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Welcome To E-Estonia, The Tiny Nation That's Leading Europe In Digital Innovation

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Innar Liiv, Tallinn University of Technology

Big Brother does “just wants to help” – in Estonia, at least. In this small nation of 1.3 million people, citizens have overcome fears of an Orwellian dystopia with ubiquitous surveillance to become a highly digital society.

The government took nearly all its services online in 2003 with the e-Estonia State Portal. The country’s innovative digital governance was not the result of a carefully crafted master plan, it was a pragmatic and cost-efficient response to budget limitations.

It helped that citizens trusted their politicians after Estonia regained independence in 1991. And, in turn, politicians trusted the country’s engineers, who had no commitment to legacy hardware or software systems, to build something new.

This proved to be a winning formula that can now benefit all the European countries.

*The once-only principle*

With its digital governance, Estonia introduced the “once-only” principle, mandating that the state is not allowed to ask citizens for the same information twice.

In other words, if you give your address or a family member’s name to the census bureau, the health insurance provider will not later ask you for it again. No department of any government agency can make citizens repeat information already stored in their database or that of some other agency.

Tech-savvy former prime minister and current Vice President of the European Commission Andrus Ansip oversaw the transformation.

The once-only principle has been such a big success that, based on Estonia’s common-sense innovation, the EU enacted a digital Once Only Principle and Initiative early this year. It ensures that “citizens and businesses supply certain standard information only once, because public administration offices take action to internally share this data, so that no additional burden falls on citizens and businesses.”

In Estonia, citizens and businesses supply certain standard information only once through a digital portal. Priit Koppel, CC BY-SA

Asking for information only once is an efficient strategy to follow, and several countries have started to implement this principle (including Poland and Austria).

But this by itself does not address the fact that merely asking for information can still be a bother to citizens and business. The once-only principle does not guarantee that the collected data was necessary to request, nor that it will be used to its full potential.

*‘Twice-mandatory’ principle*

Governments should always be brainstorming, asking themselves, for example, if one government agency needs this information, who else might benefit from it? And beyond need, what insights could we glean from this data?

Financier Vernon Hill introduced an interesting “One to Say YES, Two to Say NO” rule when founding Metro Bank UK: “It takes only one person to make a yes decision, but it requires two people to say no. If you’re going to turn away business, you need a second check for that.”

Imagine how simple and powerful a policy it would be if governments learnt this lesson. What if every bit of information collected from citizens or businesses had to be used for two purposes (at least!) or by two agencies in order to merit requesting it?

The Estonian Tax and Customs Board is, perhaps unexpectedly given the reputation of tax offices, an example of the potential for such a paradigm shift. In 2014, it launched a new strategy to address tax fraud, requiring every business transaction of over €1,000 to be declared monthly by the entities involved.

To minimise the administrative burden of this, the government introduced an application-programming interface that allows information to be automatically exchanged between the company’s accounting software and the state’s tax system.

Though there was some negative push back in the media at the beginning by companies and former president Toomas Hendrik Ilves even vetoed the initial version of the act, the system was a spectacular success. Estonia surpassed its original estimate of €30 million in reduced tax fraud by more than twice.

Latvia, Spain, Belgium, Romania, Hungary and several others have taken a similar path for controlling and detecting tax fraud. But analysing this data beyond fraud is where the real potential is hidden.

*Analytics and predictive models*

Big data, analytics and predictive models will play the main role in the next wave of e-government innovation. For example, if single-transaction information puzzle pieces are put together to form a map of the broader national business context, it might be possible to understand the kind of complex interdependencies between companies visualised below.

Example of complex network of business transaction data, collected by Estonian Tax Office from 2014.

But this also raises an interesting question: could a national government use this same digital tracking system to glean insights about the economy’s health and general economic trends?
Visualization of interdependencies between sectors in Estonia.

The Estonian Tax and Customs Board seems to be moving in this direction. Its 2020 Strategic Plan (in Estonian here) demonstrates a shift in mindset, from tasking itself solely with controlling and punishing people to envisioning giving advice to taxpayers.

Might tax offices be transformed into management consultancy-type agencies that advise companies on how to capture growth in related sectors, mitigate risk from peers’ bankruptcies or improve profits – all based on analysis of the vast amount of data it has collected?

Currently, dozens of people collect, analyse and clean such data about the business sector, but it’s possible this job could be done automatically using tax data. In this scenario, taxes could be considered a service fee paid in exchange for valuable business insights.

The key problem with Estonia’s great idea is privacy. It’s easy to imagine that giving industry-specific advice (or advice spanning several industries) based on business-transaction data might break the trust of the companies being monitored.

Indeed, one of the core founding principles of OECD Guidelines on the Protection of Privacy is that data should only be used for the purpose stated and not for any other reasons. So-called “purpose limitation” has since made its way into most modern data protection acts, including to EU data protection rules.

But as the “ask information only once, but use at least twice” idea demonstrates, data not only can and should be used for more than its original purpose, it should never be processed solely for a single aim. Some legal experts agree, stipulating that “within carefully balanced limits” data may be used for purposes beyond its original intent.

An innovative, visionary tax office that serves, rather than controls, society’s business sector is a big ask. But if any country can do it, e-Estonia can.

Innar Liiv, Associate Professor of Data Science, Tallinn University of Technology

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website. Reported by Huffington Post 16 hours ago.

Jamie Dimon just doubled down in supporting a little-known tax that pays poor people

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Jamie Dimon just doubled down in supporting a little-known tax that pays poor people In his latest annual letter to shareholders, JPMorganChase CEO Jamie Dimon says the US should "dramatically expand" its current earned-income tax credit, a form of negative income tax that pays low-earners instead of asking them to pay income tax.

The idea of negative income tax is novel: In effect, it's a kind of income tax that works in reverse.

For those who earn below a certain amount — like the poverty line — the government pays them. The US already has a program like this that benefits millions of people's health and wallets, and President Donald Trump has proposed expanding it.

Here's what it's all about.

*How it's applied today*

The largest example of NIT is the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), which serves 27 million working families in the US. It was started in 1975, under President Gerald Ford, expanded once by President Reagan, and expanded further by President Clinton.

The EITC functions like a big tax refund. If a family makes below a certain amount each year, the government will refund the tax that was withheld plus an additional amount.

President Trump wants to increase the EITC for couples making under $64,400 a year (or individuals earning below $31,200) to help low-income parents spend on childcare, up to a certain point. Families will also be able to deposit some of that money into a special account, which the government will match up to $1,000 annually.

But it's still important for government "to have eggs in other baskets" when solving poverty, rather than relying exclusively on the EITC, says Russ Whitehurst, senior fellow of economics studies at the Brookings Institution.

