When the Main stream Media ridicules an American Hispanic politician taking a sip of water during a speech, and then runs the clip over 100 times hoping to make him look silly, inexperienced and "other," it's not considered racism by Democrats. But requiring ID, or border security, or documentation for employment, is. If we'd had this sort of alert, tough, investigative press in the 70s, Nixon wouldn't have had a single worry.

Actually, Marco Rubio is an American born in 1971 whose parents immigrated from Cuba in 1956. That they fled Communism is probably a black mark with our leftist press. They adore Castro.   There is no such country as "Hispania," so I was sloppy to use it. It's a made up, catch-all term like Latino that lumps together people from Mexico, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Central America, and South America even if their ancestry is German, Portuguese, Russian, Jewish, or Spanish. It's a little like assuming all residents of the United States claim England in their ancestry because they speak English.

Rubio And Netanyahu Bump Water Bottles In Israel

Shorts in a knot over Rubio’s water bottle placement

Leftist media try to make any conservative look foolish, not about content, but about taking a sip of water on camera. At least he didn’t drive into it with an intern.

Oh my! Oreos baked in a brownie mix!

You need Brownie mix, Oreos, peanut butter, and cupcake liners.-
-place cupcake liners in your muffin pan, spread peanut butter on 2 Oreos set them on top of each other, and into the liners. Pour Brownie mix on top of them. Bake at 350 for 20 minutes.

Seen at Beyond a Mom Facebook.

You can’t chop out one amendment without affecting the others

This is from the Seattle Times.  As you may have heard, some states are limiting bullet sales, another (Washington state) has decided on a home inspection of registered owners.

“ 'In order to continue to possess an assault weapon that was legally possessed on the effective date of this section, the person possessing shall safely and securely store the assault weapon. The sheriff of the county may, no more than once per year, conduct an inspection to ensure compliance with this subsection.'

In other words, come into homes without a warrant to poke around. Failure to comply could get you up to a year in jail.

'I’m a liberal Democrat — I’ve voted for only one Republican in my life,' [Lance] Palmer told me. 'But now I understand why my right-wing opponents worry about having to fight a government takeover.'"

Why these sell is beyond me

Torn, faded jeans with platform high heels on an anorexic model.

But that’s the fashion and they do sell.  I guess it is because most of the fashion designers are gay men who prefer the form of  young boys.  So why do women fall for this?  If there is anything worse than the baggy look of a few years back, it’s the “back in skinny jeans” look that have Gen-Xers yearning for the body of their middle school days.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/08/fashion/thursdaystyles/08FASHION.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

And it’s suggested you are homophobic if you notice!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/nov/06/1

And men’s fashion too has to look like it’s for young boys. “Media trends are created by famous designer labels which have been managed by homosexual men for decades, and for several years they have been using stick-thin male models.”

http://www.examiner.com/article/straight-men-are-being-destroyed-by-gay-fashion-designers

Who pays taxes? We do.

"The most dangerous myth is the demagoguery that business can be made to pay a larger share, thus relieving the individual. Politicians preaching this are either deliberately dishonest, or economically illiterate, and either one should scare us. Business doesn't pay taxes, and who better than business to make this message known? Only people pay taxes, and people pay as consumers every tax that is assessed against a business. Begin with the food and fiber raised in the farm, to the ore drilled in a mine, to the oil and gas from out of the ground, whatever it may be -- through the processing, through the manufacturing, on out to the retailer's license. If the tax cannot be included in the price of the product, no one along that line can stay in business."
– Ronald Reagan, Speech at Hillsdale College, November 10, 1977

Physician reimbursement—or why you’ll wait, by Dr. Anna Meenan (retired at 54)

If you're wondering why your doctor is discouraged and depressed (and many are, though they don't show it) these days, this might help explain it:
http://www.physiciansmoneydigest.com/practice-management/Physician-Reimbursement-Dropped-Sharply
As best I can tell, these are the rates paid by COMMERCIAL insurers. Medicare and Medicaid pay even less than this, and have also been lowering many of their rates. If you think that this is what goes into the doctor's pocket, you are wrong. Out of these sums, the doctor must pay all the overhead of running an office: skilled labor, equipment, supplies, utility bills, and thousands of dollars in malpractice insurance. Think for a moment about what you were charged the last time you called a plumber, or the last time you took your car in for repairs, and put the value of those services up against the value of your life and health. I'm just saying.

$86 for code 99215. Just to clarify, 99215 is the highest code for an office encounter. This is what your doctor would code if you came to his/her office with, oh, let's say, out-of control diabetes with a life-threatening electrolyte imbalance, or if a senior citizen was brought in who was suddenly very confused and not eating. 

Dr. Meenan graduated from the University of Illinois at Chicago, practiced in Rockford and formerly was with the medical clinic in Mt. Morris, Illinois

Who really cares? Bush or Obama?

As many faults as Bush brought to the table, Obama is making him look like a hero and statesman, which I doubt that he was. However, Bush was definitely a patriot, a committed Christian, and a man who loved his country. Obama is none of those.

In lives saved, Bush has no match in my life time. The embryonic stem cell executive order (it was never outlawed, it only limited government funding to cells lines already in use) allowed technology to catch up and save women’s bodies from becoming medical labs for experimentation, his moral leadership on abortion inspired thousands of local organizations and volunteers which are reducing that killing field, his trafficking in persons effort (there are more slaves today than during the 17-18th centuries of the Atlantic slave trade) and the PEPFAR AIDS drug assistance in Africa (Obama has let this slide since it wasn’t his idea), and freeing the women under control of the Taliban all put Obama, the peace prize prez, to shame.

