We need to accept that the interactions of technology, society and nature are now beyond our understanding
SOON after the combination of an earthquake and the resulting tsunami destroyed the Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan earlier this year, opposing sides began to mobilise their standard arguments to reach foregone conclusions. Obviously, the disaster showed that nuclear power was insanely risky and should be abandoned. Equally obviously, new reactors will be designed to avoid such risks and will be crucial for meeting the planet’s growing energy and environmental demands.
A Wellington woman's essay about being overweight has gone viral, as many New Zealanders positively connect with the source material.
RNZ journalist Megan Whelan joined Three's The Project on Friday to discuss the essay, which covers her early experiences of being overweight and her journey to body confidence.
Ms Whelan says she wasn't always as confident as she is now, and used to hide behind straightened hair and baggy clothing,
But the introduction of the internet introduced her to new experiences, and people such as Lindy West, Michelle Allison and Roxanne Gay.
Now she doesn't feel the need to dress the way she used to and she's willing to stand up to bullies, who try to put her down.
So far, Ms Whelan hasn't had any mean comments about the essay, even though she still expects a few.
Since publication, many readers have contacted her about how the essay helped them to feel more confident in their image.
She's grateful for the chance to share her experience and hopes others learn to talk about their insecurities too.
"Telling our stories is really important and sharing the ways that we're vulnerable is really important.
Americans embroiled in the national healthcare debate might be surprised to learn there's an alternative plan that already offers inexpensive, portable insurance to everyone – one that improves, rather than aggravates, the federal deficit.
Called the Healthy Americans Act (HAA), it does have one significant drawback: It's so unpopular with the bases of both parties that it's considered a long shot to ever become law.
Two senators – Ron Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon, and Robert Bennett, a Republican from Utah – have been championing the idea for years. In a nutshell, the bill would require all Americans to buy healthcare insurance, would establish state-administered exchanges for all Americans, and would modify the tax laws to facilitate IRS collection of premiums.
The bill's co-sponsors include six Republican senators, six Democratic senators, as well as Sen. Joseph Lieberman, the Connecticut Independent who caucuses with Democrats. Former GOP Sen. Norm Coleman of Minnesota also supported the legislation when he held office.
Wyden and Bennett first submitted the bill in January 2007, and resubmitted it this year as the healthcare debate geared up in February.
As with the other reform bills, HAA doesn't satisfy everyone. Business groups complain it would leave workers less dependent on their companies for benefits. Those on the left complain about its lack of a federally subsidized public option – although it does allow states to adopt their own public option plans, if they wish to do so.
Regardless of its political viability, voters still hoping for some healthcare reform short of a federal public option may find the HAA's advantages intriguing at the very least. Among its features:
Your policy belongs to you. For the first time, health-insurance companies would sell their wares to individual consumers, rather than to businesses. Currently, employers rather than employees buy health insurance plans: Workers generally accept whatever plan an employer offers.
"Right now," Bennett said in a recent Senate speech, "healthcare is the only part of the economy where the individual receiving the goods or services does not control the money that pays for the goods or services. So it is obvious that you will not have market forces available in that circumstance. If the individual who is receiving the goods or services controls the money that pays for the goods or services, he or she will make a different choice than if someone else is controlling the money."
Under HAA, each state would be required to establish an "exchange;" that is, a menu of plans offered by different providers. All consumers – not just those who are indigent or out of work – would then be free to choose the plan that best suits their needs.
States could opt to offer a public option that would be administered on the statewide level, which understandably worries big business. The National Coalition on Benefits, a group of over 150 employers including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, comments: "We expect that the source of most health coverage would soon be under the new system of state-sponsored health insurance choices, not through employers."
On the other hand, if you lose or change your job, your coverage would not change. And if you wanted to change providers, you'd be free to do so.
State rather than federal control. Under the HAA, state governments would establish and administer the exchanges. Federal payments would subsidize them to keep the costs low.
Mandatory coverage. Virtually all Americans would be required to carry health insurance. Those living below the poverty line would have fully subsidized premiums. Those earning between 100 percent and 400 percent of the federal poverty line would have their premiums subsidized according to a sliding scale.
Ink that flows black, not red. The same agency lobbed a monkey wrench into Obamacare by projecting a deficit of more than $1 trillion over 10 years, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), has issued a preliminary analysis stating that HHA would break even within its first year of operation. The Lewin Group, a management consulting firm owned by a subsidiary of the UnitedHealth Group, has projected the plan will actually reduce the federal deficit by $343.1 billion over 10 years.
Who pays? Ah, at last we arrive at the bottom line. Currently, the employer's contribution to the cost of healthcare insurance is a benefit, but employees pay no income taxes on it. Under the HAA, that would change. The current exemption would become a tax deduction. It would be worth $6,025 for individuals, and $12,050 for couples without children. The tax deduction would gradually be reduced as you earn more, and would disappear altogether for individuals earning $125,000, or $250,000 for couples filing jointly, according to the CBO.