"Education programs that increase skill levels among the working-age population have, to date in human history, paid a consistent dividend in the form of higher overall economic activity," Whitehurst tells Business Insider.

*A hypothetical NIT, courtesy of the 1960s*

Milton Friedman, the influential University of Chicago economist, started talking about NIT in 1968. He saw it as a way to help people economically without reducing their incentive to work.

He proposed a hypothetical. Let's say the lowest income someone could pay tax on was $3,000. For everyone who makes below that, Friedman said the government should give them 50% of the amount between the actual income and the cutoff. So if you earned $2,000, you'd get half of the $1,000 difference, or $500. If you earned nothing that year, you'd get $1,500.

In other words, a family could never earn less than half the threshold, but it also couldn't earn the threshold itself or higher. Friedman said this was essential, because if people could earn the baseline or higher, they'd have little incentive to work at all.

*Planning for a future of automated work*

The idea resurfaced most recently in Dimon's letter to shareholders.

"It is important to note that large companies generally pay well above the minimum wage and provide health insurance and retirement benefits to all their employees," Dimon wrote. "While this would help small businesses far more than big businesses, large companies should support the expansion of this program because it would foster growth and be great for lower paid American workers."

Dimon's letter echoed his comments at this year's World Economic Forum, in Davos, Switzerland, where leaders took to the idea because robotic automation now looms over a growing number of jobs. Governments may need to find ways to supplement people's wages when employers no longer require the employee's specific type of work.

"I think negative income tax is a big solution for the low-skilled, to give people a living wage and the dignity of a job," Dimon said at a private lunch during the event.

Dimon's vision of the near future is different from how most of us think about earning an income.

In the current system, people earn an income based largely on what skills they can sell in the labor market. Doctors make more than baristas because medicine requires a greater set of skills and draws from a smaller pool of candidates relative to making coffee.

As more jobs become automated, that dynamic could change. More people might work part-time and rely on supplemental income to reach a living wage.

"Maybe one day we'll all be working four days a week and not five or six days a week," Dimon said. "In fact, I think in Europe they're already down to four days a week."

However, the more jobs are automated, the less something like NIT would necessarily help people, says Jesse Rothstein, an economist at UC Berkeley.

"Even the existing EITC doesn't get people to a livable wage," he tells Business Insider. "So you'd need something much more generous to make up for the fact you're only asking people to work two days a week, and to make that a livable amount of money."

An alternative idea is universal basic income — a regular, livable wage paid to every citizen, working or not. Basic income is more extreme than NIT; advocates often take issue with the initial work requirement Friedman took for granted.

Sam Altman, president of Silicon Valley's biggest startup accelerator, Y Combinator, has said it asks too much of people to keep working full-time (or at all) if machines already produce enough wealth to get divvied up.

"There's this very deep-seated American ideal that work is valuable for its own sake, and there is some truth to that," Altman says. "But I don't think work is the only way to get a sense of being needed and community and fulfillment."

*SEE ALSO: At a private lunch in Davos, Jamie Dimon was asked about the elephant in the room*

*DON'T MISS: Trump's tax plan is giving realtors and nonprofits something to worry about*

*SEE ALSO: There's another way people in expensive cities are 'penalized,' and they might not know it*

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Here's a month-by-month timeline of the best time to buy almost anything in 2017 Reported by Business Insider 21 hours ago.

Congress Can Learn From Rhode Island's Medicaid Miracle

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You'd be hard-pressed to find a more poorly designed program in the federal budget than Medicaid, the health insurance program for low-income Americans. Reported by Newsmax 19 hours ago.

Why Obamacare Was Doomed From The Start (In 1 Simple Chart)

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Why Obamacare Was Doomed From The Start (In 1 Simple Chart) Despite Obama's promise of a socialist utopia whereby all of his snowflake, millennial supporters would jump at the opportunity to 'spread their wealth around' for the greater good, his one crowning achievement that attempted to implement that vision, Obamacare, has proven to be a complete failure. * As it turns out, while millennials may be naive, they're not stupid.  *

While it may not have been readily apparent to the young Obama voters in 2008, most of whom would have blindly approved of almost any policy he put forward good or bad, Obamacare was always just a gigantic tax, via both off-market premiums and actual taxes (or 'penalties' according to the Supreme Court), levied on young people to cover the expenses of older people. 

*And perhaps nothing illustrates the cause of Obamacare's epic failure than the following chart from the Washington Post which highlights the fact that the top 1% of health-care spenders use more resources, collectively, than the bottom 75% combined.*  Slice the data a different way, and the bottom half of spenders all together rack up only about 3% of overall health care spending — a pattern that hasn’t budged for decades. 

In other words, the youngest people of this country are paying $1,000s of dollars each year for health insurance that they almost never use...and haven't for decades.

 

As Tom Miller of the American Enterprise Institute points out, Obamacare solves precisely the wrong problem by taxing young people to provide subsidies to older folks who will then just consume even more healthcare and drive already astronomical healthcare prices even higher.



But Tom Miller, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, disagreed. He said that the study is based on quick and incomplete snapshots of health and argued that it is yet another way to divert from the health-care discussion we should be having: *about how to rein in spending. Using this data to argue about where to get premium dollars from — from the pockets of the well or the sick — simply allows the system to grow ever bigger and prop up an even-more-expensive medical system.*

 

*“We all get diverted by hoping we can hide the bill under someone else’s pillow,”* Miller said. *“I think that’s the political argument you hear — these low spenders, we’re scared to death they might catch on to the fact they’re getting taken to the cleaners” by being forced to buy expensive health insurance they don’t need.*



But, seemingly no amount of logic will ever convince idealists, like Marc Berk of Health Affairs, that young people somehow have an inherent obligation to "take care of people who are very sick."



*“The key takeaway message really is most people are in good health; they don’t spend a lot of money, and yet it’s important to have them be part of our insurance system. If they’re left out of the system, we’re not going to have the funds to take care of people who are very sick,” *said Marc Berk, a health policy researcher and contributing editor of Health Affairs who led the analysis.



And while millennials may shout their verbal support at liberal rallies, they're apparently much less willing to demonstrate their actual support with their wallets. Reported by Zero Hedge 16 hours ago.

United States: House Overwhelmingly Approves Insurance Antitrust Reform Legislation - Reed Smith

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The House of Representatives has approved HR 372, the Competitive Health Insurance Reform Act of 2017, which would repeal the antitrust exemption for health insurance companies provided under the McCarran-Ferguson Act Reported by Mondaq 6 hours ago.

