President Barack Obama on Thursday said the large pool of residents in New York will reduce health insurance premiums for those who buy insurance on the open market.
Reported by NY1 2 days ago.
Obama: NYC Residents To See Big Drop In Health Insurance Premiums
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Online USA Doctors Provides a Remedy for Rising Employee Health Care Costs
Online USA Doctors offers the only comprehensive portal offering expert doctor consults to many health questions, same-day. It also offers health insurance alternative options.
Bismark, ND (PRWEB) July 18, 2013
Online USA Doctors, the novel telemedicine portal that has just been launched, is already on its way to provide long-term and sustainable solutions to some of America’s most pressing health care problems.
This portal offers many diagnostic and treatment services that seek to revolutionize the U.S. health care sector by making medical help readily accessible and financially feasible. Online USA Doctors has also fabricated an array of alternatives for traditional health care coverage plans to help employees access high-quality care facilities even in an environment of rising costs.
According to a report published in The New York Times, employees will now have to pay a rising share of their health care costs as compared to their employers. Right now, they are paying 42 percent more on their health coverage plans than what they used to spend just five years ago. This is in sharp contrast to the 32 percent increase in the costs borne by employers for their workplace individual health insurance plans. These are the findings of a survey carried out by Towers Watson and the National Business Group on Health among close to 600 large employers in the United States who cumulatively employ about 11 million workers.
The above-mentioned survey has revealed more disturbing findings. About 80 percent of the respondents in the survey stated that they intend to shift more of the burden of health care costs on their employees over the next three years. This means that employees will have to pay higher premiums on their personal health insurance plans in the coming years. With yearly salaries increasing by less than two percent, rising health care premiums have already eaten into the employee take-home pay and will make more upsetting inroads in the near future.
In such a grim scenario, Online USA Doctors has invoked a host of alternatives to conventional health insurance options to suit the needs of both individuals and families of varying sizes. For instance, the Individual Plan costs only $29.99 while the Couple Plan costs $59.99. The Family Plan by Online USA Doctors costs a maximum of $99.99. By signing up for these medical plans, Online USA Doctors enables employees to save on their health care coverage without compromising on the quality of care they can receive. What is more, by making these plans available, Online USA Doctors has also provided a breather to all those employees who had dropped out of the health insurance net owing to rising premium costs.
Apart from making available the aforementioned health care plans, Online USA Doctors also seeks to make medical care affordable and readily accessible to all. The online doctors on this telemedicine portal provide prompt and comprehensive answers to health questions posted on the site. What is more, the doctors also make personalized recommendations of pharmaceutical-grade supplements. The health questions hotline and the online medical advice provided by Online USA Doctors thus spares patients the need and the ensuing expenses of having to find a doctor as well as actually or possibly having to visit that doctor for treatment.
Online USA Doctors has ushered in unique and effective solutions to counter the problem of rising employee health care costs in the United States and has given them financially feasible alternatives to traditional health coverage policies.
Online USA Doctors Contact Information:
San Diego, CA
(855) 872-0012
http://www.onlineusadoctors.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/OnlineUSADoctor
Facebook: OnlineUsaDoctors Reported by PRWeb 2 days ago.
Bismark, ND (PRWEB) July 18, 2013
Online USA Doctors, the novel telemedicine portal that has just been launched, is already on its way to provide long-term and sustainable solutions to some of America’s most pressing health care problems.
This portal offers many diagnostic and treatment services that seek to revolutionize the U.S. health care sector by making medical help readily accessible and financially feasible. Online USA Doctors has also fabricated an array of alternatives for traditional health care coverage plans to help employees access high-quality care facilities even in an environment of rising costs.
According to a report published in The New York Times, employees will now have to pay a rising share of their health care costs as compared to their employers. Right now, they are paying 42 percent more on their health coverage plans than what they used to spend just five years ago. This is in sharp contrast to the 32 percent increase in the costs borne by employers for their workplace individual health insurance plans. These are the findings of a survey carried out by Towers Watson and the National Business Group on Health among close to 600 large employers in the United States who cumulatively employ about 11 million workers.
The above-mentioned survey has revealed more disturbing findings. About 80 percent of the respondents in the survey stated that they intend to shift more of the burden of health care costs on their employees over the next three years. This means that employees will have to pay higher premiums on their personal health insurance plans in the coming years. With yearly salaries increasing by less than two percent, rising health care premiums have already eaten into the employee take-home pay and will make more upsetting inroads in the near future.
In such a grim scenario, Online USA Doctors has invoked a host of alternatives to conventional health insurance options to suit the needs of both individuals and families of varying sizes. For instance, the Individual Plan costs only $29.99 while the Couple Plan costs $59.99. The Family Plan by Online USA Doctors costs a maximum of $99.99. By signing up for these medical plans, Online USA Doctors enables employees to save on their health care coverage without compromising on the quality of care they can receive. What is more, by making these plans available, Online USA Doctors has also provided a breather to all those employees who had dropped out of the health insurance net owing to rising premium costs.
Apart from making available the aforementioned health care plans, Online USA Doctors also seeks to make medical care affordable and readily accessible to all. The online doctors on this telemedicine portal provide prompt and comprehensive answers to health questions posted on the site. What is more, the doctors also make personalized recommendations of pharmaceutical-grade supplements. The health questions hotline and the online medical advice provided by Online USA Doctors thus spares patients the need and the ensuing expenses of having to find a doctor as well as actually or possibly having to visit that doctor for treatment.
Online USA Doctors has ushered in unique and effective solutions to counter the problem of rising employee health care costs in the United States and has given them financially feasible alternatives to traditional health coverage policies.
Online USA Doctors Contact Information:
San Diego, CA
(855) 872-0012
http://www.onlineusadoctors.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/OnlineUSADoctor
Facebook: OnlineUsaDoctors Reported by PRWeb 2 days ago.
↧
Will demographic changes amplify racial inequality?
WASHINGTON -- One-year-old Ka'Lani is so fascinated by a round plastic toy that she doesn't see her mother, Ke'sha Scrivner, walk into the Martha's Table day care, chanting her name while softly clapping out a beat that Ka'Lani keeps with a few bounces on her bottom.
Once on welfare, Scrivner worked her way off by studying early childhood education and landing a full-time job for the District of Columbia's education superintendent. She sees education as the path to a better life for her and her five children, pushing them to finish high school and continue with college or a trade school.
Whether her children can beat the statistics that show lagging graduation rates for black children is important not just to her family. The success of Ka'Lani and other minority children who will form a new majority is crucial to future U.S. economic competitiveness.
A wave of immigration, the aging of non-Hispanic white women beyond child-bearing years and a new baby boom are diminishing the proportion of children who are white. Already, half of U.S. children younger than 1 are Hispanic, black, Asian, Native American or of mixed races.
"A lot of people think demographics alone will bring about change and it won't," said Gail Christopher, who heads the W.K. Kellogg Foundation's America Healing project on racial equity. "If attitudes and behaviors don't change, demographics will just mean we'll have a majority population that is low-income, improperly educated, disproportionately incarcerated with greater health disparities."
In 2010, 39.4 percent of black children, 34 percent of Hispanic children and 38 percent of American Indian and Alaska Native children lived in poverty, defined as an annual income of $22,113 that year for a family of four. That compares with about 18 percent of white, non-Hispanic children, according to Census Bureau's 2011 American Community Survey.
Asian children overall fare better, with 13.5 percent living in poverty, the survey said.
The overrepresentation of minority children among the poor is not new. What is new is that minority children will, in the not-too-distant future, form the core of the nation's workforce, and their taxes will be depended on to keep solvent entitlement programs for the elderly.
Based on where things stand for nonwhite children today, it's not hard to make some educated guesses about what the future holds for the youngest of America's children who already are a majority of their age group, said Sam Fulwood III, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.
The recent recession worsened conditions for many children, but minorities were hard hit and are having more difficulty recovering.
The Pew Charitable Trusts found that, from 1999 to 2009, 23 percent of black families and 27 percent of Hispanic families experienced long-term unemployment, compared with 11 percent of white families. Pew Research Center, a subsidiary, found that the median wealth of white households is 20 times that of black households and 18 times that of Hispanic households.
That means more minority families end up in poor neighborhoods with underperforming school systems, leading to lower graduation rates and lower lifetime earnings, said Leonard Greenhalgh, a professor of management at Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire.
"You are looking at the future workforce of the United States – what we need to be competitive against rival economies such as India and China, and we are not educating the largest, fastest growing percentage of the U.S. workforce, so as a nation we lose competitive advantage," Greenhalgh said.
It all starts with preschool, where overall enrollment has been increasing but Hispanic children are less likely to be included. Of Hispanic children ages 3 to 5 in the U.S., 13.4 percent were enrolled in full-day public or private nursery school in 2011, according to data from the National Center for Education Statistics.
That compares with 25.8 percent of black children enrolled in full-day preschool and 18.1 percent of white children. But already, Hispanics are one-quarter of students enrolled in public schools.
The situation prompted San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro to push for voter approval to raise the sales tax and expand preschool opportunities in his city, which is 63.2 percent Hispanic.
"I see a gap in educational achievement for San Antonio children versus children in Texas and the nation, and a large percentage of those are minority children and of course, we wanted to change that trajectory," Castro said in an interview.
President Barack Obama has proposed raising cigarette taxes to help pay for preschools. He has proposed a program to entice states to expand preschool programs to reach families with incomes up to twice the poverty line, and to require full-day kindergarten. But the partisan political showdown over government spending and raising taxes has led to across-the-board federal spending cuts and stalls in other legislation that may delay those proposals.
