Mover Mike

I am so glad my creaking joints, hair loss and age spots are a boon for some venture capitalists. I would hate to have my fading years just wasted.

GigaOM has an article that describes the technology that’s coming our way to help separate us from our $3 trillion in annual disposable income.

1. Technologies and services to foster “aging in place” will be huge - most older people want to stay in their homes. New technologies allow our children or care givers to monitor us in every room from remote locations.
2. When tech products hit big with older Americans, it’s often by mistake - think wii and iPads and devices that monitor our habits and notify druggists, for example, that we are getting low on prescriptions and need a refill
3. Target market: baby boomer care givers - technology to help baby boomers monitor their parents
4. Target market: baby boomer care givers - Home delivery and check-in services, and add-ons around them, could be very big.

Society already pays a disproportionate amount of health care money on the aged, and social security is a burden on the young. I’m so happy that we can give back part of our disposable income and provide research for even more products,

Tags: Health Care, Investing by MoverMike
4 Comments »

One of my big beefs is the cost of healthcare in this country. The Northwest Labor Press has an article that headlines the cost of family health insurance as topping $15,000 a year, according to the latest annual survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Health Research & Educational Trust.

Since 1999 workers earnings are up 50% and annual premiums are up 168%! In 1999 family health coverage was $5,791. The cost doubled by 2006 to $11,480. Now five years later it’s $15,073. At this rate, if something is not done, the average family will pay $20,000 in three more years.

Two things are apparent from the study. One, the deductible is rising in most plans. That means more out of pocket expense on top of the premiums and two, fewer companies are offering health care plans. In addition, for retirees, fewer companies each year are offering health benefits. In 1988 66% of companies provided retirement health care. Now, the percent has dropped to 26%.

I was covering my wife through First Student health care plan. However, last year it cost me almost $1,000 per month over nine months to cover her. That amount taken out of my pay check left me most months with a big fat zero for take home. We have dropped her coverage and will pay $588 to Kaiser on our own.

Why do all the major countries in the world offer affordable health care to their citizens? Mexico for example charges $300 per year for excellent health care per person. Will health plans in these other countries fail as nations run out of money? Is there some we we can get our health care costs under control?

Tags: Health Care by MoverMike
No Comments »

Every day I read the latest about food shortages and drug shortages.  Think it’s just happening elsewhere?  KATU reports that “Local hospitals are doing what they can to keep a nationwide drug shortage from impacting their patients.”

The shortages of drugs in Portland hospitals primarily concerns drugs used for cancer treatments.

Tags: Health Care by MoverMike
No Comments »

Tags: Health Care, politics by MoverMike
No Comments »

Here’s a report from CounterPunch that says eight cities in the northwest U.S. (Boise ID, Seattle WA, Portland OR, plus the northern California cities of Santa Cruz, Sacramento, San Francisco, San Jose, and Berkeley) have experienced and increase in deaths among those younger than one year of age:

4 weeks ending March 19, 2011 - 37 deaths (avg. 9.25 per week)

10 weeks ending May 28, 2011 - 125 deaths (avg.12.50 per week)

“This amounts to an increase of 35% (the total for the entire U.S. rose about 2.3%), and is statistically significant. Of further significance is that those dates include the four weeks before and the ten weeks after the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant disaster.”

Tags: Health Care by MoverMike
No Comments »

President Obama’s solicitor general, defending the national health care law on Wednesday, told a federal appeals court that Americans who didn’t like the individual mandate could always avoid it by choosing to earn less money.

How dare this man suggest such a thing. I’m offended by his arrogance.

Tags: Health Care, politics by MoverMike
No Comments »

When my Mom, who’ll be 87 this year, was a teenager there was a stigma against people with tans. It was assumed that you were a laborer or field worker if you had a tan. The rich were white or pale from being out of the sun. You know that attitude has changed! Now people who have discretionary income take vacations in places where they can relax by the pool and get tan.

Time was in this country that people who were fat were rich.

“Plump bodies represented success, generosity, fertility, wealth, and beauty…”

We know in this country there has been a move away from this image for some time. Now the rich have trainers, and massages and exercise rooms and watch their weight. It’s the poor who are obese. In a new a cross-cultural study of attitudes to obesity to be published in the April issue of Current Anthropology, attitudes toward fat people are changing.

While the US and other Western countries have idealized slimness and stigmatized fatness for decades, in other parts of the world, this has not been the case, until now.

Now countries like “…Mexico, Paraguay, and - perhaps most surprisingly - in American Samoa” were changing rapidly and fat people were stigmatized at “lazy.” Slimness was starting to become the ideal.

The pendulum is swinging back to thin. It may be a subconscious way to survive in a increasingly hostile world, a world of shortages and drought and more people competing for fewer resources. Or it may be a dawning on us all that obesity shortens our lives and brings on so many health problems.

Even I, who laughed at people who exercised, who has steadily added pounds each year, from the time I was 165 in the army until I was flirting recently with 225, have lost 15 pounds and working my way back to 190. Carrying around two bowling balls, I figured, wasn’t good for my hips and knees and heart.

Maybe, we are shifting away from the Seven Deadly Sins of which one is Gluttony, derived from the Latin gluttire meaning to gulp down or swallow, means over-indulgence and over-consumption of food, drink, or intoxicants to the point of waste.

Tags: Health Care, culture by MoverMike
No Comments »

The state of Wisconsin faces a deficit of $3.3 billion.  That means the government elected by the people in the state has budgeted to spend more money than it takes in.  The people are fed up with the overspending and in the last election changed the message to government officials saying we want the fiscal house fixed.  The republican governor has made a move that will require the union members to pick up a small share of their healthcare cost.  It must be voted on and the democrats have refused to show up for the vote.  Obama has now injected himself into the debate on the side of the unions without offering a way out of the problem.

The problem is we can’t afford the contracts anymore that previous officials negotiated.  The unions can have some cake and some pie, but they can’t have both.  Either help the state cut costs or face devastating reductions in union members.  We can’t borrow the money from the Federal Government or get bailed out.  The problem is debt and it must be reduced and spending must be cut.  The sooner the unions buy in, the better!

UPDATE: Michelle Malkin has list of the salaries of all the mucks in Wisconsin school system.

Tags: Government, Government Spending, Health Care, politics by MoverMike
No Comments »

“House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis., is testing support for his idea to replace Medicare with a fixed payment to buy a private medical plan from a menu of coverage options.”

Now lets privatize Social Security like Chile and many other countries.

Tags: Government, Government Spending, Health Care by MoverMike
No Comments »

I think I’ve read all the inhumane ways we kill each other when another way one turns up.

Some people with HIV/Aids in are being buried alive by their relatives.

Tags: Health Care, culture by MoverMike
No Comments »