Poll: Most young people say gov't should pay for health care

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Most young Americans want any health care overhaul under President Donald Trump to look a lot like the Affordable Care Act signed into law by his predecessor, President Barack Obama. A GenForward poll says a majority of people ages 18 to 30 think the federal government should be responsible for making sure Americans have health insurance. Conducted Feb. 16 through March 6, before the collapse of the GOP bill, the poll shows that 63 percent of young Americans approve of the Obama-era health care law. Two-thirds of young people agree with a smaller majority of Americans overall that the government should make sure people have health care coverage. The poll pays special attention to the voices of young adults of color, highlighting how race and ethnicity shape the opinions of a new generation. A recent AP-NORC poll of U.S. adults, conducted during and after the collapse of the GOP proposal, found just 52 percent called it a federal government responsibility to make sure all Americans have coverage. [...] 71 percent favor the law's Medicaid expansion, 66 percent of young adults favor the prohibition on denying people coverage because of a person's medical history, 65 percent favor requiring insurance plans to cover the full cost of birth control, 63 percent favor requiring most employers to pay a fine if they don't offer insurance and 53 percent favor paying for benefit increases with higher payroll taxes for higher earners. Reported by SeattlePI.com 6 hours ago.

When it comes to healthcare, Republicans need to take a Hippocratic Oath to do no harm

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When I became a doctor, I went to work in an emergency room that admitted and treated the kind of hard-working, low-income farmworker families I grew up with. For many of them, the ER was their first and last resort after avoiding the doctor for years because they had no health insurance.

We didn’t... Reported by L.A. Times 4 hours ago.

How to use your 'Explanation of Benefits' to share prices in our New Orleans PriceCheck

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Here's how to read your health insurance EOB and enter prices for procedures in our New Orleans PriceCheck tool. Reported by nola.com 4 hours ago.

Where Trump's approval rating stands after Obamacare defeat

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The president backed legislation that would leave 24 million more Americans without health insurance. Reported by NJ.com 4 hours ago.

2 Charts Show How Close The U.S. Is To Healthcare Collapse

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Submitted by Patrick Watson of Mauldin Economics

The first step to solving a problem is admitting you have one. Some of us are in denial, so here’s a hard fact: We Americans spend far more money on health care than any other developed nation, but we’re no healthier.

We’re even less healthy overall.

The chart below shows the bad news. The horizontal axis is years of life expectancy. The vertical axis is per capita healthcare spending. Ideally, you want to be in the lower right quadrant. That means your population has a relatively high life expectancy and relatively low healthcare spending.

France, Japan, Spain, Chile, and a bunch of others are clustered in that area. Their money buys more health than ours does.

The United States is in the upper right, which shows that our per-person healthcare spending is significantly higher than that of the other OECD countries. Switzerland is a distant second place. Our extra spending doesn’t help us live longer. We actually die a little earlier than our peers in Japan and most of Europe.

You can quibble over details in this data, but the broad facts are inescapable. We spend too much on healthcare relative to the health it buys us. As long as that is the case, no reform plan will work.

Did Obamacare cause this? No. It goes way back. Here’s another graphic showing the changes over time.

You can see that the United States began diverging from other developed countries back in the 1980s. The gap has only grown wider since then.

Stranger yet, we spend all this extra money yet still leave millions of low-income citizens with little or no access to healthcare. Kaiser Family Foundation says some 2.5 million working Americans make too much to qualify for Medicaid, but not enough to receive Obamacare tax credits.

*Brace Yourself for the Death Spiral*

I showed you that data to say this: Simply returning to pre-Obamacare conditions won’t solve the problem. Obamacare exists because the system wasn’t working and we needed something better.

Before 2014, people with preexisting conditions were simply out of luck. They couldn’t buy health insurance at any price, unless their employers offered group health, which many didn’t. This was hurting both those people and the economy at large.

Obamacare, for all its flaws, at least tried to solve the problem. It helped some people but hurt others—and now it’s reached its limits. Insurance works *only if the risk pool includes enough low-spending people to offset those with expensive claims. *That’s Obamacare’s core problem. The legal mandate to buy insurance hasn’t brought enough young and healthy people into the pool.

This is the “death spiral” you hear about. People with serious illnesses will buy insurance no matter what it costs. This drives up claim ratios, which then drives premiums yet higher and discourages young and healthy people from buying.

That can’t work indefinitely.

  Reported by Zero Hedge 1 hour ago.

United States: Insurers' Antitrust Exemption In Crosshairs Again As Part of Potential Health Care Overhaul - Sedgwick LLP

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Just when you thought the health insurance legal and regulatory landscape couldn't get any more interesting, along comes the Competitive Health Insurance Reform Act of 2017 (the Act). Reported by Mondaq 1 day ago.

The GOP Debacle and the New Poor

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(Photo: AP/Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call)

Speaker of the House Paul Ryan walks away after holding his press conference to announce the canceled vote on the American Health Care Act on March 24, 2017.

“Everybody knows there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression,” says the eponymous hero of Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March. “If you hold down one thing, you hold down the adjoining.”

Well, everybody except today’s Republican Party.

The GOP’s problem is that the world they knew has changed, but their strategy hasn’t. For decades, Republicans have attacked Democratic efforts to expand or merely defend social insurance by depicting such insurance as benefiting presumably shiftless minorities at the expense of white workers who weren’t all that prosperous themselves.

That’s why Ronald Reagan told stories about a Chicago “welfare queen” who lived high on the public dole. That’s why Rush Limbaugh and others who opposed the Affordable Care Act as it moved through Congress in 2010 portrayed it as a program designed for the almost exclusive benefit of minorities.

The Republican attacks had an economic logic behind them: Most white voters who swallowed the GOP’s line did have incomes high enough—if, sometimes, only barely high enough—to keep them from becoming beneficiaries of such programs themselves. So long as that remained the case, attacks that depicted means-tested social insurance programs like Medicaid as designed to help the Racial Other carried a real punch. Speaker Paul Ryan and the supporters of his bill to decimate the ACA might well have assumed that this venerable bias would help ensure their success.

What they didn’t factor in was the downward mobility of the white working class. The economic and social adversities that white workers have experienced in recent decades—the substitution of low-paying service-sector jobs for more remunerative ones in manufacturing, the hollowing out of factory towns and rural communities, the declining rates of family formation and rising rates of midlife death—haven’t made white workers more racially tolerant, as their support for Donald Trump in November’s election clearly demonstrated. But neither has it made them as eager as they once were to disparage or repeal means-tested social insurance, as their response to the Trump-Ryan health-care dismantling made clear as well.