Sheila Smith, early childhood director at Columbia University's National Center for Children in Poverty, points to years of research that show kindergarteners perform better if they received high-quality early care, and if teachers used specific strategies aimed at developing behavior and language and math skills.
"If you have minority children from low-income families in very enriched preschool settings ... we see they make very big gains," Smith said. "But how many classrooms are very enriched to the point that we see kids making these very big gains? Not nearly enough."
Compounding the issue, experts say, is immigration status. About 4.5 million children of all races born in the U.S. have at least one parent not legally in the U.S., according to the Pew Hispanic Center. More than two-thirds of impoverished Latino children are the children of at least one immigrant parent, the center reported.
Latino and Asian immigrants over past two decades are driving a significant portion of the demographic change, and ensuring their children can succeed is critical, said Brookings Institution demographer William Frey.
"They're the future of our labor force. They're the future of our economy," Frey said. "They're the people who white baby boomers are going to have to depend on for their Social Security, for their Medicare and just for a productive economy to keep all of us going in the future."
The picture isn't all bleak. History and recent data show improvements for the next generations of immigrant families.
The Pew Research Center found second-generation Americans, some 20 million U.S.-born children of 20th century immigrants, are better off than their immigrant parents. They have higher incomes, more graduate from college and are homeowners and fewer live in poverty, the study found.
Many experts on low-income children see good health as one more building block for education and prosperity. Children are less likely to learn if they are ill and missing school and unable to see a doctor.
On a recent weekday, 9-month-old Anderson sat on his mother's lap in the waiting room of the clinic at Mary's Center, a community organization in the nation's capital. He had struggled for three days with diarrhea, cold symptoms and vomiting.
He and his two siblings are American citizens, but their father and mother, Alba, who did not want her last names revealed because neither parent is in the country legally, are not. The children's health care is covered by Medicaid, and Alba says she wants them to be healthy so they can have a better life. "They have to go to college," said Alba, originally from El Salvador. "They have to do better, since their mother can't."
Anderson's generation will be the first to fully grow up under the new federal health insurance mandate taking effect next year. The act requires free preventive services and also extends money for the Children's Health Insurance Program through 2015.
In 2011, about 94 percent of black children, 92.3 percent of Asian/Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander children and 95 percent of white children had health insurance coverage, while 87.2 percent of Hispanic children and 83.4 percent of American Indian and Alaska Native children had some form of health insurance coverage, according to a study by Georgetown University's Center for Children and Families.
The numbers of uninsured children are at a historic low – just 7.5 percent, said Joan Alker, the center's executive director.
While 73.1 percent of white children had private coverage, more than half of black and Hispanic children got health care through Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Programs and similar federal and state subsidized programs, the Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics reported.
"We have the increasing rates of childhood asthma, childhood obesity and these are going to lead to problems later in life, so it's far better to make sure those kids have health insurance so you can address those issues as much as possible now," Alker said.
___
Follow Suzanne Gamboa on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/APsgamboa
___
America Healing: http://tinyurl.com/32gh45l
National Center for Children in Poverty: http://nccp.org Reported by Huffington Post 2 days ago.
Once on welfare, Scrivner worked her way off by studying early childhood education and landing a full-time job for the District of Columbia's education superintendent. She sees education as the path to a better life for her and her five children, pushing them to finish high school and continue with college or a trade school.
Whether her children can beat the statistics that show lagging graduation rates for black children is important not just to her family. The success of Ka'Lani and other minority children who will form a new majority is crucial to future U.S. economic competitiveness.
A wave of immigration, the aging of non-Hispanic white women beyond child-bearing years and a new baby boom are diminishing the proportion of children who are white. Already, half of U.S. children younger than 1 are Hispanic, black, Asian, Native American or of mixed races.
"A lot of people think demographics alone will bring about change and it won't," said Gail Christopher, who heads the W.K. Kellogg Foundation's America Healing project on racial equity. "If attitudes and behaviors don't change, demographics will just mean we'll have a majority population that is low-income, improperly educated, disproportionately incarcerated with greater health disparities."
In 2010, 39.4 percent of black children, 34 percent of Hispanic children and 38 percent of American Indian and Alaska Native children lived in poverty, defined as an annual income of $22,113 that year for a family of four. That compares with about 18 percent of white, non-Hispanic children, according to Census Bureau's 2011 American Community Survey.
Asian children overall fare better, with 13.5 percent living in poverty, the survey said.
The overrepresentation of minority children among the poor is not new. What is new is that minority children will, in the not-too-distant future, form the core of the nation's workforce, and their taxes will be depended on to keep solvent entitlement programs for the elderly.
Based on where things stand for nonwhite children today, it's not hard to make some educated guesses about what the future holds for the youngest of America's children who already are a majority of their age group, said Sam Fulwood III, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.
The recent recession worsened conditions for many children, but minorities were hard hit and are having more difficulty recovering.
The Pew Charitable Trusts found that, from 1999 to 2009, 23 percent of black families and 27 percent of Hispanic families experienced long-term unemployment, compared with 11 percent of white families. Pew Research Center, a subsidiary, found that the median wealth of white households is 20 times that of black households and 18 times that of Hispanic households.
That means more minority families end up in poor neighborhoods with underperforming school systems, leading to lower graduation rates and lower lifetime earnings, said Leonard Greenhalgh, a professor of management at Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire.
"You are looking at the future workforce of the United States – what we need to be competitive against rival economies such as India and China, and we are not educating the largest, fastest growing percentage of the U.S. workforce, so as a nation we lose competitive advantage," Greenhalgh said.
It all starts with preschool, where overall enrollment has been increasing but Hispanic children are less likely to be included. Of Hispanic children ages 3 to 5 in the U.S., 13.4 percent were enrolled in full-day public or private nursery school in 2011, according to data from the National Center for Education Statistics.
That compares with 25.8 percent of black children enrolled in full-day preschool and 18.1 percent of white children. But already, Hispanics are one-quarter of students enrolled in public schools.
The situation prompted San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro to push for voter approval to raise the sales tax and expand preschool opportunities in his city, which is 63.2 percent Hispanic.
"I see a gap in educational achievement for San Antonio children versus children in Texas and the nation, and a large percentage of those are minority children and of course, we wanted to change that trajectory," Castro said in an interview.
President Barack Obama has proposed raising cigarette taxes to help pay for preschools. He has proposed a program to entice states to expand preschool programs to reach families with incomes up to twice the poverty line, and to require full-day kindergarten. But the partisan political showdown over government spending and raising taxes has led to across-the-board federal spending cuts and stalls in other legislation that may delay those proposals.
Sheila Smith, early childhood director at Columbia University's National Center for Children in Poverty, points to years of research that show kindergarteners perform better if they received high-quality early care, and if teachers used specific strategies aimed at developing behavior and language and math skills.
"If you have minority children from low-income families in very enriched preschool settings ... we see they make very big gains," Smith said. "But how many classrooms are very enriched to the point that we see kids making these very big gains? Not nearly enough."
Compounding the issue, experts say, is immigration status. About 4.5 million children of all races born in the U.S. have at least one parent not legally in the U.S., according to the Pew Hispanic Center. More than two-thirds of impoverished Latino children are the children of at least one immigrant parent, the center reported.
Latino and Asian immigrants over past two decades are driving a significant portion of the demographic change, and ensuring their children can succeed is critical, said Brookings Institution demographer William Frey.
"They're the future of our labor force. They're the future of our economy," Frey said. "They're the people who white baby boomers are going to have to depend on for their Social Security, for their Medicare and just for a productive economy to keep all of us going in the future."
The picture isn't all bleak. History and recent data show improvements for the next generations of immigrant families.
The Pew Research Center found second-generation Americans, some 20 million U.S.-born children of 20th century immigrants, are better off than their immigrant parents. They have higher incomes, more graduate from college and are homeowners and fewer live in poverty, the study found.
Many experts on low-income children see good health as one more building block for education and prosperity. Children are less likely to learn if they are ill and missing school and unable to see a doctor.
On a recent weekday, 9-month-old Anderson sat on his mother's lap in the waiting room of the clinic at Mary's Center, a community organization in the nation's capital. He had struggled for three days with diarrhea, cold symptoms and vomiting.
He and his two siblings are American citizens, but their father and mother, Alba, who did not want her last names revealed because neither parent is in the country legally, are not. The children's health care is covered by Medicaid, and Alba says she wants them to be healthy so they can have a better life. "They have to go to college," said Alba, originally from El Salvador. "They have to do better, since their mother can't."
Anderson's generation will be the first to fully grow up under the new federal health insurance mandate taking effect next year. The act requires free preventive services and also extends money for the Children's Health Insurance Program through 2015.
In 2011, about 94 percent of black children, 92.3 percent of Asian/Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander children and 95 percent of white children had health insurance coverage, while 87.2 percent of Hispanic children and 83.4 percent of American Indian and Alaska Native children had some form of health insurance coverage, according to a study by Georgetown University's Center for Children and Families.
The numbers of uninsured children are at a historic low – just 7.5 percent, said Joan Alker, the center's executive director.
While 73.1 percent of white children had private coverage, more than half of black and Hispanic children got health care through Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Programs and similar federal and state subsidized programs, the Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics reported.
"We have the increasing rates of childhood asthma, childhood obesity and these are going to lead to problems later in life, so it's far better to make sure those kids have health insurance so you can address those issues as much as possible now," Alker said.
