user: Roseanne Barr reveals she's going blind

American comedian, actress and TV star Roseanne Barr has revealed that she is suffering from glaucoma and macular degeneration and is slowing going blind.

The outspoken, Emmy award-winning star of the 1990s hit comedy show Roseanne and former US presidential candidate told the Daily Beast that her vision “is closing now.”

“It’s something weird. But there are other weird things,” she said in the interview. “I just try and enjoy vision as much as possible – y’know, living it up. My dad had it too.”

Barr, 62, said she smokes marijuana to help relieve the pressure she suffers in her eyes and also believes it opens her mind.

“You’re like, wow, you’re in awe. You look up into the stars. It makes you wonder. It doesn’t close that down,” she added.

Macular degeneration is a chronic illness that causes vision loss in the center of the field of vision. An estimated 15 million Americans suffer the illness, according to the American Society of Retina Specialists.

Barr’s blue-collar comedy show Roseanne, ran from 1988 to 1997, and was considered a trailblazer at the time in the way it portrayed family and women.

“Once you’re famous, you’re never not famous. My show is on five times a day in 15 countries or something. I’m still relevant to people,” she said.

Barr’s run for the presidency in 2012 on the California-based Peace and Freedom Party ticket, which called for the legalization of marijuana and same sex marriage, is detailed in a documentary film Roseanne for President! which is showing this week at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York.

The comedian said she might run again and would not support Hillary Clinton, who announced her candidacy for the presidency this month.

Summary: Actor and comic, who won an Emmy for her hit 1990s comedy show Roseanne, is losing her eyesight because of glaucoma and macular degeneration


Boomer Bust - Forbes.com

It won't be too long before baby boomers begin migrating from factory floors and corner offices to wheelchairs and adult diapers. That helps explain why Wall Street has long pitched health care outfits--drug companies, hospitals, devicemakers and nursing homes--as growth stocks.

Wrong, says Thomas Tobin, of Research Edge, a stock analysis boutique in New Haven, Conn. Tobin views health care through the lens of a demographer, tallying births, mortality rates and spending by each age group on drugs, medical gadgets and clinical services. His conclusion might surprise you.

"Health care peaked in 2002," Tobin declares.

That would be news to the Washington pols fixated on the notion that the health care system requires a radical injection of tax money. Another group he thinks has got it wrong: The conservative investors flocking to makers of cholesterol drugs and operators of rehab facilities simply because they serve old folk.

Tobin, a native of Needham, Mass., is a biochemist who dropped out of Dartmouth's Ph.D. program to work on Wall Street in 1997. It was when he was covering large medical firms for a series of hedge funds that he first grew suspicious of the premise that an aging society will lift health care stocks en masse.

Tobin knew the double-digit revenue growth driving equity valuations was unlikely to continue and decided to dig deeper. His first brush with demographics came while looking at Hill-Rom, a company that makes hospital beds and caskets.

"I tried to forecast total deaths minus cremations," using census and mortality data, he says. The approach worked and became part of his health care stock-picking toolbox.

Tobin studied data on the ages at which people undergo specific treatments and calculated where people were in the pipeline. The elderly were indeed multiplying, he found. The postwar baby boom was ushering between 3.5 million and 4 million people a year into their 60s, versus 2.5 million to 3 million a year born between the World Wars.

The shocker was Tobin's discovery that health spending does not rise steadily as people age. Between 37 and 55, he found, individuals double health care spending from $3,000 a year to $7,000 on average. The rise continues afterward--but at a far slower rate, until it approaches $9,000 a year around the time people turn 80. Then it speeds up again under the impetus of nursing home and intensive-care-unit bills.

As demographics go, so goes the industry's financial health, says Tobin. In 2002 the first wave of baby boomers, born in 1947, turned 55--the age when spending levels off. No coincidence that health care profit growth peaked the same year. At Johnson & Johnson ( JNJ - news - people ) profits doubled between 1999 and 2004, then grew only half as fast over the next five years. Its stock also peaked in 2002 at around $65; it is now hovering near $60. The Vanguard Health Care Fund notched annual returns of 20% or more six times between 1995 and 2003. It has not done so once since then.

Product sales show similar trends. Growth of implantable defibrillators peaked in 2002. (Dick Cheney received one the following year.) Tobin says it's no coincidence that Guidant (now part of Boston Scientific ( BSX - news - people )) and Medtronic ( MDT - news - people ) started growing more slowly after that as well.

Tobin has also applied his demographic models to forecasting demand for hospitals and nursing homes. The trends are not encouraging. There will simply be too few octogenarians for years to come because the preponderance of boomers is still two decades away from flooding this demographic. As a result, hospitals and nursing homes will be struggling with patterns similar to the ones that caused schools to close in the 1970s after the boomers had passed through, he says.

What health care companies have benefited from over the past decade is boomers entering their late 40s and early 50s. That led to strong sales of expensive maintenance drugs and trips to multiple specialists. Those susceptible to heart attacks mostly suffered their first ones during those years.

That surge of spending has now subsided. Another downer for the industry is that once boomers hit 65, Medicare coverage kicks in and pays reimbursements that are one-third lower than those many forked over through company-sponsored health insurance.

Tobin doesn't believe the future is grim for the entire health care business. He advises investors to shun stocks like J&J, which plans to lay off 8,000 employees. Instead, he favors focused providers like Mednax, whose neonatologists care for premature babies. The number of preemies correlates negatively with the health of mothers and positively with their ages. Tobin, who tracks deliveries, says Mednax missed earnings earlier this year as the recession caused a mini baby bust but expects fertility to snap back.

Cross Country ( CCRN - news - people ) Healthcare, a staffing specialist, is another Tobin favorite. "An older-than-average workforce is retiring at a pace faster than new nurses are being trained," he says. That's forcing hospitals to pay premiums for Cross Country's traveling nurses.

Another bit of Tobin research: Knee replacements surge right around the time people turn 67. That means boomers born in 1947 will hit their peak in five years. That could give a kick to jointmaker Zimmer at some point in the next few years, although he thinks it's a little too early to buy the stock now. (It trades at 15 times trailing earnings.)

A better bet in the short term is UnitedHealth ( UNH - news - people ), the big HMO. The average age of the American worker is leveling off at 40 and will stay there for a decade. That means that medical costs will be more predictable, stabilizing what have been volatile earnings in the sector. "The health reform debate has ignored this," he says.

Prices as of Oct. 21. Sources: Bloomberg; Interactive Data and Thomson IBES via FactSet Research Systems.

Reach David Whelan at dwhelan@forbes.com

Follow Forbes' health coverage at http://www.twitter.com/forbeshealth

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Summary:

assistant: Tom Tobin offers an alternative theory of which health care stocks will get a boost from the graying of America.