New Rules Tell Insurers: Spend More On Care

The rules, intended to benefit consumers, vastly expand federal authority to direct the use of premiums collected by companies like Aetna, Humana, UnitedHealth and WellPoint. While some states have had such requirements, Monday?s announcement is the first such mandate by the federal government and grows out of the new national health care law.

?Millions of Americans will get better value for their health insurance premium dollar,? Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services, said in issuing the rules.

Ms. Sebelius said the rules would protect nearly 75 million people: 10.6 million with individual policies, 24.2 million with small-group coverage and 40 million covered by large employers.

Starting next year, she said, insurers in the individual and small-group markets must spend at least 80 percent of their premium revenues on medical care and activities to improve the quality of care. Insurers in the large-group market must spend at least 85 percent of premium dollars for those purposes.

Insurers that do not meet the standards next year will have to pay rebates to consumers, starting in 2012. Ms. Sebelius estimated that up to nine million people could get rebates worth up to $1.4 billion. About 45 percent of people with individually purchased insurance are in health plans that do not meet the new standards, known as medical loss ratios, federal officials said.

At a news conference on Monday, administration officials repeatedly refused to respond to Republican attacks on the health care law. Nor would they discuss Republican calls to repeal the law, a centerpiece of President Obama?s domestic agenda.

?We are just trying to implement this regulation,? said Jay Angoff, the rules? chief author. He is director of the Department of Health and Human Services? Office of Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight.

He said most insurers should be able to meet the standards because ?their profitability and reserves are at an all-time high.?

However, state officials said the standards could destabilize insurance markets in some states. Specifically, they said they feared that some carriers would withdraw from the market in some states, resulting in fewer choices and less competition.

Under the rules, federal officials can lower the standard for up to three years in states where ?there is a reasonable likelihood that market destabilization, and thus harm to consumers, will occur.?

Mr. Angoff said that Georgia, Iowa, Maine and South Carolina had asked for such adjustments.

Joshua R. Raskin, a senior analyst at Barclays Capital, an investment bank, said, ?With these rules, the federal government will, for the first time, hold health insurance companies accountable for putting a minimum amount of premiums toward medical expenses.?

The rules allow special treatment for health plans that provide limited benefits at a more affordable price. At least 1.4 million people are enrolled in such ?mini-med? plans, which may cap coverage for one or more benefits at $5,000 or $10,000 a year ? or perhaps $25,000.

Employers offering such coverage had said they might end it because they could not meet the 80 percent standard next year.

Premiums are usually lower for mini-med plans than for regular insurance, and administrative costs may be high because these plans often cover employees with high turnover rates. As a result, administrative costs account for a higher share of premium revenues.

In addition, some consumer groups said mini-med plans had higher profit margins than traditional insurance.

?The administration has made a wise accommodation that will temporarily preserve this coverage, which is very important to many employees in the retail and restaurant industries,? said E. Neil Trautwein, a vice president of the National Retail Federation.

The dispensation for mini-med plans is for one year. The government will collect data on these plans next year and decide how to proceed in 2012 and 2013. ?In 2014, we anticipate that these mini-med policies will disappear and be replaced by more comprehensive health plans,? said Steven B. Larsen, a federal insurance regulator.

The rules generally follow recommendations from the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, which represents state regulators.

However, ?we have a difference of opinion? on one point, said Jane L. Cline, the insurance commissioner of West Virginia and president of the association.

State officials said Mr. Obama should allow states to phase in the requirements over several years, to avoid disruption of the individual or small-group insurance market. The White House said, ?The law allows adjustments of the medical loss ratio for the individual market in a state and does not apply to the small-group market.?

Consumers Union, the American Heart Association and Democratic members of Congress praised the rules.

Representative George Miller, Democrat of California, said the rules showed the folly of efforts to repeal the health care law.

?If Republicans succeed,? Mr. Miller said, ?they will be taking money right out of the pockets of millions of average Americans.?

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New Trade Group?s Focus Will Be Marijuana Industry

Now, flush with financial clout, and with their eyes on pushing Congress to further loosen laws, medical marijuana industry leaders are forming a national trade association. While there are smaller, local trade groups, organizers around the country say this will be the first business organization working on the national level.