The Quinnipiac Poll on Ryan’s bill that was released just a few days before the legislation’s demise showed that it commanded just 17 percent support, while 56 percent opposed it. A meager plurality of Republicans supported it—just 41 percent—but the most damaging numbers were those of constituencies on whom Republicans have increasingly come to rely. Whites without college degrees opposed Ryan’s bill 48 percent to 22 percent, while voters between 50 and 64 years old opposed it 62 percent to 16 percent.

More telling still, voters were asked whether they supported or opposed cuts to Medicaid, which, the question read, “helps pay for health care for low income Americans.” Just 22 percent said they supported such cuts, while 74 percent opposed them. Among Republicans, 39 percent supported but 54 percent opposed, while among whites without college degrees, 29 percent supported while 66 percent opposed. The ACA’s extension of Medicaid to Americans with incomes higher than its previous threshold coincided with the decline of many white workers’ incomes to levels at which they became eligible—doubtless contributing to the wider acceptance of the program’s necessity and legitimacy.

Even without the intransigence of the House Freedom Caucus, then, the Ryan bill faced two daunting obstacles. First, it would have eliminated coverage to a large number of working-class whites whose support Republicans can’t risk forfeiting. Second, not only have health-care costs continued to rise, but so has the share of new jobs that don’t come with health insurance. A study by economists Lawrence Katz and Alan Krueger found that of the net increase of nine million jobs created between 2005 and 2015, virtually all that increase came among independent contractors, or workers for sub-contractors, or temporary employment agencies, or in the gig economy—in other words, in the vast majority of cases, in jobs that didn’t come with benefits.

The Ryan bill’s backers assumed there was a sufficiently large bloc of voters who believed their own health coverage was secure enough to make it permissible to go after those Americans in need of public support. As they now try to resurrect a version of that bill, they still assume that’s the case. But they’re assuming wrong. In a nation that’s lost its middle-class majority, people of color aren’t the only ones who feel insecure. Stripping away health coverage from the poor and the working class devastates whites as well as blacks, Trump supporters as well as diehard Democrats.

The shrinkage of the middle class, and of jobs that provide insurance, renders all but impossible any “accuracy of suppression” in the efforts to cut back the ACA. Our economy has devolved past the point where most people believe you can hold down the means-tested benefits for one group, or race, of citizens without holding down the adjoining. Reported by The American Prospect 6 hours ago.

Why You Should Hate Uber, According to the New York Times

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Via The Daily Bell

Uber is psychologically manipulating their drivers in order to exploit them. I know this because a New York Times article told me so. The article is titled, How Uber Uses Psychological Tricks to Push Its Drivers’ Buttons, and starts, “The secretive ride-hailing giant Uber rarely discusses internal matters in public.”

From this alone, I can deduce that Uber is run by tricksters who are manipulative of their employees and very guarded in their tactics for profit, which makes me assume they are unethical practices.

The New York Times piece does mention that Uber is trying to be more friendly and engaging with its drivers since they have gotten some bad press on that front. But the article goes on to inform me further of the exploitation:



And yet even as Uber talks up its determination to treat drivers more humanely, it is engaged in an extraordinary behind-the-scenes experiment in behavioral science to manipulate them in the service of its corporate growth…

Uber’s innovations reflect the changing ways companies are managing workers amid the rise of the freelance-based “gig economy.” Its drivers are officially independent business owners rather than traditional employees with set schedules. This allows Uber to minimize labor costs, but means it cannot compel drivers to show up at a specific place and time. And this lack of control can wreak havoc on a service whose goal is to seamlessly transport passengers whenever and wherever they want.

Uber helps solve this fundamental problem by using psychological inducements and other techniques unearthed by social science to influence when, where and how long drivers work. It’s a quest for a perfectly efficient system: a balance between rider demand and driver supply at the lowest cost to passengers and the company.

Employing hundreds of social scientists and data scientists, Uber has experimented with video game techniques, graphics and noncash rewards of little value that can prod drivers into working longer and harder — and sometimes at hours and locations that are less lucrative for them.



Basically, the article admits that drivers have more freedom and independence, but casts it as a bad thing since they are psychologically manipulated into working harder, or at particular times. But doesn’t that beat being basically literally manipulated into working harder or longer at a typical company?

If you are a corporate worker you are still often “asked” to work longer hours, and still given the type of assignments the corporation wants you to complete. And if you don’t like it, you need to find a different job.

Uber drivers can simply turn off their app and suffer no consequences. Yes, even though a prompt with a big button encouraging them to keep driving shows up, and even though the app tells them how close they are to earning a certain amount of money, the power still rests with the driver.

When it comes to contractors, corporations basically have to tread lightly in order to keep them happier, since they have less control over the workforce.

Uber has to make their work appealing, and using psychological “tricks” is how they are doing it. Why should a company be faulted for being clever in how they attract and encourage employees? Companies have been doing the same in order to attract and engage customers for years.

So it feels like a video game when you are driving for Uber. Great! Because with Uber, you actually make money and with video games, you spend money.

Could it be that many Uber drivers would either be driving for Uber, or at home playing video games? Uber has basically found a way to provide a great fit for gamers to contribute to the economy in a way that doesn’t feel unnatural to them.

Uber is giving an option, not forcing anyone to work for them. But that’s not the way the New York Times spins it.



To keep drivers on the road, the company has exploited some people’s tendency to set earnings goals… It has even concocted an algorithm similar to a Netflix feature that automatically loads the next program, which many experts believe encourages binge-watching. In Uber’s case, this means sending drivers their next fare opportunity before their current ride is even over.

And most of this happens without giving off a whiff of coercion…

But an examination by The New York Times found that Uber is continuing apace in its struggle to wield the upper hand with drivers.



Well, that almost sounds like it is harder for Uber to keep the upper hand than for a typical corporation. It sounds like workers and employers are closer to an even playing field when it comes to negotiation over their mutually beneficial transactions.

But no, I shouldn’t let the corporate giant manipulate me too! Exploiting the tendency to strive towards goals! Providing an interface which makes them want to work longer and earn more money! Adding addictive video game elements which make work feel like leisure! The horror!



Uber exists in a kind of legal and ethical purgatory, however. Because its drivers are independent contractors, they lack most of the protections associated with employment. By mastering their workers’ mental circuitry, Uber and the like may be taking the economy back toward a pre-New Deal era when businesses had enormous power over workers and few checks on their ability to exploit it.



If only our dear leader FDR could have ruled forever. Alas! His dictatorial controls on the economy could not last. Instead, we must live in a world where workers cannot control by threat of government violence what they get from their employers.