___
Follow Suzanne Gamboa on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/APsgamboa
___
America Healing: http://tinyurl.com/32gh45l
National Center for Children in Poverty: http://nccp.org Reported by Huffington Post 2 days ago.
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Obamacare premiums: not so high after all
*Obamacare premiums: not so high after all*
If you pay attention to political news, you've probably been treated over the spring to dire predictions of "rate shock," the supposed sky-high health insurance premiums to be inflicted on Americans starting in 2014, when the new health care law starts requiring everyone to have health insurance or pay a fine.
Those predictions are turning out to be a bit off the mark. In the 11 states where 2014 health insurance premium information is available, the average price for a plan with a middle range of benefits is coming in at $321 a month, 18 percent lower than the impartial Congressional Budget Office estimated it would be, according to a report released today by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The chart above, taken from the report, gives state-by-state details.
Even better, these premiums are for much better coverage than consumers can purchase on the individual market in most states today. For instance, they must all cover mental health care, maternity care, and prescription drugs, essential health benefits that are absent from a lot of plans being sold to individuals today, pre-reform.
--------------------
Got a question for me? Ask it here.
Want to share your own health insurance story? Tell it here.
--------------------
Best of all, the vast majority of people buying these plans through their state's new health insurance Marketplace (they're opening for business Oct. 1 nationwide) will receive a break on costs in the form of a new kind of tax credit that they can use right away to offset part of the premiums. Learn more about the Marketplace and tax credit in our new brochure.
For healthy young adults, who have the highest uninsurance rate of any age group and the lowest awareness of the coming reforms, premiums will be even lower. That's because the law allows younger adults to be charged lower premiums than older customers pay. In Los Angeles County, which according to HHS has more uninsured people than any other county in the country, a 25-year-old can purchase one of these mid-range plans for $174 a month, before subsidies. If that 25-year-old has an income of $17,235, subsidies will bring the cost down to only $34 a month.
If you want to read the whole report, you can find it here.
*Subscribe now!*
Subscribe to *ConsumerReports.org* for expert Ratings, buying advice and reliability on hundreds of products.
--------------------
Update your feed preferences Reported by Consumer Reports 2 days ago.
If you pay attention to political news, you've probably been treated over the spring to dire predictions of "rate shock," the supposed sky-high health insurance premiums to be inflicted on Americans starting in 2014, when the new health care law starts requiring everyone to have health insurance or pay a fine.
Those predictions are turning out to be a bit off the mark. In the 11 states where 2014 health insurance premium information is available, the average price for a plan with a middle range of benefits is coming in at $321 a month, 18 percent lower than the impartial Congressional Budget Office estimated it would be, according to a report released today by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The chart above, taken from the report, gives state-by-state details.
Even better, these premiums are for much better coverage than consumers can purchase on the individual market in most states today. For instance, they must all cover mental health care, maternity care, and prescription drugs, essential health benefits that are absent from a lot of plans being sold to individuals today, pre-reform.
--------------------
Got a question for me? Ask it here.
Want to share your own health insurance story? Tell it here.
--------------------
Best of all, the vast majority of people buying these plans through their state's new health insurance Marketplace (they're opening for business Oct. 1 nationwide) will receive a break on costs in the form of a new kind of tax credit that they can use right away to offset part of the premiums. Learn more about the Marketplace and tax credit in our new brochure.
For healthy young adults, who have the highest uninsurance rate of any age group and the lowest awareness of the coming reforms, premiums will be even lower. That's because the law allows younger adults to be charged lower premiums than older customers pay. In Los Angeles County, which according to HHS has more uninsured people than any other county in the country, a 25-year-old can purchase one of these mid-range plans for $174 a month, before subsidies. If that 25-year-old has an income of $17,235, subsidies will bring the cost down to only $34 a month.
If you want to read the whole report, you can find it here.
*Subscribe now!*
Subscribe to *ConsumerReports.org* for expert Ratings, buying advice and reliability on hundreds of products.
--------------------
Update your feed preferences Reported by Consumer Reports 2 days ago.
↧
Some states push 'employee choice' for small business insurance
Small business workers in at least 15 states and the District of Columbia may have a menu of health insurance choices next year, something that didn’t seem likely a few months ago.
Reported by msnbc.com 3 hours ago.
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New York health insurance to fall under Obamacare?
Excitement of the news today that New York state health insurance premiums may fall under Obamacare was somewhat tempered by...
Reported by Deseret News 2 days ago.
↧
Today's Economist: What Makes U.S. Health Insurance Exchanges So Complicated
Americans’ insistence on broad choices in health insurance raises both the cost and complexity of establishing insurance exchanges.
Reported by NYTimes.com 2 days ago.
Reported by NYTimes.com 2 days ago.
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Access Publishing Offers Tips on How to Choose an Insurance Agent in San Luis Obispo County
Here are a few pointers on how to choose a great local insurance agent in San Luis Obispo from Access Publishing.
Paso Robles, CA (PRWEB) July 19, 2013
Selecting an insurance agent to look after a family's need can be a tough decision, says Scott Brennan, owner of Access Publishing.
"Since my wife and I run a local business here, people ask us all the time to recommend an insurance agent for them," Brennan says.
Here are a few pointers Brennan recommends to consider when choosing a local insurance agent:
A good referral
Ask your friends who they use as their insurance agent. I think a lot of people end up doing business with those who’ve been referred to them by friends. Who better to give you advice on what local insurance agent to use than one of your good friends who has worked with the same person for several years.
Good reviews
Take a look at review websites and see what other people think. There are agents specializing in car insurance, health insurance, life insurance, and home insurance. You probably want someone who can give good advice in all areas, but maybe a specialist is more appropriate for you.
Location
Why would you want to drive to see an agent when some of the best insurance agents you can find are right here in Paso Robles and San Luis Obispo County.
Credentials
Continuing education of your agent is very important. Look for an agent with good credentials. Chartered Property and Casualty Underwriter (CPCU), Certified Insurance Counselor (CIC), Chartered Life Underwriter (CLU), Certified Risk Manager (CRM), Life Underwriters Training Council Fellowship (LUTCF), and the Accredited Advisor in Insurance (AAI) are a few professional level credentials to look for.
Friendly
Life is too short to work with someone you don’t like. You don’t have to be best friends with your agent, but it’s nice when you can work with someone who’s company you enjoy.
Knowledgeable
Your insurance agent needs to have excellent knowledge about the products and services they have to offer. You are selecting a person who’s main job is to provide protection to your family. So it is important that the insurance agent you choose knows his or her products inside and out.
Honesty
Believe it or not, there are insurance agents who are not honest. Dishonest agents are the exception, but be on the look out. How can you tell who’s honest or not? That’s a tough question. Trust your instincts, ask your friends, and check credentials.
Customer Service
You want an agent who will service your account and be prompt. You want the agent to have excellent support staff to help you. Do they answer their phone? Do they return calls? Do they provide quotes quickly?
A solid product at a good price
You can probably find it cheaper, but is that what you want to protect your family. Compare apples to apples. If you pay more, be sure you know the advantages. Some new drivers are just interested in buying auto insurance from “the cheapest insurance agent in town.” Be careful before you do that.
Recommended insurance agents in Paso Robles for life, home, auto insurance:
HFG Coastal Insurance Services, Inc.
1446 Spring Street, Suite 205
Paso Robles, CA 93446
(805) 239-7443
Rick Goree – State Farm Insurance Agent
1947 Spring Street
Paso Robles, CA 93446
(805) 227-1560
Steve Weber – State Farm Insurance Agent
526 Spring Street
Paso Robles, CA 93446
(805) 238-6200
Health insurance specialist in Paso Robles:
Callie L Fisher Insurance Services, Inc
578 Spring Street
Paso Robles, CA 93446
(805) 238-6593
Health insurance specialist in San Luis Obispo:
Susan Polk Insurance Agency, Inc.
1443 Marsh Street
San Luis Obispo, CA 93401
(805) 544-6454
Life home and auto insurance in San Luis Obispo:
Susan Rodriguez – State Farm Insurance Agent
1317 Broad Street
San Luis Obispo, CA 93401
(805) 783-7050
About Access Publishing
Access Publishing helps local businesses master online marketing with solutions created for small business. Access is a local leader in Internet marketing, advertising, local search engine optimization, SEO, Google Business Photos, web design, blog writing, press releases, graphic design and printing.
Access Publishing, 806 9th Street #2D, Paso Robles, CA 93446 (805) 226-9890. Reported by PRWeb 2 days ago.
Paso Robles, CA (PRWEB) July 19, 2013
Selecting an insurance agent to look after a family's need can be a tough decision, says Scott Brennan, owner of Access Publishing.
"Since my wife and I run a local business here, people ask us all the time to recommend an insurance agent for them," Brennan says.
Here are a few pointers Brennan recommends to consider when choosing a local insurance agent:
A good referral
Ask your friends who they use as their insurance agent. I think a lot of people end up doing business with those who’ve been referred to them by friends. Who better to give you advice on what local insurance agent to use than one of your good friends who has worked with the same person for several years.
Good reviews
Take a look at review websites and see what other people think. There are agents specializing in car insurance, health insurance, life insurance, and home insurance. You probably want someone who can give good advice in all areas, but maybe a specialist is more appropriate for you.
Location
Why would you want to drive to see an agent when some of the best insurance agents you can find are right here in Paso Robles and San Luis Obispo County.