Based in Washington, the group, the National Cannabis Industry Association, will focus primarily on lobbying, but will also help medical marijuana businesses navigate a patchwork of laws that differ depending on location.

?This is an industry that is emerging ? from the dispensaries to the ancillary businesses that are now coming out of the shadows,? said Aaron Smith, a medical marijuana advocate in Phoenix and the group?s executive director. ?While there is good work being done, there isn?t anyone out there representing the industry?s interests directly.?

The group?s board members, which include some of the more prominent names in the medical marijuana industry, say the need for a national association has become increasingly apparent with the explosion of the legal marijuana business. Such businesses include dispensaries, growing facilities and equipment suppliers.

J. B. Woods, a former insurance agent for Allstate who now sells property and product-liability insurance to medical marijuana businesses in Colorado and other states, is one of the 23 board members. Mr. Woods said the industry had grown so quickly and laws had changed so rapidly that it can be difficult for medical marijuana businesses ? and the property owners and banks they deal with ? to know if they are operating legally.

?A lot of times these dispensaries can make a huge capital investment only to find out that the local municipality changed its rules, and they have to close down,? he said. ?You are in an industry that is very complicated, and ultimately it?s about having a source of credible information.?

The group will officially begin at a national convention in Denver next month.

?This is an industry in its infancy,? said Bob Selan, a board member and chief executive of Kush magazine, a medical marijuana lifestyle publication. ?But it is an industry now.?

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New Trade Group?s Focus Will Be Marijuana Industry

Now, flush with financial clout, and with their eyes on pushing Congress to further loosen laws, medical marijuana industry leaders are forming a national trade association. While there are smaller, local trade groups, organizers around the country say this will be the first business organization working on the national level.

Based in Washington, the group, the National Cannabis Industry Association, will focus primarily on lobbying, but will also help medical marijuana businesses navigate a patchwork of laws that differ depending on location.

?This is an industry that is emerging ? from the dispensaries to the ancillary businesses that are now coming out of the shadows,? said Aaron Smith, a medical marijuana advocate in Phoenix and the group?s executive director. ?While there is good work being done, there isn?t anyone out there representing the industry?s interests directly.?

The group?s board members, which include some of the more prominent names in the medical marijuana industry, say the need for a national association has become increasingly apparent with the explosion of the legal marijuana business. Such businesses include dispensaries, growing facilities and equipment suppliers.

J. B. Woods, a former insurance agent for Allstate who now sells property and product-liability insurance to medical marijuana businesses in Colorado and other states, is one of the 23 board members. Mr. Woods said the industry had grown so quickly and laws had changed so rapidly that it can be difficult for medical marijuana businesses ? and the property owners and banks they deal with ? to know if they are operating legally.

?A lot of times these dispensaries can make a huge capital investment only to find out that the local municipality changed its rules, and they have to close down,? he said. ?You are in an industry that is very complicated, and ultimately it?s about having a source of credible information.?

The group will officially begin at a national convention in Denver next month.

?This is an industry in its infancy,? said Bob Selan, a board member and chief executive of Kush magazine, a medical marijuana lifestyle publication. ?But it is an industry now.?

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MilTube: a video-sharing site for the military

The Department of Defense (DoD) needed a dynamic way to share videos of training, ceremonies, and news clips with soldiers around the world. Enter milTube, a website that allows the military workforce to share videos behind secure network firewalls. The site features channels, categories, and tags, so that users can easily watch, upload, sort, and search content. Since all activity takes place behind the DoD firewall, content is protected from unauthorized viewing and distribution, making milTube a safe military alternative to public video-sharing sites.

The site is part of milSuite, a group of integrated tools that mirrors Internet services that are not behind the DoD firewall. It includes milBook, milWiki, milBlog, and now milTube. More than 88,500 employees from the Armed Services already uses milSuite. To meet bandwidth challenges at different military bases, milTube diagnoses platform needs so users can watch and upload videos at any location. Upon launch, it will support multiple video formats, audio-only streaming, as well as both desktop and mobile devices.