Instead, they are forced to work for evil corporations like Uber… Or go drive for a competitor like Lyft… Or work for a gig-based delivery service like Postmates… Or go to an entirely different sector of the economy, which only has hundreds of thousands of businesses to choose to work for… Or start their own business if they feel they have something to offer and don’t want to deal with an employer…

But still, super-exploited.



Mr. Amodeo, the Uber spokesman, defended the practice. “We try to make the early experience as good as possible, but also as realistic as possible,” he said. “We want people to decide for themselves if driving is right for them.”

That making drivers feel good could be compatible with treating them as lab subjects was no surprise. None other than Lyft itself had shown as much several years earlier.

In 2013, the company hired a consulting firm to figure out how to encourage more driving during the platform’s busiest hours.

At the time, Lyft drivers could voluntarily sign up in advance for shifts. The consultants devised an experiment in which the company showed one group of inexperienced drivers how much more they would make by moving from a slow period like Tuesday morning to a busy time like Friday night — about $15 more per hour.

For another group, Lyft reversed the calculation, displaying how much drivers were losing by sticking with Tuesdays.

The latter had a more significant effect on increasing the hours drivers scheduled during busy periods.



So companies are being forced to make their employees feel good about working.

Isn’t psychology the way to voluntarily induce certain behaviors, versus force? Companies need their employees to do certain things to optimize business. Getting the employees to want to comply is a positive approach, especially when the alternative is, “Do this or get fired,” which has basically been the dominant approach of companies for years.

The article says that these tactics have been employed by video games for decades to induce a waste of time, so why is it suddenly horrible to use these tactics to induce productive use of time?

And just to make sure there is no mistake about whose side the New York Times is on, they close with a quote from an Obama official about a contract style, gig-based economy.



“You have all these players entering into this space, and the assumption is they’ll do it through vast armies of underemployed people looking for extra hours, and we can control every nuance about what they do but not have to pay them,” said David Weil, the top wage-and-hour official under President Barack Obama.



Somebody high up doesn’t want the peasants participating in a freelance economy. Yet the government is the one exploiting the masses as tax slaves.

Maybe they have a vested interest in keeping the old employment model, where you are under the control of one company rather than free to take a contract here or there. Maybe the government wants to make sure the corporation is on their side when it comes to health insurance, social security, and tax withholding.

Uber doesn’t withhold taxes from paychecks. That means instead of filing taxes to get money back, when (if?) you file taxes, you owe the government a big chunk of cash. Maybe that isn’t exactly beneficial to the psychological manipulation the government employs to make citizens comply.

And at the end of the day, the government can still use their guns to get your money. Uber needs your consent.

Uber Undermines Regulation

There are certainly unethical practices companies use towards their employees, but I am failing to see what the big deal is with Uber. No one is being forced to drive for them, and this isn’t the industrial revolution where the only option available in your village is to work for a toxic factory or starve.

It really seems like the New York Times has it out for Uber. Their long piece talking about the psychological manipulation Uber uses on their employees is really just psychological propaganda to make readers feel emotional about the situation.

They want people to think that this unregulated company is dangerous. They want people to support more control over the economy by the government, just like the good old days of FDR. They want people to clamor to bring Uber into the fold of government controlled corporations. They want people to want the government to save them from the scary manipulations of big business!

But government’s whole business is manipulation, and the same goes for the media outlets they control.

If you can read deeper, the New York Times’ hit-pieces often give hope for Uber. It is a modern business model which doesn’t need to use force like the government. And they have even implemented programs to undermine government regulation.

A different New York Times piece on Uber is called How Uber Deceives Authorities Worldwide and continues to explain as if it was a bad thing, that Uber uses something called greyballing to deliver a fake version of the app to thwart government stings and protect their drivers from official harassment.



…Uber had just started its ride-hailing service in Portland without seeking permission from the city, which later declared the service illegal. To build a case against the company, [code enforcement] officers like Mr. England posed as riders, opening the Uber app to hail a car and watching as miniature vehicles on the screen made their way toward the potential fares.

But unknown to Mr. England and other authorities, some of the digital cars they saw in the app did not represent actual vehicles. And the Uber drivers they were able to hail also quickly canceled. That was because Uber had tagged Mr. England and his colleagues — essentially Greyballing them as city officials — based on data collected from the app and in other ways. The company then served up a fake version of the app, populated with ghost cars, to evade capture…

The mayor of Portland, Ted Wheeler, said in a statement, “I am very concerned that Uber may have purposefully worked to thwart the city’s job to protect the public.”



Any company that is getting around government coercion can’t be all bad. The cities are trying to protect the cab companies, wasting tax dollars in the process of chasing people delivering a service clearly in demand from Portland residents.

[It is interesting to note that both New York Times articles start with the word “How,” which is a psychological trick to get more clicks, the idea being that people think they will find more practical knowledge in the articles that start with “How”. But it is okay when the New York Times uses psychology to promote its business, just not when Uber uses it to run its business.]

But anyway, the poor exploited Uber drivers won’t have to labor too long seeing as they will be replaced by driverless cars within about a decade.

 
You can exploit the masses just like Uber, with lessons from this book on how psychology is used to sell! (Of course, you could also use the book to avoid being manipulated into buying.) Reported by Zero Hedge 20 hours ago.

G&L Acupuncture and Wellness Center in Beaverton and West Linn Is Celebrating 20 Years of Community Wellness and Serving Family and Friends

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G&L Acupuncture and Wellness Center is celebrating 20 years of community wellness and serving family and friends. Starting as a one person operation in 1997, before acupuncture was widely accepted and understood in the West, and expanding into what it is today, two treatment centers serving hundreds of patients, Zheng Gong and Lei Liu have dedicated their lives to helping people and increasing the awareness of acupuncture in the Beaverton, West Linn and greater Portland area.

(PRWEB) April 05, 2017

When G&L Acupuncture and Wellness Center opened its doors in 1997 Zheng Gong had an important mission: use knowledge of natural medicine to help as many people as possible. The tiny Beaverton clinic was literally wedged between a nail salon and a cigarette shop. It barely had the basics: two treatment rooms and a shelf of herbs. At first, Zheng was the only acupuncturist. She also doubled as the manager, receptionist, accountant, and everything else that was needed. Lei Liu, her husband, joined a year later and started building the clinic into what it is today.

In those early days, America had yet to accept acupuncture as a valid form of medicine. Health insurance didn’t cover treatment and many people were “afraid of the needles.” There were tough days when no patients called or walked in, but Zheng and Lei knew what acupuncture could do and were determined to help the people who needed it. Eventually, as more patients trickled in, the clinic slowly grew.

