Air Cycle, The Air Cycle paper

Air Powered Car 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

via Garret at dangerousmeta

Examples of products that should be discarded are:

• Citrushield Lotion
• Dermasentials DermaBarrier
• Dermassentials by Clarcon Antimicrobial Hand Sanitizer
• Iron Fist Barrier Hand Treatment
• Skin Shield Restaurant
• Skin Shield Industrial
• Skin Shield Beauty Salon Lotion
• Total Skin Care Beauty
• Total Skin Care Work

At the same time, the Food and Drug Administration said it was working to develop mandatory standards for growing, harvesting and processing fruits and vegetables, going well beyond the rules in place today.

The announcements were the latest signs that Washington was moving forward with efforts to overhaul the food safety system. On Thursday, the House of Representatives passed a bill to strengthen the F.D.A.’s oversight of food safety by giving it added powers and mandating more frequent inspections of food processing plants. The Senate is expected to take up similar legislation this autumn.

Remember This?

Click here for more videos’s

This is pretty big news, guys. Remember, the Massachusetts plan is the model they want to use for national reform – and already it’s beginning to crack under the economic strain.

This is what happens with “bipartisan,” market-friendly compromise: Band-aid solutions that can’t handle a massive load. And it’s exactly why we need single-payer universal healthcare: because it’s the only plan cheap enough to stay solvent through tough times.

Overseers of Massachusetts’ trailblazing healthcare program made their first cuts yesterday, trimming $115 million, or 12 percent, from Commonwealth Care, which subsidizes premiums for needy residents and is the centerpiece of the 2006 law.

The board of the Connector Authority made the cuts as officials confronted two side effects of the recession: the state budget crisis and a surge in enrollment by the recently unemployed.

The largest share of the savings will come from slowing enrollment. An estimated 18,000 poor residents who qualify for full subsidies, but who forget to designate a health plan, will no longer be automatically assigned a plan and enrolled and thus could face delays in getting care.

The board also eliminated dental coverage for the poorest residents enrolled in Commonwealth Care, roughly 92,000 people who currently are the only ones in the program who receive that care. Regulators said that would save $10 million. Dental coverage was retained in the budget approved by lawmakers last week, and now it falls to the governor to decide its fate.

Also hanging in the balance is the health insurance status of 28,000 legal immigrants whose Commonwealth Care coverage was dropped in the budget lawmakers approved for the fiscal year that begins July 1. Governor Deval Patrick has until Monday to decide whether to veto any of that budget, which set aside $116 million less for Commonwealth Care than he proposed.

via (crooksandliars.com)

The Democratic Party showed on Friday what it’s capable of when led by the majority of its members rather than its conservative wing. In stark contrast to Senate Democrats, who spent the week backpedaling on reform, unified House Democrats unveiled a draft health care overhaul bill jointly endorsed by three powerful committee chairmen.

Henry Waxman, Charlie Rangel and George Miller, chairs of the Energy & Commerce, Ways & Means and Education & Labor Committees, announced the result of six months of negotiations. The sight of three united committee chairmen in the turf-conscious House is a historically rare one.

Where the Senate Finance Committee’s outline of a bill didn’t include a public health insurance option for people to buy into, the House version includes a robust public plan that would operate nationally and compete with private insurers on a level playing field to keep them honest.

Read the rest of the story

Why would any educated society rely on a health care system that has a stated fiduciary responsibility to extract as much money from its customers while giving them as little care as possible?

Kevin Drum reports:

Yesterday the House Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations decided to investigate the practice of recission. This is when you pay your premiums for years to a healthcare insurer, then get sick, and then have your insurance cancelled. The insurance industry executives at the hearing did not exactly cover themselves with glory:

A Texas nurse said she lost her coverage, after she was diagnosed with aggressive breast cancer, for failing to disclose a visit to a dermatologist for acne.

The sister of an Illinois man who died of lymphoma said his policy was rescinded for the failure to report a possible aneurysm and gallstones that his physician noted in his chart but did not discuss with him.

….Late in the hearing, [Bart] Stupak, the committee chairman, put the executives on the spot. Stupak asked each of them whether he would at least commit his company to immediately stop rescissions except where they could show “intentional fraud.”

The answer from all three executives: “No.”

Read the rest of the story

Want to get healthy, loose weight, and have a better life? Then go see Food, Inc. Learn and change what you eat.

I’ll see you there.

Two warring conceptions of the American food and agriculture business collide in the gripping agitprop documentary ‘Food, Inc.,’ the result of a collaboration between filmmaker Robert Kenner and writers Eric Schlosser and Michael Pollan. I’m using ‘agitprop’ as a descriptor, not a pejorative, since I personally agree with nearly all the arguments made in the film. Furthermore, if ‘Food Inc.’ comes off as a one-sided project, it’s easy to know where to point the finger, since the biggest meat-processing companies and agribusiness firms profiled in the film — Smithfield, Tyson, Perdue, Monsanto — universally declined to provide any access or on-camera interviews.

On one hand, we’ve got the fact that, as Pollan puts it, the production of food has changed more in the last 50 years than it did in the previous 10,000. With the massive application of fertilizers, pesticides and economies of scale after World War II, raising crops and animals for food ceased to be a rural lifestyle based on many small farmers and ranchers, and rapidly became a heavily mechanized (and lightly regulated) industry dominated by a handful of big companies who run on low-wage labor. “Food, Inc.” attempts to lift the veil of secrecy from this process. In one remarkable example Pollan provides, the meat in a single fast-food burger might have come from 400 different cows.”

Read the rest of the story at Salon.com

The President has long noted that skyrocketing health care costs will be disastrous in terms of our long term national debt unless we pass real reform. In this Weekly Address, the President also explains how he will cover the upfront costs of reform by eliminating overpayments from Medicaid and Medicare and driving down costs contributing to government’s health care expenditures across the board.

Read the details

Kathleen Sebelius, the Secretary of Health and Human Services spoke clearly and effectively of the importance that there be a public option available for health care to all Americans. Straight talk about how the public option will benefit Americans.

Sen. Bernie Sanders on The Situation Room discussing his recent article at The Huffington Post, Health Care Is a Right, Not a Privilege.

It’s pretty interesting that Obama is taking the insurance companies at their word and calculating in the savings they claim they can find, using that as a go-ahead to cut Medicare reimbursement. It’s a bold move and I don’t see any downside, although of course the industry will be screaming