AIDS affects gay men and and blacks more than any other demographic, but it was Bush, not Obama, who really stepped up to help. Just one more example of how people who blindly supported Obama where left out in the cold after he got their vote. Michael Weinstein, president of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, said HIV/AIDS was a higher priority for Bush than it is for Obama, citing the ADAP waiting list and the distinction in PEPFAR as a key difference between the presidents.

http://www.cdc.gov/hiv/topics/aa/index.htm

Minimum wage increases always hurt teens (Monday Memories)

Years ago (I was about 42 I think) I went to work in a local book store.  I knew nothing about selling books, but wanted part time work so I could be at home when the kids were out of school.  I never was able to figure out the cash register (very early computer style) or all the special promotions/gift cards/coupons.  It killed me to tear off covers and put books in the dumpster.  I hid pornography in the basement.  But because I had a master’s degree in library science, the manager put my salary at twenty five cents above minimum wage.  Truly, I wasn’t worth even that. Businesses that hire beginners like me are doing an act of service.   I made so many mistakes, it is embarrassing to remember.  However, I learned a lot, and it convinced me I really did need to work for the state.  The free market, especially the corporate world (was a chain), was not for me.

After 1998 strict gun control law, crime soared in Massachusetts

But the law will never be blamed.  It’s the fault of neighboring states.  Meanwhile, legal gun ownership is way down.

http://www.jeffjacoby.com/12950/after-the-toughest-gun-law-gun-crime-rose

How we got standard time—the railroads

http://www.wimp.com/trainstime/

Bait and Switch

I clicked on a Nordstrom link for Spring dresses, looking modest, decent length, pretty colors, but when I got there I found something like this, a t-shirt over a window curtain.  The is called a “drop-waist.”  The front looks like  underwear for men.

I had a dog named Polka-dot when I was 11.

The Book of Judith

Protestant Bibles don’t contain the book of Judith, although it was part of canon for the Eastern and Western Church until the Reformation.  It seems, though, St. Jerome had a bit of a struggle—I looked it up and he had to translate from the Chaldean texts to Latin.  (We saw his cell when we were in the Holy Land.)

There is a web site that focuses just on Biblical films, Bible Films Blog. It is amazing, or maybe not, how many films have been made about Judith.  The author, Matt Page (UK), is going to be writing about Judith the next week or so, and begins with a collation of all the films he could find, and the first 3 are silent films.

He lists 13 films about Judith—it has everything for today’s audience; religion, sex, violence, and politics.

A plan doomed to fail

No shock here. If the federal government passes enough mandates, and the states can't print money, soon there is no money for the poor.

"Obama administration officials said Friday that the state-based “high-risk pools” set up under the 2010 health-care law will be closed to new applicants as soon as Saturday and no later than March 2, depending on the state." reported in Washington Post today.

The plan is set up to fail--whether intentional or not. The wait to get in the high risk pool means the people are desperately sick by the time they get coverage, and very expensive to treat, thus depleting the money for those waiting. Bad, bad plan that only a massive bureaucracy could come up with.

And ultimately, it is the same plan for the rest of us.  Doctors are quitting rather than go along with the insane regulations—the documents to support this massive bill run to thousands of pages. 13,000 pages as of October 12 and 18 pages to define a full time employee.  There aren’t enough to meet the Obamacare guidelines and new doctors probably won’t materialize.  By the time we get to see a doctor, we’ll be too sick for effective treatment.

The government will add more snoops and IRS agents than doctors or nurses.

Food stamp king, jobs footman

Since January 2009, a net of 194,000 new jobs have been created. During that same time, 14.7 million have been added to the food stamp rolls.

Wrong on so many things, but especially this one

A holocaust for black America—40% of pregnancies of black women end in abortion. Democrats think it’s a plan to fight poverty.

Young Indiana athlete excels at life and sports

“The son of Marvin and Apryl Hoot, Nik is a well rounded athlete in spite of the fact that he is missing parts of both legs and doesn't have a fully developed set of fingers. He lives with these physical disabilities because his biological parents - an unknown couple from Russia - attempted to abort Nik. The abortion didn't take and in the fall of 1996 Nik was born - he was put up for adoption shortly thereafter.”

He’s had prosthetic legs since he was two years old and since then has been unstoppable.  His parents have adopted five other children with birth defects, who look up to him.

http://www.wane.com/dpp/sports/local_sports/wane-   woodburn-woodlans-warrior-nik-hoots-story-jwh

http://www.theabortionsurvivors.com/failed-abortions-get-informed/

Bad to the bone.

      

Noodling what you’re eating

A pending federal food-labeling rule that stems from Obamacare would overburden thousands of grocers and convenience store owners — to the tune of $1 billion in the first year alone. At first it was just for restaurants, but it has slopped over into the grocery industry for salad bars, food bars, soups and bakery items. Apparently there are people still who think death by chocolate is the equivalent in nutrition of a salad so they need big brother. All of us who shop at that store will pay.

http://facethepolitics.com/2013/02/supermarkets-angered-by-new-fda-obamacare-regulation/