Credentials
Continuing education of your agent is very important. Look for an agent with good credentials. Chartered Property and Casualty Underwriter (CPCU), Certified Insurance Counselor (CIC), Chartered Life Underwriter (CLU), Certified Risk Manager (CRM), Life Underwriters Training Council Fellowship (LUTCF), and the Accredited Advisor in Insurance (AAI) are a few professional level credentials to look for.
Friendly
Life is too short to work with someone you don’t like. You don’t have to be best friends with your agent, but it’s nice when you can work with someone who’s company you enjoy.
Knowledgeable
Your insurance agent needs to have excellent knowledge about the products and services they have to offer. You are selecting a person who’s main job is to provide protection to your family. So it is important that the insurance agent you choose knows his or her products inside and out.
Honesty
Believe it or not, there are insurance agents who are not honest. Dishonest agents are the exception, but be on the look out. How can you tell who’s honest or not? That’s a tough question. Trust your instincts, ask your friends, and check credentials.
Customer Service
You want an agent who will service your account and be prompt. You want the agent to have excellent support staff to help you. Do they answer their phone? Do they return calls? Do they provide quotes quickly?
A solid product at a good price
You can probably find it cheaper, but is that what you want to protect your family. Compare apples to apples. If you pay more, be sure you know the advantages. Some new drivers are just interested in buying auto insurance from “the cheapest insurance agent in town.” Be careful before you do that.
Recommended insurance agents in Paso Robles for life, home, auto insurance:
HFG Coastal Insurance Services, Inc.
1446 Spring Street, Suite 205
Paso Robles, CA 93446
(805) 239-7443
Rick Goree – State Farm Insurance Agent
1947 Spring Street
Paso Robles, CA 93446
(805) 227-1560
Steve Weber – State Farm Insurance Agent
526 Spring Street
Paso Robles, CA 93446
(805) 238-6200
Health insurance specialist in Paso Robles:
Callie L Fisher Insurance Services, Inc
578 Spring Street
Paso Robles, CA 93446
(805) 238-6593
Health insurance specialist in San Luis Obispo:
Susan Polk Insurance Agency, Inc.
1443 Marsh Street
San Luis Obispo, CA 93401
(805) 544-6454
Life home and auto insurance in San Luis Obispo:
Susan Rodriguez – State Farm Insurance Agent
1317 Broad Street
San Luis Obispo, CA 93401
(805) 783-7050
About Access Publishing
Access Publishing helps local businesses master online marketing with solutions created for small business. Access is a local leader in Internet marketing, advertising, local search engine optimization, SEO, Google Business Photos, web design, blog writing, press releases, graphic design and printing.
Access Publishing, 806 9th Street #2D, Paso Robles, CA 93446 (805) 226-9890. Reported by PRWeb 2 days ago.
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Fact Check: Obama exaggerates impact of health insurance rebates
In his speech defending his health care law Thursday, President Obama said rebates averaging $100 are coming from insurance companies to 8.5 million Americans. In fact, most of the money is going straight to employers who provide health insurance, not to their workers, who benefit indirectly.
Reported by FOXNews.com 2 days ago.
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Zane Benefits Publishes New Information on HRAs and Minimum Value and Affordability
How HRAs Will Be Used in Calculating Minimum Value and Affordability
Park City, Utah (PRWEB) July 19, 2013
Today, Zane Benefits, the online solution to small business health insurance, published new information on HRAs and Minimum Value and Affordability.
According to Zane Benefits’ website, the Internal Revenue Services (IRS) released proposed guidance on the minimum value and affordability rules under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), including how health reimbursement arrangements (HRAs) will be used in determining minimum value and affordability.
Employers with 50+ employees that also offer an integrated HRA should use these guidelines for calculating if their health coverage meets minimum value and affordability.
Here are four important PPACA concepts to be familiar with before understanding the proposed rules on minimum value and affordability:
1. Integrated HRA: An integrated HRA is a Health Reimbursement Arrangement (HRA) that is offered alongside an employer-sponsored group health plan (usually a high-deductible plan).
2. Applicable Large Employer: PPACA defines an applicable large employer as 50+ full time equivalent (FTE) employees.
3. Minimum Value (MV): According to PPACA, a plan provides MV if the plan's share of the total allowed cost of benefits provided under the plan is at least 60%. In other words, it has an actuarial value (AV) of 60%.
4. Affordability: PPACA considers coverage affordable if an employee’s required premium contribution (for self-only coverage only) does not exceed 9.5% of household income.
The proposed rules address how employer contributions toward an integrated HRA will count toward the plan's minimum value and affordability.
For minimum value determination:
All HRA amounts that are made newly available under an integrated HRA for the current plan year are taken into account for MV purposes (assuming that the amounts may only be used for cost-sharing and not to pay insurance premiums).
For Affordability:
According to the proposed regulations, integrated HRAs can also count toward affordability. IRS says that for the purposes of determining affordability, HRA amounts that are made newly available under an integrated HRA for the current plan year are taken into account in determining affordability only if the employee may either use the HRA amounts only for premiums or choose to use the HRA amounts for either premiums or cost-sharing.
Click here to read full article.
About Zane Benefits
Zane Benefits was founded in 2006 to provide a revolutionized SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) administration platform ("ZaneHRA") for Health Reimbursement Arrangements (HRAs) and defined contribution health care. The flagship software provides a 100% paperless administration experience to small businesses and insurance professionals that want to offer better health benefits without a traditional group health insurance plan at lower costs. For more information about ZaneHRA, visit http://www.zanebenefits.com. Reported by PRWeb 2 days ago.
Park City, Utah (PRWEB) July 19, 2013
Today, Zane Benefits, the online solution to small business health insurance, published new information on HRAs and Minimum Value and Affordability.
According to Zane Benefits’ website, the Internal Revenue Services (IRS) released proposed guidance on the minimum value and affordability rules under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), including how health reimbursement arrangements (HRAs) will be used in determining minimum value and affordability.
Employers with 50+ employees that also offer an integrated HRA should use these guidelines for calculating if their health coverage meets minimum value and affordability.
Here are four important PPACA concepts to be familiar with before understanding the proposed rules on minimum value and affordability:
1. Integrated HRA: An integrated HRA is a Health Reimbursement Arrangement (HRA) that is offered alongside an employer-sponsored group health plan (usually a high-deductible plan).
2. Applicable Large Employer: PPACA defines an applicable large employer as 50+ full time equivalent (FTE) employees.
3. Minimum Value (MV): According to PPACA, a plan provides MV if the plan's share of the total allowed cost of benefits provided under the plan is at least 60%. In other words, it has an actuarial value (AV) of 60%.
4. Affordability: PPACA considers coverage affordable if an employee’s required premium contribution (for self-only coverage only) does not exceed 9.5% of household income.
The proposed rules address how employer contributions toward an integrated HRA will count toward the plan's minimum value and affordability.
For minimum value determination:
All HRA amounts that are made newly available under an integrated HRA for the current plan year are taken into account for MV purposes (assuming that the amounts may only be used for cost-sharing and not to pay insurance premiums).
For Affordability:
According to the proposed regulations, integrated HRAs can also count toward affordability. IRS says that for the purposes of determining affordability, HRA amounts that are made newly available under an integrated HRA for the current plan year are taken into account in determining affordability only if the employee may either use the HRA amounts only for premiums or choose to use the HRA amounts for either premiums or cost-sharing.
Click here to read full article.
About Zane Benefits
Zane Benefits was founded in 2006 to provide a revolutionized SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) administration platform ("ZaneHRA") for Health Reimbursement Arrangements (HRAs) and defined contribution health care. The flagship software provides a 100% paperless administration experience to small businesses and insurance professionals that want to offer better health benefits without a traditional group health insurance plan at lower costs. For more information about ZaneHRA, visit http://www.zanebenefits.com. Reported by PRWeb 2 days ago.
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Cost of Expat Health Insurance in Hong Kong affected by Hong Kong Government Reforms according to a new article published by the Hong Kong Health Insurance blog
An article published on http://www.Hong-Kong-Health-Insurance.com blog about Expat Health Insurance in Hong Kong, highlights the cost of living as an expat in Hong Kong and the health insurance benefits that expats can get from with the reformed policies on medical insurance by the Hong Kong Government.
Hong Kong, Hong Kong S.A.R (PRWEB) July 19, 2013
Hong Kong Health Insurance published a new blog article on the Cost of Expat Health Insurance in Hong Kong.
The article focuses on the expenses that an expat living in Hong Kong should expect, given that Hong Kong ranks high as one of the most expensive places in the world and even higher as one of the most expensive cities in Asia.
The article sheds further light on how health insurance reforms that are currently taking place by the Hong Kong Government will positively affect the implementation of the new private insurance policy reform, which is designed to involve the government as a middle-man between consumers and health insurance providers.Health insurance costs for expats living in Hong Kong is definitely one of the factors that is taken into account among the number of services and consumer products that an expat would consider in terms of affordability.
The blog article mentions that there are good arguments to suggest that Hong Kong still remains one of the best cities in Asia for expats to live and work in, as Hong Kong S.A.R. as a city, is stable, and “poised for the competition for international talent”.
Hong Kong Health Insurance previously published another article on their blog describing what the new role of the government will be when the reformed policy on private health insurance is implemented. This is good news for both Hong Kong expats and residents, as Hong Kong has the second highest private medical fees in the world after the USA. While Hong Kong has a comprehensive public healthcare system, individuals must be permanent residents of Hong Kong in order to access these low-cost medical services. If you are not a Hong Kong Permanent Resident the fees associated with your medical treatment, even at a public hospital, can be extremely expensive; highlighting the necessity of comprehensive medical insurance coverage in Hong Kong. Reported by PRWeb 2 days ago.
