Other News
Other News
December 31st, 2016
Here's a reason to be hopeful about 2016 despite, among other things, the election of Donald Trump, the loss of several beloved celebrities and the intractable civil war in Syria.
Innovations for Poverty Action's Annie Duflo and Jeffrey Mosenkis write that 2016 might turn out to have been one of the best years for humanity because the number of people living in extreme poverty and child mortality has been dropping... Continue Reading
March 15th, 2016
For the first time, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has come out against doctors prescribing highly addictive opioid painkillers, The Washington Post's Karoun Demirjian and Lenny Bernstein report.
The nonbinding guidelines from the federal government recommend that doctors prescribe alternative courses of treatment before resorting to opioid painkillers to treat chronic pain. The guidelines have been developed in... Continue Reading
December 11th, 2015
On a personal note, I'd like to share news of an event my family has organized in honor of our mother, Laura Elliott-Engel. I was always so proud of Mom for getting sober at the age of 28 and then spending the rest of her career helping people recover from addictions herself. We are holding a showing of It's A Wonderful Life in the Olean, New York, community where she was the executive director of the Council on Addiction Recovery... Continue Reading
September 27th, 2015
Lana Slezic has a visual history in The Walrus of the Canadian residential schools in which Indian children were taken away from their families to boarding schools in order to "civilize them." The United States has this same history of assimilation too (I wrote my senior thesis at Mount Holyoke College about this). Slezic's photographic essay looks at the decaying remains of these institutions, asking if their destruction through... Continue Reading
April 13th, 2015
Homeowners who lost their properties to foreclosures are starting to bounce back and are qualifying for new mortgages, The Wall Street Journal's Annamaria Andriotis, Laura Kusisto and Joe Light report. More than 5 million families lost their homes to foreclosure between 2007 and 2014, but foreclosures and other negative credit events come off credit reports after about seven years. “'The dark shadow of the foreclosure... Continue Reading
March 8th, 2015
Natural disasters are costing $250 billion to $300 billion annually, the U.N. Office for Disaster Risk Reduction said in a report released last week. According to the Associated Press' Edith M. Lederer, the report estimates that, if a $6 billion investment is made every year, the cost from disasters would be reduced by $360 billion over the next 15 years. Andrew Maskrey, lead author of the 2015 Global Assessment Report... Continue Reading
January 3rd, 2015
The Ebola virus has killed over 20,000 people, Reuters reports, and the disease is still spreading in West Africa: "The Ebola crisis in West Africa is likely to last until the end of 2015, according to Peter Piot, a London-based scientist who helped to discover the virus in 1976 in the former Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo." Continue Reading
December 8th, 2014
The American Red Cross has been claiming that 91 percent of charitable dollars are spent on services, ProPublica and NPR reports. But overhead expenses are more than charitable officials have been claiming, with fundraising expenses alone taking up 26 cents of every donated dollar, the two journalism outlets report. While the Red Cross changed the wording on its web site to now explain that 91 cents of every dollar goes to humanitarian... Continue Reading
November 12th, 2014
During law school I did research about various efforts to put patients in charge of their own care, whether their issue is addiction, a disability or mental health. So I was very interested to read a piece that Newsworks' Laura Benshoff published about a pilot program in a Philadelphia suburb to put Medicaid patients with mental health issues in charge of decisions about their care: "It gives patients the option to redirect that money... Continue Reading
September 11th, 2014
Brynn Tannehill, director of advocacy for SPART*A, writes in the Huffington Post on how to be a good ally for transgender rights. Tannehill says that many people take positions "on a lack of understanding of the lived experiences of so many transgender people: of how hard it is to find work, or medically necessary health care, or accepting partners, or athletic activities where we're welcomed, or safe spaces; how hard it is to... Continue Reading
August 24th, 2014
ProPublica reports that the Red Cross had dropped its argument that documents about how it spent $300 million in disaster-relief funds on Superstorm Sandy contain trade secrets. The Red Cross disclosed that the largest Sandy expenditures involved financial assistance, food, other relief items, programming resources and paying for the deployment of staff and volunteers: "More than half the money spent, $129.6 million, went to... Continue Reading
June 18th, 2014
Only 352 of 15,000 New York City residents seeking aid to fix homes wrecked by Superstorm Sandy have received federal assistance so far, Wall Street Journal said. The aid has been "slowed by a combination of federal rules invoked to prevent fraud and misspending after Hurricane Katrina, local rules, and certain missteps by local officials and contractors," WSJ reports. Aid also has been very slow on the New Jersey Shore. Continue Reading
June 10th, 2014
Apple's partnership with Epic Systems, the dominant vendor of electronic health records, on a HealthKit platform for health apps and tracking devices will initially store around 60 different types of health data, Forbes contributor Zina Moukheiber writes. A conusmer using HealthKit has to give Apple permission to share biometrics with Epic's electronic health record system for patients, MyChart, in order to notify their clinicians... Continue Reading
May 28th, 2014
Several insurers who waited out the first round of health insurance applications through online exchanges are going to be selling policies through the exchanges next year, the New York Times reports. Even if insurers wait a year or two to enter the exchanges, they can still compete for customers because "people buying coverage in the individual market tend to be focused on price and may quickly switch plans if better deals become... Continue Reading
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