Many of those first patients still come to the clinic. They took a chance on G&L and have stayed all these years because Zheng and Lei were able to help them when no one else could. They know how deeply G&L cares about them and their health. They’ve seen the healing power of acupuncture firsthand and trust G&L – so much so that some patients come to G&L before they consult their doctors!

Reflecting back through the years, so many inspiring patients come to mind. A couple of highlights in particular stand out:

We receive holiday cards every year from dozens of couples who had trouble conceiving until they received treatment from us. It brings us great joy to help families in this way. Some of them have children in their teens now!

There was a young woman whose chronic asthma was impeding her acceptance to the U.S. Air Force Academy. After receiving consistent acupuncture treatments, she passed her physical in 2014 and graduated as a USAF second lieutenant in 2016. Zheng and Lei were honored to be invited to the ceremony and see her happy smile.

Twenty years later, G&L Acupuncture and Wellness Center has expanded to 14 treatment rooms in the Beaverton clinic and four more in the West Linn location, opened in 2004. G&L is proud to employ acupuncturists, massage therapists, and support staff who share the caring philosophy and commitment to helping people get well with natural medicine.

Every good thing that has happened since that first day is due to the devotion to the G&L mission and patients’ trust. G&L Acupuncture and Wellness Center regularly volunteers our time at events throughout the city to increase awareness of acupuncture and spread the message of natural medicine. G&L is driven by the desire to improve the health of others with acupuncture and other natural solutions, especially those who have not found help through traditional methods.

G&L Acupuncture and Wellness Center is very happy to celebrate this milestone with you, treasured patients and friends. The G&L success is due to your trust and loyalty and Zheng and Lei are humbled by this opportunity to serve the community. Looking forward to many more years of helping you, your friends, and your family feel better and stay healthy.

Thank you all for your continued support. G&L couldn’t do it all without you! Reported by PRWeb 19 hours ago.

House Democrats Introduce New Social Security Expansion Bill

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WASHINGTON ― Rep. John Larson (D-Conn.) introduced a bill Wednesday to expand Social Security benefits and shore up the program’s finances.

The Social Security 2100 Act already has 156 co-sponsors, all of them Democrats, giving it the support of some 80 percent of the party’s House caucus.

Surrounded by seniors advocacy groups and fellow Democratic House members at a press conference on Capitol Hill, Larson said he was “optimistic” about the bill’s prospects despite Republicans’ control of both chambers of Congress.

A key reason: President Donald Trump’s campaign-trail promises to protect the program.

“We do have a president who did stand out, in a very difficult time when he didn’t have to, and talked about not just preserving Social Security, but expanding it,” Larson said. “So we think this is an opportunity for us to seize on what the president of the United States has said and join with us.”

In fact, Trump vowed only that he would not reduce benefits, and his first budget did not address Social Security at all.

Larson’s staff shared the legislation and related materials with the White House, and is hoping to arrange a meeting to discuss it. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the bill or confirm that it had received Larson’s overture.

Seeking Trump’s cooperation on Social Security is an unlikely strategy for congressional Democrats, who have been locked in conflict with the president virtually since he took office.

And even if Trump were personally inclined to consider a bill that expands benefits, he has surrounded himself with ultra-conservative figures like budget director Mick Mulvaney, a former member of the hard-right House Freedom Caucus. Mulvaney claims he is trying to convince Trump of the need to dramatically scale back Social Security and Medicare.

Instead, Larson appears to be trying a less aggressive variation of what Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has done in the Senate, using Trump’s campaign promises to protect Social Security against him. Sanders invoked those comments when introducing his own expansion bill back in February.

If Democrats constantly remind voters of Trump’s pledges, the lawmakers’ thinking goes, he will either feel pressure to stick to them, or suffer politically if he does not.Should Trump take Larson up on his offer to collaborate, however, he may find the legislation more palatable than other progressive Social Security expansion bills that seek to raise taxes on more people.

Larson’s Social Security 2100 Act would increase benefits across the board through a change in Social Security’s benefit formula. It would also adopt a cost-of-living adjustment tailored for older Americans that has historically been more generous, and create a minimum benefit that would be 125 percent of the poverty level.

The legislation would pay for these increases by subjecting earnings of $400,000 or more to the 6.2 percent payroll tax. (At present, Americans only pay into Social Security on the first $127,200 of their earnings, a limit that climbs in tandem with the average wage index.) The added revenue would also enable Social Security to pay out promised benefits for the next 75 years, according to an analysis by the Social Security Administration’s chief actuary.

Sanders’ Social Security expansion bill, by contrast, would pay for its benefit increases by taxing incomes of $250,000 or more.

And Larson’s legislation would cut the taxes of some Social Security beneficiaries by raising the income threshold for seniors’ benefits to be taxed.

The Connecticut Democrat’s Social Security expansion bill comes as Democrats seek to go on the offensive after the collapse of the Republican Obamacare replacement bill.

The progressive wing of the party, in particular, views this moment as an ideal time to generate support for single-payer health insurance, or “Medicare for all.” A universal Medicare bill introduced by Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) has picked up a dozen more co-sponsors since the GOP health care bill’s defeat last month.

Asked whether the two legislative pushes were part of a common strategy by Democrats to get behind ambitious progressive reforms, Larson demurred, calling health care and Social Security “separate issues entirely.”

Larson does not plan to join Conyers’ bill, since he likes the idea of preserving both private and public health insurance options to ensure competition. Instead, he intends to introduce legislation that would lower the Medicare eligibility age to 50.

However, Social Security Works, a group advocating for Social Security expansion that backs Larson’s bill, supports single-payer health insurance.

Alex Lawson, executive director of Social Security Works, said the organization welcomes a variety of measures that would increase access to Medicare.

“This is the debate I want to have,” Lawson said of disagreements between Democrats who want to lower the Medicare age and those who would like to make the program universal.

“We’re going to support Bernie Sanders’ Medicare-for-all bill when it comes out,” Lawson said. “And we’ll support Larson’s push to lower the age to 50, because both of those are wise policy and politics.”

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website. Reported by Huffington Post 16 hours ago.

Regulators step in as Zoom+ prepares to exit insurance market

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Nearly two years after ZoomCare expanded its reach with Zoom+ Performance Health Insurance, the company is retreating from the market. In addition, state regulators placed the health plan under supervision, meaning the Oregon Department of Consumer and Business Services Division of Financial Regulation will oversee operations on site as the insurance plan winds down by the end of the year, DCBS announced. Zoom Health Plan notified the state that it intends to withdraw from the individual and small… Reported by bizjournals 15 hours ago.