Hong Kong, Hong Kong S.A.R (PRWEB) July 19, 2013
Hong Kong Health Insurance published a new blog article on the Cost of Expat Health Insurance in Hong Kong.
The article focuses on the expenses that an expat living in Hong Kong should expect, given that Hong Kong ranks high as one of the most expensive places in the world and even higher as one of the most expensive cities in Asia.
The article sheds further light on how health insurance reforms that are currently taking place by the Hong Kong Government will positively affect the implementation of the new private insurance policy reform, which is designed to involve the government as a middle-man between consumers and health insurance providers.Health insurance costs for expats living in Hong Kong is definitely one of the factors that is taken into account among the number of services and consumer products that an expat would consider in terms of affordability.
The blog article mentions that there are good arguments to suggest that Hong Kong still remains one of the best cities in Asia for expats to live and work in, as Hong Kong S.A.R. as a city, is stable, and “poised for the competition for international talent”.
Hong Kong Health Insurance previously published another article on their blog describing what the new role of the government will be when the reformed policy on private health insurance is implemented. This is good news for both Hong Kong expats and residents, as Hong Kong has the second highest private medical fees in the world after the USA. While Hong Kong has a comprehensive public healthcare system, individuals must be permanent residents of Hong Kong in order to access these low-cost medical services. If you are not a Hong Kong Permanent Resident the fees associated with your medical treatment, even at a public hospital, can be extremely expensive; highlighting the necessity of comprehensive medical insurance coverage in Hong Kong. Reported by PRWeb 2 days ago.
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If You Like Your Doctor - You *May* Be Able To Keep Your Doctor...
One of the president's biggest selling points when he was pushing ObamaCare back in 2009 and early 2010, was the fact that no one would be forced off of their health care plans and have to choose a new doctor.
We heard him say it a hundred times - "if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.
At the *Weekly Standard*, Jeryl Bier reminds us of the lengths the WH went to push their propaganda:
The White House even went so far as to post a "Health Insurance Reform Reality Check" on its website, where "Linda Douglass of the White House Office of Health Reform debunks the myth that reform will force you out of your current insurance plan or force you to change doctors." President Obama upped the ante, putting the promise in the form of a "guarantee".
Worse than that, Douglass actually set up a "snitch site" where Americans could rat out fellow Americans who were spreading "myths" about Obama's miracle health care plan that was going to cover more people at a lower cost.
Remember *this?*
There is a lot of disinformation about health insurance reform out there, spanning from control of personal finances to end of life care. These rumors often travel just below the surface via chain emails or through casual conversation. Since we can’t keep track of all of them here at the White House, we’re asking for your help. If you get an email or see something on the web about health insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to flag@whitehouse.gov.
Now we find HHS actually questioning their own ironclad, oft repeated assertion on its website:* “Can I keep my own doctor?”:*
Different plans have different networks and providers
Most health insurance plans offered in the Marketplace have networks of hospitals, doctors, specialists, pharmacies, and other health care providers. Networks include health care providers that the plan contracts with to take care of the plan’s members. Depending on the type of policy you buy, care may be covered only when you get it from a network provider.
When comparing plans in the Marketplace, you will see a link to a list of providers in each plan’s network. If staying with your current doctors is important to you, check to see if they are included before choosing a plan.
Back in 2009, that was known as a "myth."
Reported by Breitbart 2 days ago.
We heard him say it a hundred times - "if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.
At the *Weekly Standard*, Jeryl Bier reminds us of the lengths the WH went to push their propaganda:
The White House even went so far as to post a "Health Insurance Reform Reality Check" on its website, where "Linda Douglass of the White House Office of Health Reform debunks the myth that reform will force you out of your current insurance plan or force you to change doctors." President Obama upped the ante, putting the promise in the form of a "guarantee".
Worse than that, Douglass actually set up a "snitch site" where Americans could rat out fellow Americans who were spreading "myths" about Obama's miracle health care plan that was going to cover more people at a lower cost.
Remember *this?*
There is a lot of disinformation about health insurance reform out there, spanning from control of personal finances to end of life care. These rumors often travel just below the surface via chain emails or through casual conversation. Since we can’t keep track of all of them here at the White House, we’re asking for your help. If you get an email or see something on the web about health insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to flag@whitehouse.gov.
Now we find HHS actually questioning their own ironclad, oft repeated assertion on its website:* “Can I keep my own doctor?”:*
Different plans have different networks and providers
Most health insurance plans offered in the Marketplace have networks of hospitals, doctors, specialists, pharmacies, and other health care providers. Networks include health care providers that the plan contracts with to take care of the plan’s members. Depending on the type of policy you buy, care may be covered only when you get it from a network provider.
When comparing plans in the Marketplace, you will see a link to a list of providers in each plan’s network. If staying with your current doctors is important to you, check to see if they are included before choosing a plan.
Back in 2009, that was known as a "myth."
Reported by Breitbart 2 days ago.
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Prospects for Repealing PPACA's Taxes on Medical Devices and Health Insurance
The delay of PPACA's employer mandate makes repealing the medical-device excise tax and health-insurance premium tax more difficult.
Reported by Forbes.com 1 day ago.
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FACT CHECK: Obama spins health insurance rebates
WASHINGTON (AP) — Another year, another round of exaggeration from President Barack Obama and his administration about health insurance rebates. EDITOR'S NOTE _ An occasional look at political claims that take shortcuts with the facts or don't tell the full story
Reported by Boston.com 1 day ago.
Reported by Boston.com 1 day ago.
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Thrive Capital's Kushner Looks To Build A Modern Health Insurer With $40M For Oscar
With new parts of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) going into effect next year, Thrive Capital’s Josh Kushner is betting that health insurance — an area long considered off-limits to tech entrepreneurs because of its legal and political complexities — is finally ripe for change. Kushner, whose venture fund Thrive Capital has $200 million under management with bets in Instagram, Nasty Gal and Warby Parker, has amassed a team to revolutionize health insurance through a new stealth startup called Oscar. While the company isn’t sharing details about the product yet or even talking publicly, you can bet that its health insurance offering will likely have a more customer-friendly experience that is transparent about costs. The startup is actually licensed as a health insurance operator in the state of New York, so it isn’t some kind of front-end for existing providers, sources tell us. It will have its own plans so it can offer something truly differentiated. The company launches later this fall and it will only be for New Yorkers at first. Here’s the landscape: next year, some very key parts of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act go into effect. There will be an individual mandate, where consumers will be required to have coverage or pay a penalty. New health insurances exchanges are being established where consumers can compare and contrast different plans. Then there are also subsidies provided for those near the poverty line who can’t afford coverage. This is already having a profound effect on health care insurance costs. New York state insurance regulators say rates approved for next year, are at least 50 percent lower on average than this year’s rates, according to The New York Times. What that means is that there is a fresh market opportunity for new health insurance providers, especially ones that offer exceptionally good customer service, design, marketing and leverage big data. Kushner put together a team including his old Vostu co-founder Mario Schlosser, a Harvard Business School classmate Kevin Nazemi who oversaw marketing for Microsoft’s CRM programs and Fredrik Nylander, who ran engineering and operations and Tumblr. On the company’s board is Charlie Baker, who ran insurer Harvard Pilgrim out of Massachusetts, the only state with an insurance exchange before the Affordable Care Act was passed. The company also includes other long-time health care executives, who have at least a collective 250 years of experience
Reported by TechCrunch 1 day ago.
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Hong Kong Government's New Plan on Private Health Insurance Policies published on Hong Kong Health Insurance Blog
http://www.hong-kong-health-insurance.com releases blog article on Private Health Insurance in Hong Kong, highlighting the reforms that the Hong Kong Government is implementing, to bridge the gap between consumers and health insurance providers.
hong kong, hong kong (PRWEB) July 20, 2013
Hong Kong Health Insurance recently published a new blog article on "Private Health Insurance Hong Hong".
The article mentions that "in an effort to improve private health insurance services, the Hong Kong government plans to implement a new plan which will encourage people to buy health insurance policies." It is further mentioned that the government will seek to ensure that consumers are getting what they paid for and that health insurance providers abide by the agreements made between consumers and themselves.
The Hong Kong government will now serve to bridge the gap between consumers and private health insurance providers in Hong Kong. Food and Health Secretary, Dr. Ko was quoted saying that the government will not meddle with the insurance prices in Hong Kong, but will offer tax incentives to aid consumers in buying their insurance policies. The article also mentions that currently, "a large percent of the population visits general hospitals for their health related problems and only 3 in 10 citizens possess private health insurance."
This new approach that Hong Kong's Government is adopting towards private health insurance policies aims to aid consumers and health insurance providers, as the government "may not want to put insurance companies out of business, but it will not allow insurance companies turning customers away".
Hong Kong has the second highest private medical fees in the world after the USA. While the city does possess a comprehensive public healthcare system, individuals must be permanent residents of Hong Kong in order to access these low-cost medical services. If you are not a Hong Kong Permanent resident the fees associated with your medical treatment, even if the treatment was received at a public hospital, can be extremely expensive; highlighting the necessity of comprehensive medical insurance coverage while in the city. Reported by PRWeb 16 hours ago.
hong kong, hong kong (PRWEB) July 20, 2013
Hong Kong Health Insurance recently published a new blog article on "Private Health Insurance Hong Hong".