Essentially, the Wyden-Bennett plan creates a federal system for collecting premiums via the U.S. income tax system. It would also distribute corresponding subsidies to help people buy insurance who otherwise might not be able to afford it.
Of course, employers would be expected to kick in money as well. This would occur according to a sliding scale based on two factors: the number of employees, and the amount of revenue per employee. The CBO says the employer tax would be "between 3 percent and 26 percent of the national average premium for the minimum benefits package for each employee."
So here's the CBO's bottom line: Individuals collectively would pay between $650 billion and $800 billion annually in total premiums through their tax returns. Eliminating the current tax exclusion for health insurance premiums, along with employers' tax payments, would raise between $400 and $500 billion.
Along with various cost savings generated by the plan, this would mean the federal outlays for health insurance premiums – expected to reach $1.3 trillion to $1.4 trillion by 2014 – would be roughly offset by new revenues and savings.
So why hasn't HAA received more attention, given its fiscal soundness? In part, it's because it appears to be a political non-starter.
President Barack Obama helped sound its political death knell in July. In classic Obama doublespeak, the president told the editors of the Portland Oregonian that he agreed with about "90 percent" of Wyden's thinking on healthcare reform, calling him a "real thought leader" on the topic.
Obama went on to say Wyden's plan would require "radical restructuring." Wyden-Bennett was "too radical" he said, and would inevitably encounter "significant political resistance."
Like anyone daring to carve out a middle ground in the healthcare debate these days, Wyden is taking fire from both sides.
Conservatives don't like its state-level public option. But the heaviest salvos have been launched from within Wyden's own party. Union leaders object to any taxation of health-insurance benefits, even though the impact would fall on the relatively wealthy.
"Stop Ron Wyden's tax break," urges StopWydensHealthTax.com, a Web site set up by unions. "…[It] taxes our benefits and leaves us at the mercy of the insurance companies."
The union's reaction reflects the left's determination to steamroll anyone who stands in their way on healthcare reform. Wyden has a liberal voting record and is considered a friend of the unions. Yet big labor produced and ran radio ads in his home state lambasting his plan.
That Wyden remains silent on that holy grail of progressives' healthcare dreams, a federally run and funded public option, hasn't helped HAA either. He says merely that he is "open" to the public option concept, and like Obama refuses to identify it as the sine qua non of healthcare reform. Predictably, this has outraged his erstwhile allies on the left.
Before the summer recess, HAA co-sponsor Bennett gave an impassioned speech on the Senate floor, warning that if Democrats put a full-fledged public option into HAA, he will vote against his own bill.
"The sticking point in this entire debate," Bennett said, "is the demand on the part of the Obama administration that the final product have within it a government plan as one of the options. And if that happens, I vote against my own bill. If that happens, I do everything I can to say no. Because I am convinced if that happens, we end up with a situation where there is only one option that survives."
The public option, Bennett says, is like putting an elephant into a room full of mice. "And as the elephant walks around the room, pretty soon there aren't any mice left. A government plan is the elephant in the room," he tells colleagues.
That contrasts sharply with the views of progressives, who have raised the establishment of a national, government-subsidized private option to the level of a national moral imperative.
Perhaps sensing that HHA would never pass political muster in the current climate, Wyden submitted a modified initiative last month called the Free Choice Proposal.
Like HAA, the Free Choice Proposal would open up the president's proposed insurance exchanges to all employees, not just those who are self-employed or between jobs.
So you could leave the plan currently offered by your employer. Your employer would be required to issue you a voucher defraying about 70 percent of your premiums from the new insurer you selected via the insurance exchange.
Even that proposal may be prove too threatening, however, given the traditional U.S. system of employer-based healthcare that Obama has strongly endorsed.
Wyden is hoping his Free Choice Proposal will be grafted on to whichever proposal eventually emerges from the legislative meat grinder of Congress.
And with every day that passes, the price of healthcare – to employers, to workers, to the government – grows more costly.
"We can't forget that we are working on life-and-death issues facing our constituents, our families, our friends, and our neighbors," Wyden and Bennett recently wrote in a Washington Post op-ed. "It's time to stop trying to figure out what pollsters say the country wants to hear from us, and focus on what the country needs from us. The American people can't afford for Congress to fail again."
Americans embroiled in the national healthcare debate might be surprised to learn there's an alternative plan that already offers inexpensive, portable insurance to everyone – one that improves, rather than aggravates, the federal deficit. Called the Healthy Americans Act...
Oct. 17 (Bloomberg) -- A Florida lawmaker is pressing to prevent banks from charging customers when they use debit cards at retailers, less than three weeks after Bank of America Corp. announced plans for a $5 monthly fee.
A bill offered today by state Representative Jeff Clemens, a Democrat from Lake Worth, would ban the practice in Florida.