"Video is an extremely powerful tool for storytelling and sharing information among personnel," Justin Filler, deputy director of the MilTech Solutions Office, said in a statement. "MilTube provides a secure, internal environment for those connections to take place across the Armed Services."

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Intel's Oak Trail platform enters production, ARM not worried

Defenders of Earmarks Point to Urgent Needs That Would Not Be Met

In doing so, Republicans are hoping to tap into growing public concern about federal spending, and stand up to the kind of projects that have become reliable late-night punch lines over the years, like bridges to nowhere, teapot museums and studies of pig odor.

But at a local level, there remain many supporters of earmarks, who argue that they play an important role ? solving basic and urgent infrastructure needs in communities ? that is often lost in their cartoonish portrayals.

?I don?t really care what it?s called ? I?m mostly concerned about what the money is going to be used for,? said Francis G. Slay, the mayor of St. Louis, whose deteriorating flood-control system along the banks of the Mississippi went unaddressed for years until Senator Christopher S. Bond, a Republican, accelerated the slow-moving project with help from an earmark.

?How can anyone vilify one of our representatives,? Mr. Slay added, ?who has gone out and basically forced the federal government to fund a project that is essential to our ability to protect the property and the people of St. Louis from major flooding??

Money can take many different routes from budgets in Washington to projects in communities. The vast majority is allocated through the decisions of federal bureaucracy, which often uses formulas to rank priorities, or by the states themselves, where critics say the money is often distributed as pork anyway, only by governors and state lawmakers instead of members of Congress.

Earmarks, which for all their controversy account for less than half of 1 percent of total federal spending, allow lawmakers to specify how money is used in their home states. If they were eliminated, Congress would cede more authority over spending decisions to the executive branch.

The fate of earmarks remains unclear because the Republican ban is, at present, voluntary, and Democrats have not yet responded to a proposed moratorium.

Critics of earmarks contend that even the most legitimate projects ought not be financed through a process that rewards influence and sidesteps normal procedures. But in some towns and cities, supporters say these earmarks provide the shortest and most direct route to paying for road, water and sewer projects. The flood-control walls in St. Louis are cited as an example of an earmark that solved an urgent problem.

During the Midwestern floods of 1993, the Mississippi here reached to the steps of the Gateway Arch, peaking just two feet from the top of the flood walls.

Though the decades-old walls held, unlike the barriers in many surrounding communities, the flood caused substantial damage and exposed systemic problems. In one area, the river channeled beneath the wall, forcing emergency repairs. Calls came from all sides to prepare for the next flood.

Like many other projects involving highways and bridges ? so long as they go somewhere ? spending to repair the St. Louis flood-control system has not been controversial. But getting the money for the work has taken years.

The $20 million project, which is scheduled to be completed at the end of 2012, has been praised by fans and foes of earmarks as a straightforward and cost-efficient effort to patch up an aging series of levies, flood walls and floodgates. The Army Corps of Engineers has estimated that a breach could cause more than $1.2 billion in damages.

?I can?t say I?m in favor of earmarks, because I always thought they were someone?s favorite little pet projects,? said Greg Piel, a vice president at the Commercial Plating Company here, whose family business had to be ringed with makeshift levies in 1993 after the river channeled under the man-made barrier into his parking lot. ?I wouldn?t call the repair of a flood wall for a city a pet project. That?s an absolute must.?

Mr. Piel paused and added, ?It?s really easy to cross the line between needs and wants.?

Even if the projects themselves are deemed worthy, debates arise over whether they should be financed through Congressional earmarks. Last week, Representative Michele Bachmann, a Minnesota Republican who leads the Congressional Tea Party caucus and has been strongly critical of earmarks, made an exception for them. She was quoted as saying that she did not consider infrastructure projects like roads and bridges to be earmarks because of their importance. The comments immediately drew challenges.

Michael Cooper contributed reporting from New York, and Emma Graves Fitzsimmons from Chicago.

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Crowdsourcing Jobs to a Worldwide Mobile Workforce

A few years ago, Nathan Eagle had a big idea. What if millions of people in poor countries?people who couldn't find work in their local economies?could become a remote workforce for organizations all over the world? And what if, instead of traveling to do such jobs at call centers or other outsourcing offices in big cities, they could do their work quickly, reliably, and easily through text messages on their mobile phones?