The article mentions that "in an effort to improve private health insurance services, the Hong Kong government plans to implement a new plan which will encourage people to buy health insurance policies." It is further mentioned that the government will seek to ensure that consumers are getting what they paid for and that health insurance providers abide by the agreements made between consumers and themselves.
The Hong Kong government will now serve to bridge the gap between consumers and private health insurance providers in Hong Kong. Food and Health Secretary, Dr. Ko was quoted saying that the government will not meddle with the insurance prices in Hong Kong, but will offer tax incentives to aid consumers in buying their insurance policies. The article also mentions that currently, "a large percent of the population visits general hospitals for their health related problems and only 3 in 10 citizens possess private health insurance."
This new approach that Hong Kong's Government is adopting towards private health insurance policies aims to aid consumers and health insurance providers, as the government "may not want to put insurance companies out of business, but it will not allow insurance companies turning customers away".
Hong Kong has the second highest private medical fees in the world after the USA. While the city does possess a comprehensive public healthcare system, individuals must be permanent residents of Hong Kong in order to access these low-cost medical services. If you are not a Hong Kong Permanent resident the fees associated with your medical treatment, even if the treatment was received at a public hospital, can be extremely expensive; highlighting the necessity of comprehensive medical insurance coverage while in the city. Reported by PRWeb 16 hours ago.
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Zane Benefits Publishes New Information on Health Insurance Tax Subsidies
Tax Subsidy Charts Show How Much Employees Can Expect to Pay for Health Insurance Premiums
Park City, Utah (PRWEB) July 20, 2013
Today, Zane Benefits, the online alternative to group health insurance, published new information on Health Insurance Tax Subsidies.
According to Zane Benefits’ website, beginning in 2014, significant tax subsidies will be available to help individuals purchase individual health insurance coverage through the new state-based public marketplaces.
The health insurance tax subsidies will cap the cost of health insurance at 2% - 9.5% of household income, if household income is up to 400% above the federal poverty line (FPL).
According to Zane Benefits’ website, individuals are only eligible for tax subsidies if they are not offered qualified, affordable group health insurance through an employer.
Zane Benefits' website includes detailed health insurance tax subsidy chart calculations for an individual, and family of four.
Click here to read full article and view charts.
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About Zane Benefits
Zane Benefits was founded in 2006 to provide a revolutionized SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) administration platform ("ZaneHRA") for Health Reimbursement Arrangements (HRAs) and defined contribution health care. The flagship software provides a 100% paperless administration experience to small businesses and insurance professionals that want to offer better health benefits without a traditional group health insurance plan at lower costs. For more information about ZaneHRA, visit http://www.zanebenefits.com. Reported by PRWeb 15 hours ago.
Park City, Utah (PRWEB) July 20, 2013
Today, Zane Benefits, the online alternative to group health insurance, published new information on Health Insurance Tax Subsidies.
According to Zane Benefits’ website, beginning in 2014, significant tax subsidies will be available to help individuals purchase individual health insurance coverage through the new state-based public marketplaces.
The health insurance tax subsidies will cap the cost of health insurance at 2% - 9.5% of household income, if household income is up to 400% above the federal poverty line (FPL).
According to Zane Benefits’ website, individuals are only eligible for tax subsidies if they are not offered qualified, affordable group health insurance through an employer.
Zane Benefits' website includes detailed health insurance tax subsidy chart calculations for an individual, and family of four.
Click here to read full article and view charts.
--
About Zane Benefits
Zane Benefits was founded in 2006 to provide a revolutionized SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) administration platform ("ZaneHRA") for Health Reimbursement Arrangements (HRAs) and defined contribution health care. The flagship software provides a 100% paperless administration experience to small businesses and insurance professionals that want to offer better health benefits without a traditional group health insurance plan at lower costs. For more information about ZaneHRA, visit http://www.zanebenefits.com. Reported by PRWeb 15 hours ago.
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Largest small-business insurance provider in California jumps off the ObamaCare train wreck
Remember how Barack Obama gave that stupid speech the other day to assure us that ObamaCare was working perfectly, and he was going to plow right through the naysayers? He'll be plowing through Anthem Blue Cross in California, according to the L.A. Times:
Health insurance giant Anthem Blue Cross is spurning California's new insurance market for small businesses, a potential setback in the state's rollout of the federal healthcare law.
Anthem, a unit of WellPoint Inc., is California's largest insurer for small employers. The company's surprising move raised concerns about the state's ability to offer competitive rates and attract businesses to its new Covered California exchange that opens Jan. 1.
"If you like your health care plan, you will be able to keep your health care plan. Period. No one will take it away, no matter what." - Barack Obama, 2009
The federal Affordable Care Act left it up to health insurers to decide whether they wanted to sell in these government-run marketplaces.
Friday's disclosure made Anthem the first big insurer in California to publicly pass on the small-business pool. Some other big names, such as UnitedHealth Group Inc. and Aetna Inc., have already opted out of California's larger exchange for individual consumers.
"If you like your health care plan, you will be able to keep your health care plan. Period. No one will take it away, no matter what." - Barack Obama, 2009
Obama also promised, "If you’ve got a doctor that you like, you will be able to keep your doctor." But the commissars at the People's Glorious Department of Health and Human Services recently made a very quiet little change to its Q&A website to answer the question, "Can I keep my own doctor?" as follows:
Depending on the plan you choose in the Marketplace, *you may be able to keep your current doctor*. Different plans have different networks and providers Most health insurance plans offered in the Marketplace have networks of hospitals, doctors, specialists, pharmacies, and other health care providers. Networks include health care providers that the plan contracts with to take care of the plan’s members. Depending on the type of policy you buy, care may be covered only when you get it from a network provider. When comparing plans in the Marketplace, you will see a link to a list of providers in each plan’s network. *If staying with your current doctors is important to you, check to see if they are included before choosing a plan.*
No, America, if staying with your current doctor was important to you, you needed to vote Barack Obama the hell out of office in 2012. But you didn't, so you're going to lose your doctor, especially if you're relying on a plan whose provider just bailed out of the ObamaCare train wreck.
Reported by Breitbart 32 minutes ago.
Health insurance giant Anthem Blue Cross is spurning California's new insurance market for small businesses, a potential setback in the state's rollout of the federal healthcare law.
Anthem, a unit of WellPoint Inc., is California's largest insurer for small employers. The company's surprising move raised concerns about the state's ability to offer competitive rates and attract businesses to its new Covered California exchange that opens Jan. 1.
"If you like your health care plan, you will be able to keep your health care plan. Period. No one will take it away, no matter what." - Barack Obama, 2009
The federal Affordable Care Act left it up to health insurers to decide whether they wanted to sell in these government-run marketplaces.
Friday's disclosure made Anthem the first big insurer in California to publicly pass on the small-business pool. Some other big names, such as UnitedHealth Group Inc. and Aetna Inc., have already opted out of California's larger exchange for individual consumers.
"If you like your health care plan, you will be able to keep your health care plan. Period. No one will take it away, no matter what." - Barack Obama, 2009
Obama also promised, "If you’ve got a doctor that you like, you will be able to keep your doctor." But the commissars at the People's Glorious Department of Health and Human Services recently made a very quiet little change to its Q&A website to answer the question, "Can I keep my own doctor?" as follows:
Depending on the plan you choose in the Marketplace, *you may be able to keep your current doctor*. Different plans have different networks and providers Most health insurance plans offered in the Marketplace have networks of hospitals, doctors, specialists, pharmacies, and other health care providers. Networks include health care providers that the plan contracts with to take care of the plan’s members. Depending on the type of policy you buy, care may be covered only when you get it from a network provider. When comparing plans in the Marketplace, you will see a link to a list of providers in each plan’s network. *If staying with your current doctors is important to you, check to see if they are included before choosing a plan.*
No, America, if staying with your current doctor was important to you, you needed to vote Barack Obama the hell out of office in 2012. But you didn't, so you're going to lose your doctor, especially if you're relying on a plan whose provider just bailed out of the ObamaCare train wreck.
Reported by Breitbart 32 minutes ago.
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'Still Not Free': It's 2013, And Black America's Hit Again
This article is the first in a Huffington Post series examining the state of Black America.
WASHINGTON -- Elijah Cummings, 62 years old, has lived and seen the best -- and the worst -- of what this country means, offers and does to a black man. He knows the promise and pain of Black America.
His parents were Southern sharecroppers who moved to Baltimore for a better life. The budding civil rights movement was active in the city, and schools and public facilities became integrated when he was a boy. They were excellent, and he went on to become student body president at Howard University, earned a law degree and now serves as a Democrat in the House, representing the city in which he grew up.
He recently took his 86-year-old mother, Ruth Cummings, to meet his close friend, Barack Obama. A Pentecostal preacher, she told the president, "I want you to know, son, I pray for you every day."
"She called him 'son'!" Cummings recalled with a laugh. "I said, 'Mom, he's the president.' She told me it was the best day of her life. It blew her mind to meet a black president."
But as Cummings rose -- indeed, as Barack Obama rose in Chicago -- Baltimore fell.
Cummings' district, which is 60 percent African-American, encompasses block upon block with abandoned, boarded-up housing. The congressman lives on one such block. Schools and other public institutions are under crushing financial pressure. Poverty, joblessness and incarceration: all rampant, and in many cases worsened in recent years of recession.
