Insurance Industry’s Final Ad Blitz: Don’t Blame Us For Your High Costs

As President Obama makes his final push to get health care reform through Congress, he is “seizing on a report showing that market concentration for health insurance is so monopolized that insurance companies are willing to raise prices and lose customers in an effort to help their bottom line,” HuffPost’s Sam Stein reported.

The insurance industry is not taking this lying down. The Associated Press reports:

Robert Zirkelbach, a spokesman for America’s Health Insurance Plans, said insurance industry workers “do not deserve to be vilified for political purposes. … For every dollar spent on health care in America, less than one penny goes toward health plan profits. The focus needs to be on the other 99 cents.” AHIP plans to spend more than $1 million to run television ads on cable stations nationwide beginning in the next few days to push back on the attacks on insurers.

Obama has long identified the insurance industry as an obstacle to changes along the lines he seeks, but the administration’s actions and rhetoric seem to have escalated in recent days.

The president’s proposal would give the government the right to limit excessive premium increases – a provision included after one firm announced a 39 percent increase in the price of individual policies sold in California. Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services, convened a White House meeting with insurance executives last week, and followed up with a letter released in advance of Obama’s speech.

It asks companies to “post on your Web sites the justification for any individual or small group rate increases you have implemented or proposed in 2010.”

Talking Points Memo notes that the new AHIP campaign “comes as the group kicks off a two-day ‘policy conference’ in downtown D.C.”

In her opening remarks at the conference, which began this morning and runs through tomorrow, AHIP CEO Karen Ignagni said her industry still sees itself as a partner in health care reform. But she said growing criticism of recent controversial rate hikes by insurance companies are not helping to move the debate over reform forward.

“Our industry strongly supports health care reform because we recognize that the current system is unsustainable,” Ignagni said. “The current debate about rising premiums has demonstrated that, in fact, we have a health care cost crisis in this country. Unfortunately, the path that has been followed is one of vilification rather than problem solving.”

Article source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/09/insurance-industrys-final_n_491369.html

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First Space Lightning Captured on Video – cassini

Last Updated on Thursday, 15 April 2010 04:28 Written by Daisy Harley Thursday, 15 April 2010 04:28

This video here is of lighting flashing on Saturn, and it’s the first ever captured of lightning not happening right here on planet Earth.

The evidence of lightning on Saturn has been around for years in the form of radio signals, but this is the first video and audio evidence of the phenomena ever captured. It was taken by the Cassini spacecraft of Saturn’s dark side.

The video was shot over 16 minutes and compressed down into the 10 seconds that you see here. The cloud, which is about 1,900 miles along its longest side, is illuminated by the reflection of Saturn’s rings. Each flash is about 190 miles (300 kilometers) across with an energy comparable to the most intense lightning here on Earth. In real time, they lasted for about one second.

he crackling soundtrack to the video is synthetic. It approximates the actual sounds received by Cassini’s radio recording instrument, which are above the human hearing range.

[Wired Science]

Article source: http://gizmodo.com/5518132/first-space-lightning-captured-on-video

Non-Nuclear US ICBM Can Strike Iran In 30 Minutes – ICBM

Last Updated on Thursday, 15 April 2010 03:58 Written by Daisy Harley Thursday, 15 April 2010 03:58

Non-Nuclear US ICBM Can Strike Iran In 30 MinutesDefense Secretary Robert Gates has made an startling revelation today: The US has long-range missiles armed with high-power-but-non-nuclear explosives ready for a global strike. The (big) problem: China and Russia won’t be able to distinguish between nuclear and non-nuclear ICBMs.

This is what Gates said, talking on NBC’s Meet the Press:

We have, in addition to the nuclear deterrent today, a couple of things we didn’t have in the Soviet days… And we have prompt global strike affording us some conventional alternatives on long-range missiles that we didn’t have before.

Defense Tech’s Greg Grant says that maybe Gates meant to say “we will soon have”, but he also points out that the Navy has been working on conventional explosive D-5 Trident II missiles for “at least a decade” now. This development was funded through the Trident program—the program’s production line is still open—without the direct approval of Congress. The concern about this kind of weapon is that China, Russia, and other nuclear powers won’t be able to detect the nature of the ICBM with their early-warning systems. For them, on a computer screen, all inter-continental ballistic missiles look just like the same.

Even if the US President called each of the nuclear nations, I doubt that such a launch would be observed without serious concerns. An ICBM launched from California to North Korea or Iran would look very dangerous for both China and Russia, no matter what an US President is saying over the phone.

On top of that potential nuclear power ruckus, the fact is that a ballistic missile loaded with conventional explosives is not a very effective weapon. ICBMs are dumb weapons designed to reach a target area, spread their nuclear heads, and wipe everything around, completely, over a large blast radious. By loading ICBMs with explosives—no matter how powerful they may get—your destruction power is very low, while keeping a very low accuracy.

So basically, a launch of this type of missile may not reach its target, and make people with actual nuclear ICBMs very pissed off. Sounds like a lose-lose situation to me. [Defense Tech]

Article source: http://gizmodo.com/5518192/non+nuclear-us-icbm-can-strike-iran-in-30-minutes

The Moon in 3D – 3D moon

Last Updated on Thursday, 15 April 2010 03:58 Written by Daisy Harley Thursday, 15 April 2010 03:58

The Moon in 3DGet out your anaglyph glasses, because this Flickr gallery of 3D-ized Apollo landing sites (and more) is something special. Also, for those of you without red ‘n blue shades, is there no joy in your life? [Flickr via Bad Astronomy]

Article source: http://gizmodo.com/5518090/the-moon-in-3d

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