Illinois health care advocates cheer GOP bill's demise, worry about future

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Many health care leaders in Illinois cheered the demise of House Republicans' Obamacare replacement bill Friday — but it didn't take long for reality to quiet the celebration.

Despite the bill's downfall, challenges remain in Illinois and across the U.S. when it comes to health insurance, they... Reported by ChicagoTribune 14 hours ago.

Mark Meadows Wants the AHCA to Take Even More from the Poor

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(CQ Roll Call via AP Images)

Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., chairman of the House Freedom Caucus, walks through Statuary Hall in the Capitol on Wednesday, March 22, 2017.

But seriously—there is nothing Republicans won’t do to secure tax cuts for the rich.

It was only two weeks ago that the GOP’s effort to repeal and replace Obamacare (after seven years of presumable preparation) ended in complete failure, leaving Speaker Paul Ryan to meekly state, “Doing big things is hard.” Trump and congressional Republicans seemed content to leave the American Health Care Act’s wreckage in their rearview mirror as they headed for greener, seemingly less divisive, pastures: tax reform. 

That now seems to have been a head fake. 

Last week, party leaders revealed that the Obamacare repeal is back on the table and negotiations are again under way—an indication that Ryan knows the only way to make his steep tax cuts revenue-neutral is to first repeal Obamacare, and that he is ready to accede to even more extreme provisions floated by the party’s far-right flank in order to do so.

Enter Mark Meadows, leader of the House Freedom Caucus, the group of three dozen far-right members that was instrumental in blocking the AHCA’s passage because it didn’t eviscerate the Affordable Care Act quite enough.

Meadows now calls for a plan that allows states to do away with two of the core ACA protections that the AHCA had previously left untouched. As Margot Sanger-Katz explains in an excellent piece at The Upshot: First, states could rescind the essential health benefits component that requires providers to cover some basic benefits, including prescription drugs, maternity care, mental health services, and hospitalization. Second, states could effectively nullify protections for people with preexisting conditions by getting rid of community rating, a provision that requires insurers to charge the same rate for everyone of the same age.

The result of this proposal, Sanger-Katz writes, would be devastating—while a cancer patient may still be able to get health insurance, it could very well not cover chemotherapy treatment and would cost many times more than that of a healthy person. “Only cancer patients with extraordinary financial resources and little interest in the fine print would sign up,” Sanger-Katz writes. Republicans would likely be able to point to lower premiums because the only people who could afford coverage would be those with a perfect bill of health—and even then, their plans would likely be very stingy.

In short, Meadows wants to turn the AHCA, already a vehicle for an enormous upward redistribution of wealth, into an even more egregious reverse-Robin Hood scheme.

As Robert Greenstein, president of the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, writes, even without Meadow’s proposed additions to the AHCA, “the House bill, if enacted, would represent the greatest assault on low- and moderate-income Americans of any law in modern times. It would also represent the largest direct transfer from low- and moderate-income people to the very wealthy in memory.”

(Center on Budget and Policy Priorities)

The vast majority of tax breaks would go to the top 1 percent. The wealthiest 400 taxpayers in the country would see annual tax cuts of $7 million—$2.8 billion in total—each year.

The victims of that largesse, as the Congressional Budget Office found, would be the 24 million Americans who would lose health-care coverage over the next ten years. Millions more would get diminished or more expensive coverage. Josh Bivens of the Economic Policy Institute finds that the AHCA would cost Americans a staggering $33 billion just in higher deductibles and copays by 2026.

Republicans claim that the ACA repeal’s built-in tax cuts—totaling roughly $70 billion in 2019 alone—will spur job growth because the cuts are mostly targeted at those almighty job creators. That’s not what the numbers show, however. As Bivens finds, repealing the ACA would reduce job growth by 1.2 million by 2019, as tens of millions of Americans are forced to spend more on health-care costs, reducing their disposable income.

If Meadow’s proposal is rolled into the AHCA, it might just bring enough of his ultra-conservative colleagues on board to open up a narrow path for passage in the House. Thus amended, the bill, if passed, would illustrate that Republicans see no level of pain inflicted on average Americans—like people dying of cancer because they can’t afford chemotherapy—that can’t be assuaged with the aloe of trickle-down tax cuts. For that, Mark Meadows is our Trickle Downer of the Week. 

Tax Cuts for the rich. Deregulation for the powerful. Wage suppression for everyone else. These are the tenets of trickle-down economics, the conservatives’ age-old strategy for advantaging the interests of the rich and powerful over those of the middle class and poor. The articles in Trickle-Downers are devoted, first, to exposing and refuting these lies, but equally, to reminding Americans that these claims aren’t made because they are true. Rather, they are made because they are the most effective way elites have found to bully, confuse and intimidate middle- and working-class voters. Trickle-down claims are not real economics. They are negotiating strategies. Here at the Prospect, we hope to help you win that negotiation. Reported by The American Prospect 6 hours ago.

Regional Chemotherapy Alternative Cancer Treatment Was the Last Resort to Save the Life of Little Melina

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Medias Health Inc. has started the #damagecancer Project initiative to tell the stories of patients with advanced-stage cancers, who have successfully undergone Regional Chemotherapy treatment. Battling cancer often involves not taking "no" for an answer and seeking out alternative cancer treatments.

Toronto, Ontario (PRWEB) April 06, 2017

Medias Health Inc. has started the #damagecancer Project initiative to tell the stories of patients with advanced-stage cancers, who have successfully undergone Regional Chemotherapy treatment. These are the stories of people who kept fighting and received second lifelines after they were told that palliative care was the only option left when accepted treatment protocols failed. Today we share the story of Melina, a little girl who did not give up fighting cancer.

At the age when smiling children attempt their first steps, or practice their social skills, making friends in a daycare, little Melina (5) already grew accustomed to hospital settings. This cute little girl suffered from an aggressive type of head and neck cancer. She endured countless chemotherapies and irradiations, but there seemed to be no hope for her. One unique therapy turned out to be her new lifeline.

At Melina's birth a tumor was found on the left side of her little throat. Her doctors were saying to her parents Katharina and Eugene that the tumor was benign. At first everything looked good. Unfortunately, when the child was 18 months old, the tumor came back. This time it was malignant, and it grew to measure ten by six centimeters. Melina’s mother recalls her shock at the time.

The parents hoped that their “little sunshine” would be quickly restored to health with standard chemotherapies. The reality turned out to be different. Melina tolerated her chemotherapy treatments very badly. The little girl suffered from nausea, difficulty swallowing, extreme weight loss, nose bleeding and other side effects. The biggest problem was that the tumor could not be surgically removed, because it had grown around an artery. The doctors tried their best, but after every surgery the cancer came back with a vengeance.