“The banks sold us all on the idea of a cashless society, and now that we’ve bought into their promise of free, easy access to our own money, they want to charge us for it,” Clemens said today in a statement from Tallahassee, the capital. “Anyone with a sense of decency should be outraged.”
The bill responds to consumer anger after banks such as JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Wells Fargo & Co. began unveiling new charges for debit-card use, Clemens said. Bank of America, the biggest U.S. lender by assets, said last month that its levy would offset federal rules that cap “swipe fees,” which are the charges merchants pay each time a customer makes a purchase using a debit card.
The Florida bill would be “bad regulation on top of bad regulation,” said Trish Wexler, an Electronic Payments Coalition spokeswoman. The organization based in Washington represents banks and transaction networks.
“No business can be expected to lose money and continue to offer the product,” Wexler said in a telephone interview. Her group supports a repeal of the federal law capping swipe fees.
Anne Pace, a spokeswoman for Bank of America, didn’t comment on the Florida bill in an e-mail sent in response to an inquiry about the measure.
The prospect of higher costs for consumers as a result of the new banking rules led U.S. Representatives Jason Chaffetz, a Utah Republican, and Bill Owens, a New York Democrat, to file a bill in Congress last week to repeal the swipe-fee controls.
(Adds industry spokeswoman’s comment in fifth paragraph.) Oct. 17 (Bloomberg) -- A Florida lawmaker is pressing to prevent banks from charging customers when they use debit cards at retailers, less than three weeks after Bank of America Corp. announced plans for a $5...
Suez Energy North America -- the New World subsidiary of one of the largest energy companies in Europe -- announced Tuesday it plans to buy FirstLightPower Resources, the utility that owns the five hydroelectric power plants on the Housatonic River and the three big lakes in western Connecticut -- Candlewood, Lillinonah and Zoar -- that are part of that system.
Julie Vitek , a spokeswoman for Suez Energy North America, which is based in Houston, said Tuesday, "and it's one we're looking forward to growing there."
"We're excited about this," said James Ginnetti , vice president of external affairs for FirstLight. "It's a great fit for us."
, the New Jersey-based private equity firm that bought the Housatonic system from Northeast Utilities in 2006, along with power-generation plants in Massachusetts, for $1.34 billion.
However, the Paris-based newspaper Le Figaro reported Tuesday that Suez paid about $1.9 billion for First Light.
Suez is the North American affiliate of GDF Suez, a huge, multinational power company based in France. It is one of the biggest utilities in Europe.
The sale had been expected since May, when Energy Capital Partners announced it would consider offers for the Housatonic plants.
"We can't say it's a surprise," Larry Marsicano , executive director of the Candlewood Lake Authority , said Tuesday.
Ginnetti said Tuesday "it's too soon to tell" if the company leadership might change. But he said its mission will remain the same.
After about 80 years of stable ownership by Northeast Utilities and Connecticut Light & Power Co., the rapid turnover left area leaders at least a little apprehensive.
"I can't imagine having a big multinational company owning Candlewood Lake will be good for the lake," New Fairfield First Selectman John Hodge said.
Sherman First Selectman Andrea O'Connor said there were worries when Energy Capital Partners -- a private equity firm with no experience in managing power plants -- bought the Housatonic system in 2006. Now, she said, it is owned by a giant conglomerate based in Houston that is knowledgeable about the power industry.
"My concern is that we have pressing issues on Candlewood Lake," she said, pointing out the long-stalled shoreline management plan -- which will regulate development around the lake --may be slowed by FirstLight's sale.
"It's another delay and another delay and another delay," she said. "We're not dealing with the issues."
State politicians also weighed in the sale Tuesday. In a press statement, Gov. M. Jodi Rell , whose hometown of Brookfield borders Candlewood Lake and Lake Lillinonah, said her concern is that GDF Suez provides power to customers at affordable rates "and that the transaction, like all such transactions, should be open to public scrutiny."
Blumenthal acknowledged his power to stop or alter the sale is limited. But he said his office would use that power to the full extent "if we felt that transaction contravenes the public interest."
Michael McLachlan , the Republican candidate for the 24th District state Senate seat, called for the creation of a regional power authority to run the power plants and the lakes.
"Candlewood and Lillinonah are special assets," he said, pointing out that many states have created such quasi-public authorities to operate utilities.
"It will take a lot of homework," McLachlan said of the years of study and planning it would take to create the authority -- not to mention the cost of turning a private company into a publicly owned authority. "But the time is now."
Vitek, the spokesman for Suez Energy North America, said Tuesday the company -- which has assets in Canada, the U.S. and Mexico -- already has a portfolio of power generating plants that includes biomass, wind, hydroelectric and natural gas.
Charles Rothenberger , senior attorney for the Connecticut Fund for the Environment , said the sale might bode well for the future, showing that even multinational conglomerates see a future in clean energy.
"But if they continue to sell and trade things like pieces on a Monopoly board , we'll have to take steps to protect our assets," he said.