"The unemployment rate in my district among African-American men is 40 percent," he told me. "Forty percent!" And that doesn't count the many men serving hard time in prison, often for victimless drug crimes that carry stiff mandatory sentences. "The criminal record makes it hard, if not impossible, for them to get jobs after they get out," he said.
Gun violence struck Cummings' own family in 2011. Intruders shot and killed his 20-year-old nephew, Christopher Cummings, in an off-campus apartment at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Va. Two years later, no one has been arrested. Christopher was a top student, studying criminal justice.
At a memorial service in Baltimore, Cummings pleaded for an end to violence in the black community. "I consider my nephew's murder a hate crime," he told me, his voice laced with bitterness. "They hated his success."
The story of Elijah Cummings is a story of Black America in the summer of 2013: rising visibility and achievement, power in high places, but also renewed focus on the persistence, or decay, of conditions on the streets and in the homes of African Americans. We aren't living in the colorblind, post-racial society we hoped a black president might usher in, not when success is so split along color lines.
"We have famous names of outstanding achievement," the Rev. Jesse Jackson told me. "We have LeBron. We have Jay Z. We have Barack Obama. But that is not a random sample. What matters is the undercurrent, and it's pulling our people down."
This is a teaching moment in American life, a teaching summer.
The country, including the president himself, is talking about race again. It's our oldest and deepest argument, a conversation in black and white and blood about our original constitutional and social sin.
The reasons for its revival now: the Supreme Court, Trayvon, Detroit and Martin Luther King Jr.
In June, the court issued opinions restricting the reach of affirmative action and the Voting Rights Act, twin engines of African-American upward mobility.
Earlier this month, a jury in Sanford, Fla., acquitted George Zimmerman of all charges, accepting his claim that he had shot and killed a 17-year-old unarmed black youth named Trayvon Martin in self-defense. The 2012 shooting and the 2013 verdict divided the country, but united Black America around the reasonable fear that no black child -- especially no black male -- is safe from the assumption that he is somehow a threat to the civil order on any street he walks.
President Obama was moved this past week to offer his own personal testimony about the casual slights he had suffered and the fears he thought he had engendered in whites in passing encounters earlier in his life.
"Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago," he said. It was a stunning statement, and a rare attempt by Obama to explain the world from his black perspective.
Led by the Rev. Al Sharpton, "Justice for Trayvon" protests were planned for this weekend in 130 cities nationwide.
The day before Obama spoke, Detroit filed for bankruptcy, owing an estimated $20 billion to creditors. The city of 700,000 -- once it was 2 million -- is over 80 percent African-American and a mecca of black culture. But the cheerful pop sound of Motown now seems like a cruelly ironic soundtrack to decline.
Then there is the equally loud echo of political history.
Later this summer, the nation will observe the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington for "Jobs and Freedom," and in advance of that milestone, new questions are being asked about whether African Americans have much more of either than they did on Aug. 28, 1963.
If Dr. King were alive today, what would he say on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial as he surveyed the scene?
"He would say that we are freer but less equal," said Jackson. "He would remind us of what he said back then, which is that the allies who joined us to oppose barbarity will not necessarily be our allies for equality."
In a series that begins Sunday, The Huffington Post examines the pain and the promise of Black America and looks at how far we have come, and still have left to go, to reach Dr. King's longed-for mountaintop. The stories focus on poverty and joblessness, health care, crime and incarceration, barriers to civic participation, the administration's record, education, and black progress against long odds. HuffPost also seeks to highlight potential solutions to these endemic issues.
Measured against the arc of American history, which includes more than two centuries of slavery and a third of official segregation, the legal, political and social advancements since 1963 are impressive, even astonishing. We are not a perfect Union, but we are less imperfect in fundamental and decent ways.
"Jim Crow is gone, housing and school segregation are gone, voting rights are in, millions were registered, blacks voted in a higher percentage than whites in 2012," Jackson noted. "We have won a lot of victories."
Racial diversity is accepted as a social norm, good not only for the soul and society but for the economy and even, if not especially, for corporate management.
The president, who measures the culture in part by watching his daughters, took note of the changed tone. "It doesn't mean that racism is eliminated," he said this past Friday. "But when I talk to Malia and Sasha, and I listen to their friends and I see them interact: They're better than we are -- they are better than we were -- on these issues. And that is true in every community that I have visited all across the country."
But cold federal statistics add up to a different narrative. It is a depressing litany, but one that bears repeating. The numbers tell a old story: It is shocking how little things have changed since Dr. King started measuring out loud in the 1950s.
Black poverty rates were cut in half from the start of the 1960s (when they were over 50 percent) to the year 2000, but have mostly been inching upwards since. In absolute terms, more blacks are in poverty than ever -- more than one in four of the nation's 44 million African-American citizens. More than one in three black children live in poverty, a percentage that rises to well over 50 percent in cities such as Detroit.
Diversity is a social good but not automatically an economic one if there is no broad access to capital. "Diversity can be a diversion," said Jackson. "I can sit down and eat anywhere in my hometown, but not a single building is owned by an African American." And there are only a small handful of blacks who are CEOs of Fortune 500 companies.
Health care numbers are equally bleak. Infant mortality, a basic measure of community health, is 1.14 percent among black Americans, more than double the 0.51 percent among whites. The relative rates of health insurance and pension coverage for blacks haven't budged since 1979, according to Census figures and the most recent "State of Working America" study. For example, 48.2 percent of whites had health care coverage in 2010, compared with 37.7 percent of blacks.
Changes in the criminal justice and penal systems -- especially the rise of mandatory sentencing and the privatization of prisons -- have created an archipelago of incarceration that has trapped a vastly disproportionate number of black men behind bars. African Americans are 14 percent of the U.S. population, but constitute nearly 1 million of the 2.3 million prison inmates today, according to a recent NAACP study. "If current trends continue," the study says, "one in three black males born today can expect to spend time in prison during his lifetime."
Education is a more hopeful tale, at least at first glance. In 1975, 40 percent of African-American high school graduates enrolled in college; by 2008, that percentage had risen to 56 percent, according to the College Board. But overall, only 16 percent of blacks have at least a bachelor's degree, a rate half that of whites. After decades of diligent effort and the advent of need-blind admission, the Ivy League is 7 percent black, still only half the percentage of the overall population.
Violence remains rampant. Blacks were victims in nearly half of all homicides, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Serious violent crime against black youths was more than twice that against white youths. That much of this violence is black-on-black is no solace.
So how far have we really come?
In 1963, Dr. King declared on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial that African Americans were "still not free."
Five years later, in his posthumously published book, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?, he depicted the life of African Americans, especially men, in a way that seems alarmingly current:
"Of the good things in life he has approximately one half those of whites," King wrote, "of the bad he has twice those of whites. ... When we turn to the negative experiences of life, the Negro has a double share. There are twice as many unemployed. The rate of infant mortality (widely accepted as an accurate index of general health) among Negroes is double that of whites." And so on.
Such statistics remain all too real to men such as Elijah Cummings, who sees them vividly in his Baltimore district.
He told me that he has pressed the president, whose campaign he oversaw in Maryland in 2008 and 2012, to speak out and do more on what Jackson called "the undercurrent." Cummings said, "He thinks he has accomplished a lot, and there is only so hard I can press him."
But Obama now seems to be awakening to the need to speak openly from the African-American perspective, and Cummings insists on seeing the promise beyond the pain, based in part on his own youth.
For Cummings, the first steps on the still arduous march to true racial equality began in a wading pool in the late 1950s.
Back then, he was just a young boy whose parents -- strict Pentecostal preachers both -- had come north from South Carolina in the 1940s to ensure that their children would receive a decent education. Each summer, in the soupy Chesapeake heat, Elijah and the other black children would crowd into a tiny wading pool in their poor South Baltimore neighborhood. "It was so crowded that we had to take turns stepping into it," Cummings recalled.
Until one day Juanita Jackson Mitchell arrived. Her husband was Clarence Mitchell, a close associate of Dr. King, a lobbyist for the NAACP in Washington, and a man who ultimately deserves major credit for passage of most significant civil rights legislation of the 1950s and 1960s. She was a lawyer -- the first African-American woman admitted to the bar in Maryland -- and a fiercely effective civil rights activist in her own right.
"She came by one day and held a meeting of us kids and our parents," Cummings recalled. "She said that only a few blocks from us was a much larger pool, with deeper and cooler water, and didn't we want to swim in it?" he remembered.
"She said, 'Now the only problem is there are going to be some people in that pool who don't want you to be in it with them.' We kids didn't know what she was talking about.
"It took us seven days of trying, but we finally integrated that pool. And that was my introduction on civil rights. Change does happen."
Ashley Balcerzak contributed reporting. Reported by Huffington Post 32 minutes ago.
WASHINGTON -- Elijah Cummings, 62 years old, has lived and seen the best -- and the worst -- of what this country means, offers and does to a black man. He knows the promise and pain of Black America.
His parents were Southern sharecroppers who moved to Baltimore for a better life. The budding civil rights movement was active in the city, and schools and public facilities became integrated when he was a boy. They were excellent, and he went on to become student body president at Howard University, earned a law degree and now serves as a Democrat in the House, representing the city in which he grew up.
He recently took his 86-year-old mother, Ruth Cummings, to meet his close friend, Barack Obama. A Pentecostal preacher, she told the president, "I want you to know, son, I pray for you every day."
"She called him 'son'!" Cummings recalled with a laugh. "I said, 'Mom, he's the president.' She told me it was the best day of her life. It blew her mind to meet a black president."