The parents were desperately looking for therapeutic alternatives. Last autumn, a clinic recommended the so-called Regional Chemotherapy cancer treatment (RCT). Searching the Internet, Katharina came across the term "experimental" and "scientifically not proven". But she did not let herself be discouraged. Numerous reviews also pointed out to incredible therapeutic successes of RCT. "I knew instinctively that this was our last chance ..."— says Katharina today.

Prof. Karl R. Aigner, medical director of a renowned private oncological surgery clinic in Germany and world's leading expert on Regional Chemotherapy, said that Melina suffered from a rhabdomyosarcoma. This type of cancer is caused by degenerative or not fully developed cells of the muscle or connective tissue. He noted that whenever such tumor is removed surgically, it comes back aggressively. If the surgery was not a complete success, Melina could have dire consequences. The cancer could have spread in the throat or grow into the cranial base, causing paralysis and suffocation.

Prof. Aigner recalls that initially there was an issue getting approval to apply Regional Chemotherapy for pediatric oncology. He had built a new building for his clinic in the autumn of 2015. The health authority initially refused to allow him to treat children. Prof. Aigner referred Melina to a specialized surgery department of the pediatric clinic at a university. Unfortunately, they did not succeed in their treatment.

In the meantime, the city’s district councilor had warmed up to the idea of Regional Chemotherapy and managed to ensure that Prof. Aigner was given permission to use his unique therapy for children with cancer.

There was another problem. The family health insurance provider refused to pay for the alternative therapy. "The pediatric clinic should have explicitly prescribed this treatment in their paperwork," explains Katharina. It was then that her husband and she decided to sell their car. Luckily for them, they did not have to, because Prof. Aigner agreed to treat their little girl free of charge. He also paid for materials and medication from his own pocket. "We are eternally grateful to him," says Katharina, referring to Prof. Aigner. She also notes that RCT seemed to be the only therapy to help Melina.

"The success of Regional Chemotherapy method lies in the fact that medication is delivered directly to the tumor site through arterial blood. This allows to significantly increase absorption and to improve efficacy"— explains Prof. Aigner. "This also means that healthy organs are spared." In Melina’s case, the medication was delivered to the tumor site via a child port, the Portolino, which was developed by Prof. Aigner. The Portolino port was inserted in Melina’s neck. Only after two treatments, the tumor had shrunk to the point that it could be completely removed surgically.

After all the excitement of the last years, Katharina and Eugene can now breathe easier, — "Regional Chemotherapy was our last resource, and it has given our child a chance for a new life!"

Contact:
Medias Health Inc. | USA & Canada: 1-888-896-0251 | International: +1-647-986-5977
info(at)mediashealth(dot)com https://www.regionalchemotherapy.com http://www.mediashealth.com http://www.facebook.com/mediashealth Reported by PRWeb 7 hours ago.

ICICI Lombard Conferred Stevie Award for The Best Contact Centre of the Year (100 Seats)

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*ICICI Lombard* has been conferred with the ‘*Bronze*’ Award for *Contact Centre of the Year* (over 100 Seats) in the Business Services and Financial Services Industries Segment by Stevie Awards, Inc., a US Based firm that stages seven annual Stevie Awards competitions for companies across the globe.  

 

The Stevie Awards are the world's premier business awards. The mission of the Stevie Awards is to recognize and generate public awareness of excellence in the workplace.

 

Effective usage of customer centric metrics, multifunctional technology integration, structured processes were the differentiators that led to ICICI Lombard winning this prestigious accolade.

 

ICICI Lombard in the latter half of 2014 took a strategic move of in-housing its call centre. This led to creating multiple touch points, system access and imparting in-depth training about the products and processes of the company, eventually achieving superior customer experience. 

 

ICICI Lombard has been pioneering in technology enabled insurance solutions in the general insurance space. This is also be reflected in the company’s customer service initiatives which are tech-driven with a human touch that ensure solutions are customized, faster and brings efficiency and customer convenience at the focal centre.

                                                                                               

*About ICICI Lombard General Insurance*

ICICI Lombard GIC Ltd. is a joint venture between ICICI Bank Limited and Fairfax Financial Holdings Limited, a Canada-based diversified financial services company engaged in general insurance, reinsurance, insurance claims management and investment management. ICICI Lombard GIC Ltd. is one of the leading private sector general insurance companies in India with a Gross Written Premium (GWP) of Rs 83.07 billion for the year ended March 31, 2016. The company issued over 15.80 million policies and settled over 1.62 million claims as on March 31, 2016.

 

ICICI Lombard General Insurance has been declared the ‘Most Innovative Health Insurance Company of the Year’ at ‘The 2016 Frost & Sullivan India Best Practices Awards’.  It has also been conferred with the Association for Talent Development (ATD) Best Award 2016 for the fourth time. ICICI Lombard has won the ‘Claim Service Leader’ (General Insurance – Large category) and ‘Technology Innovation’ Awards at the Indian Insurance Awards, 2016. The company received the ‘Claim Service Leader’ award for its excellent track record in claim settlement across product segments. It was given the ‘Technology Innovation’ recognition for its technology driven initiatives especially the ‘RiskInspect’ App, a mobile application developed to capture risk information of low sum insured property risk. ICICI Lombard General Insurance has been adjudged the ‘Non-life Insurer of the Year’ at the coveted Outlook Money Awards, 2015. Non-life Insurance as a category has been included for the first time at the Outlook Money awards, which were introduced more than a decade ago. It is a matter of pride that ICICI Lombard has been chosen as the Winner in the introductory year of the award category. ICICI Lombard General Insurance has been conferred the coveted 'Golden Peacock Corporate Social Responsibility Award 2015'. The award recognizes the company for it continuous contribution to CSR and especially for its ‘Caring Hands’ initiative, an employee volunteering CSR program. ICICI Lombard was adjudged the award ‘Golden Peacock Innovation Management Award, 2015’ for demonstrating innovation across multiple functions of its business operations and promoting the 'culture of innovation'. The award ‘Golden Peacock Award for Business Excellence, 2015’ recognizes best management practices that act as the basis for business excellence. ICICI Lombard General Insurance received the award for its robust risk management practices and customer centric initiatives. ICICI Lombard was conferred with the ‘E-Business Leader’ Award in the General Insurance Category at the 5th annual edition of the Indian Insurance Award 2015 for its performance, growth, product and market innovation, customer service and technology. ICICI Lombard was also named as the ‘Best Travel Insurance Company’ by CNBC Awaaz Travel Awards 2015 presented by the Chattisgarh Government based on an online and on-air survey.  Reported by NewsVoir 7 hours ago.
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