Aged, Frail and Screwed by Insurance...

Bad news if you've been paying into long term care insurance. Your company may be planning to stiff you in the end.

From the New York Times:

"Interviews by The New York Times and confidential depositions indicate that some long-term-care insurers have developed procedures that make it difficult — if not impossible — for policyholders to get paid. A review of more than 400 of the thousands of grievances and lawsuits filed in recent years shows elderly policyholders confronting unnecessary delays and overwhelming bureaucracies. In California alone, nearly one in every four long-term-care claims was denied in 2005, according to the state."

Cancer fight in Campaign Spotlight

Presidential Candidate John Edwards' wife has cancer again.

"Mrs. Edwards’s doctor said at the news conference that she had metastatic, or Stage 4, breast cancer, meaning that it is in an advanced stage that has spread beyond the breast and lymph nodes, in her case to the bone.

According to statistics from the American Cancer Society, only 26.1 percent of patients with Stage 4 breast cancer live five years or more, but those figures are by nature outdated and do not reflect recent medical advances."

Edwards has already done a lot to raise awareness of breast cancer. Now her fight will be even more high profile. Edwards by the way, thus far has the most coherent Health Care plan of the campaign.

Starting up

Welcome to my new Blog. Recently a friend was commenting that my work at Tidepool.org with ebbTIDE was essentially blogging before there was such a thing as Blogspot. That got me itching to start commenting on the world again now that nursing school is done. This will be a place for all sorts of things, and will allow me to link to past articles I've written for Tidepool, the Christian Science Monitor, et al as current events dictate. Moreover, I'll use this space to link to articles that I catch every morning that I want to share with others.

-Ed