But as Cummings rose -- indeed, as Barack Obama rose in Chicago -- Baltimore fell.
Cummings' district, which is 60 percent African-American, encompasses block upon block with abandoned, boarded-up housing. The congressman lives on one such block. Schools and other public institutions are under crushing financial pressure. Poverty, joblessness and incarceration: all rampant, and in many cases worsened in recent years of recession.
"The unemployment rate in my district among African-American men is 40 percent," he told me. "Forty percent!" And that doesn't count the many men serving hard time in prison, often for victimless drug crimes that carry stiff mandatory sentences. "The criminal record makes it hard, if not impossible, for them to get jobs after they get out," he said.
Gun violence struck Cummings' own family in 2011. Intruders shot and killed his 20-year-old nephew, Christopher Cummings, in an off-campus apartment at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Va. Two years later, no one has been arrested. Christopher was a top student, studying criminal justice.
At a memorial service in Baltimore, Cummings pleaded for an end to violence in the black community. "I consider my nephew's murder a hate crime," he told me, his voice laced with bitterness. "They hated his success."
The story of Elijah Cummings is a story of Black America in the summer of 2013: rising visibility and achievement, power in high places, but also renewed focus on the persistence, or decay, of conditions on the streets and in the homes of African Americans. We aren't living in the colorblind, post-racial society we hoped a black president might usher in, not when success is so split along color lines.
"We have famous names of outstanding achievement," the Rev. Jesse Jackson told me. "We have LeBron. We have Jay Z. We have Barack Obama. But that is not a random sample. What matters is the undercurrent, and it's pulling our people down."
This is a teaching moment in American life, a teaching summer.
The country, including the president himself, is talking about race again. It's our oldest and deepest argument, a conversation in black and white and blood about our original constitutional and social sin.
The reasons for its revival now: the Supreme Court, Trayvon, Detroit and Martin Luther King Jr.
In June, the court issued opinions restricting the reach of affirmative action and the Voting Rights Act, twin engines of African-American upward mobility.
Earlier this month, a jury in Sanford, Fla., acquitted George Zimmerman of all charges, accepting his claim that he had shot and killed a 17-year-old unarmed black youth named Trayvon Martin in self-defense. The 2012 shooting and the 2013 verdict divided the country, but united Black America around the reasonable fear that no black child -- especially no black male -- is safe from the assumption that he is somehow a threat to the civil order on any street he walks.
President Obama was moved this past week to offer his own personal testimony about the casual slights he had suffered and the fears he thought he had engendered in whites in passing encounters earlier in his life.
"Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago," he said. It was a stunning statement, and a rare attempt by Obama to explain the world from his black perspective.
Led by the Rev. Al Sharpton, "Justice for Trayvon" protests were planned for this weekend in 130 cities nationwide.
The day before Obama spoke, Detroit filed for bankruptcy, owing an estimated $20 billion to creditors. The city of 700,000 -- once it was 2 million -- is over 80 percent African-American and a mecca of black culture. But the cheerful pop sound of Motown now seems like a cruelly ironic soundtrack to decline.
Then there is the equally loud echo of political history.
Later this summer, the nation will observe the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington for "Jobs and Freedom," and in advance of that milestone, new questions are being asked about whether African Americans have much more of either than they did on Aug. 28, 1963.
If Dr. King were alive today, what would he say on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial as he surveyed the scene?
"He would say that we are freer but less equal," said Jackson. "He would remind us of what he said back then, which is that the allies who joined us to oppose barbarity will not necessarily be our allies for equality."
In a series that begins Sunday, The Huffington Post examines the pain and the promise of Black America and looks at how far we have come, and still have left to go, to reach Dr. King's longed-for mountaintop. The stories focus on poverty and joblessness, health care, crime and incarceration, barriers to civic participation, the administration's record, education, and black progress against long odds. HuffPost also seeks to highlight potential solutions to these endemic issues.
Measured against the arc of American history, which includes more than two centuries of slavery and a third of official segregation, the legal, political and social advancements since 1963 are impressive, even astonishing. We are not a perfect Union, but we are less imperfect in fundamental and decent ways.
"Jim Crow is gone, housing and school segregation are gone, voting rights are in, millions were registered, blacks voted in a higher percentage than whites in 2012," Jackson noted. "We have won a lot of victories."
Racial diversity is accepted as a social norm, good not only for the soul and society but for the economy and even, if not especially, for corporate management.
The president, who measures the culture in part by watching his daughters, took note of the changed tone. "It doesn't mean that racism is eliminated," he said this past Friday. "But when I talk to Malia and Sasha, and I listen to their friends and I see them interact: They're better than we are -- they are better than we were -- on these issues. And that is true in every community that I have visited all across the country."
But cold federal statistics add up to a different narrative. It is a depressing litany, but one that bears repeating. The numbers tell a old story: It is shocking how little things have changed since Dr. King started measuring out loud in the 1950s.
Black poverty rates were cut in half from the start of the 1960s (when they were over 50 percent) to the year 2000, but have mostly been inching upwards since. In absolute terms, more blacks are in poverty than ever -- more than one in four of the nation's 44 million African-American citizens. More than one in three black children live in poverty, a percentage that rises to well over 50 percent in cities such as Detroit.
Diversity is a social good but not automatically an economic one if there is no broad access to capital. "Diversity can be a diversion," said Jackson. "I can sit down and eat anywhere in my hometown, but not a single building is owned by an African American." And there are only a small handful of blacks who are CEOs of Fortune 500 companies.
Health care numbers are equally bleak. Infant mortality, a basic measure of community health, is 1.14 percent among black Americans, more than double the 0.51 percent among whites. The relative rates of health insurance and pension coverage for blacks haven't budged since 1979, according to Census figures and the most recent "State of Working America" study. For example, 48.2 percent of whites had health care coverage in 2010, compared with 37.7 percent of blacks.
Changes in the criminal justice and penal systems -- especially the rise of mandatory sentencing and the privatization of prisons -- have created an archipelago of incarceration that has trapped a vastly disproportionate number of black men behind bars. African Americans are 14 percent of the U.S. population, but constitute nearly 1 million of the 2.3 million prison inmates today, according to a recent NAACP study. "If current trends continue," the study says, "one in three black males born today can expect to spend time in prison during his lifetime."
Education is a more hopeful tale, at least at first glance. In 1975, 40 percent of African-American high school graduates enrolled in college; by 2008, that percentage had risen to 56 percent, according to the College Board. But overall, only 16 percent of blacks have at least a bachelor's degree, a rate half that of whites. After decades of diligent effort and the advent of need-blind admission, the Ivy League is 7 percent black, still only half the percentage of the overall population.
Violence remains rampant. Blacks were victims in nearly half of all homicides, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Serious violent crime against black youths was more than twice that against white youths. That much of this violence is black-on-black is no solace.
So how far have we really come?
In 1963, Dr. King declared on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial that African Americans were "still not free."
Five years later, in his posthumously published book, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?, he depicted the life of African Americans, especially men, in a way that seems alarmingly current:
"Of the good things in life he has approximately one half those of whites," King wrote, "of the bad he has twice those of whites. ... When we turn to the negative experiences of life, the Negro has a double share. There are twice as many unemployed. The rate of infant mortality (widely accepted as an accurate index of general health) among Negroes is double that of whites." And so on.
Such statistics remain all too real to men such as Elijah Cummings, who sees them vividly in his Baltimore district.
He told me that he has pressed the president, whose campaign he oversaw in Maryland in 2008 and 2012, to speak out and do more on what Jackson called "the undercurrent." Cummings said, "He thinks he has accomplished a lot, and there is only so hard I can press him."
But Obama now seems to be awakening to the need to speak openly from the African-American perspective, and Cummings insists on seeing the promise beyond the pain, based in part on his own youth.
For Cummings, the first steps on the still arduous march to true racial equality began in a wading pool in the late 1950s.
Back then, he was just a young boy whose parents -- strict Pentecostal preachers both -- had come north from South Carolina in the 1940s to ensure that their children would receive a decent education. Each summer, in the soupy Chesapeake heat, Elijah and the other black children would crowd into a tiny wading pool in their poor South Baltimore neighborhood. "It was so crowded that we had to take turns stepping into it," Cummings recalled.
Until one day Juanita Jackson Mitchell arrived. Her husband was Clarence Mitchell, a close associate of Dr. King, a lobbyist for the NAACP in Washington, and a man who ultimately deserves major credit for passage of most significant civil rights legislation of the 1950s and 1960s. She was a lawyer -- the first African-American woman admitted to the bar in Maryland -- and a fiercely effective civil rights activist in her own right.
"She came by one day and held a meeting of us kids and our parents," Cummings recalled. "She said that only a few blocks from us was a much larger pool, with deeper and cooler water, and didn't we want to swim in it?" he remembered.
"She said, 'Now the only problem is there are going to be some people in that pool who don't want you to be in it with them.' We kids didn't know what she was talking about.
"It took us seven days of trying, but we finally integrated that pool. And that was my introduction on civil rights. Change does happen."
Ashley Balcerzak contributed reporting. Reported by Huffington Post 32 minutes ago.
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White House enlisting entertainers to help implement healthcare law
Stepping up efforts to enroll young Americans in health insurance this fall, the Obama administration is enlisting the help of actors and entertainment industry officials to educate twentysomething consumers about the need to get covered.
Reported by dailypress.com 6 hours ago.
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