Eagle founded a small startup, Txteagle, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to put the idea to the test. It has struck deals with mobile-phone carriers around the world to pay workers in credits for mobile airtime. In many places, that's as good as cash.

But while the concept sounds promising, expanding the business has proved difficult. Eagle told Technology Review this summer that his venture is "going to be binary?a huge hit or a spectacular failure."

One big challenge is to find valuable tasks that can be completed through text messages and phone calls. Eagle got the idea for the company after he created a service that let nurses in the coastal Kenyan village of Kilifi send text messages to tell central blood banks how much blood their hospital had on hand, so its supplies could be refilled more efficiently. Simply compensating the nurses for the cost of their text messages turned out to be the key to its success.

He launched Txteagle in Kenya and eventually had 10,000 people doing part-time tasks such as filling out surveys for international agencies, translating text, or collecting address data for business directories. One of his first partners was Nokia, which paid local people to translate mobile-phone menu functions into the 60 languages used in the country. But that task was quickly exhausted.

Now Txteagle needs to form several solid partnerships with multinational corporations that could supply a steady stream of small tasks. Eagle believes one promising idea is to use Txteagle as a market-research tool: workers could be paid to help companies learn what sorts of products would be desired in their rural corners of the world.

Txteagle recently announced a collaboration with the United Nations, which will use the mobile-phone platform to survey up to 500,000 people in 70 countries about their local governance. That brings the number of countries with Txteagle workers up to 80. The U.N.'s goal is to lay the foundation for future disaster-response efforts by learning how well communities and their governments communicate with each other. People who complete the survey will be paid about $1 and reimbursed for the cost of the text message.

For the U.N. initiative, Txteagle is working with the Global Network for Disaster Reduction, a nonprofit organization that influences policy in more than 90 countries. Most nonprofits operate on a relatively small scale, says Terry Gibson, a project manager at GNDR, but Txteagle allows them to reach a significantly larger audience.

Txteagle isn't the only company exploring ways to crowdsource small tasks to people all over the world. In 2005, Amazon launched its Mechanical Turk project, which sets up a way for a large group of distributed workers to participate in jobs like identifying elements in a set of photographs or performing data entry and transcription. A San Francisco-based startup, CrowdFlower, collaborated with nonprofit organizations this year to have people translate and map text messages that were sent from victims of floods in Pakistan and the earthquake in Haiti. Lukas Beiwald, CEO of CrowdFlower, says his company compensates its workers through PayPal and, in some cases, with virtual currency like the money used in Second Life.

The fundamental technology behind Txteagle includes algorithms for quality control, so that people who do consistently accurate work make higher wages. Workers who recruit others are paid small bonuses. To generate revenue, the company takes a tiny fraction of certain paid transactions.

To make real money with this business model, however, Eagle will need millions of workers using the platform. For now, he estimates, about 100,000 people will be using Txteagle to make money by the end of U.N. survey. And he hopes to find enough partners, with enough of the right sort of small tasks, to push those numbers even higher. "We'd like to be the largest knowledge workforce in the world," he says.

Kate Greene and Nathan Eagle are coauthoring Reality Mining: Using Big Data to Engineer a Better World, to be published by MIT Press.

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Blog - How Far Do Mountain Bikers Travel?

If you've ever tried mountain biking, you'll know that many factors influence the amount of work you do in the saddle, such as riding speed, terrain and weather. But perhaps most important is the size of the hills you tackle.

The question that Dennis Rapaport, from Bar Ilan University in Israel, tackles today is how to quantify this factor. And it turns out that it's not so easy to work out.

The obvious way to start is to find some way of determining the cumulative vertical distance travelled during a bike ride. So Rapaport used both GPS and barometric measurements during a lengthy ride to find out how they compare.

His results are a little surprising. While both methods produce altitude measurements at specific waypoints during the ride, he says that the GPS data is much noisier with all kinds of spikes and troughs that are caused by momentary loss of satellite signals and other signal degradation. The effect of this noise is that the GPS method tends to overestimate the cumulative vertical distance travelled.

The barometric data deduces changes in height by measuring changes in atmospheric pressure (assuming that there is no change due to the weather). The device that Rapaport used is periodically calibrated using GPS but this happens only occasionally so the device is not so susceptible to noise. Rapaport believes that this gives a more accurate estimate.

There's a sting in the tail, however. The final vertical distance estimation depends crucially on the number of waypoint measurements during the trip. Any distance travelled in between is simply averaged. But how many measurements are necessary?

It turns out there's no easily definable answer, no standard length scale that ought to be used. "Estimating cumulative ascent is an ill-defined task," concludes Rapaport. The question has no unique answer.

The problem, of course, is analogous to measuring a coastline or any fractal quantity. "At best, a range of estimates can be obtained, hopefully one that is comparatively narrow," says Rapaport.

And that means that cyclists are destined to never know exactly how much vertical distance they travel.

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1011.4778: Evaluating Cumulative Ascent: Mountain Biking Meets Mandelbrot

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FCC wants to let you send text messages to 911

Taking into account that 70 percent of calls to 911 are made through a mobile phone and that 72 percent of Americans text, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has decided to revamp the national emergency hotline to process SMS pleas for help. FCC's Chairman Julius Genachowski is calling for a Next-Generation 9-1-1 service, which falls under the FCC-drafted National Broadband Plan, that would allow Americans to send texts, photos, and videos to 911 from their mobile phone.

Genachowski pointed to the tragic Virginia Tech campus shootings in 2007 as an example where the technological limitations of 911 were a serious obstacle. Some witnesses tried to text 911 during the emergency but the messages never went through.

According to the FCC, Americans place 650,000 calls per day (more than 237 million calls a year) to 911. Modernizing the hotline would allow them to text for help in situations when calling might jeopardize their safety. Furthermore, photos and videos taken with a mobile phone could provide first responders with additional information to better assess a reported situation.

Expanding 911's communications platform would require the cooperation of numerous parties: local, state, and federal partners, as well as public safety, lawmakers, communications, broadband service providers and equipment manufacturers. In December, the FCC will lead a "Next-Generation 9-1-1 proceeding" to gauge the public's opinion.

The US is already planning on sending text messages about local, state, or national emergencies. This new 911 proposal would make the country's emergency system a two-way street.

"The Next Generation 9-1-1 Whats Next Project is an initiative of the U.S. Department of Transportation and is being carried out by the Transportation Safety Advancement Group (TSAG)," according to 911.gov. "The project draws on the expertise of public safety experts to identify and prioritize digital data, potentially available to first responders via the Next Generation 9-1-1 (NG9-1-1) system, which could best improve their safety and performance."

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Content Ratings Coming To The Android Market [TNW Mobile]

One of the top requests from Android users to Google has apparently been one to get more information about the applications available on the Android Market. Well, Google listened and according to a post on Google?s Android Developer blog, content ratings are going to show up on all applications on the Android Market in just a few weeks time.

So, what?s it all about and who does it affect?

Well, Google is saying that the new function is going to supply users more information about software in order for them to make the best selections. Unfortunately, they didn?t elaborate with any information or photo evidence so we?ll just have to wait and see how it plays out visually.

Oh, and it?s not only going to affect consumers. No. In fact, it?s going to impact app developers as well.

While the current rating policy for the Market won?t change, developers are going to have to supply some new information when submitting a new app or an update for a current one. And over the next few weeks, current applications will have to be updated as well. If not, well, Google has prepared an interesting policy for devs that don?t adhere to the new rules:

To prepare for this launch, starting next week, developers submitting new or updated applications will be required to include a rating for all applications and games uploaded onto Android Market. In addition, developers will have the next several weeks to add a rating to their existing applications and games. Once content rating is visible to users, any applications or games that do not include a rating will be treated as ?Mature?.

So, if you?re the developer of Monkey Kickoff, you probably want to make sure you update your application with a rating as soon as you possibly can.

Or face the wrath of the Goog?s new policy.

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Source: http://thenextweb.com/mobile/2010/11/24/content-ratings-coming-to-the-android-market/

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