CNN 2012-03-27 | CNN.com |
At a clinic last week in Miami, a doctor tends to a patient who said her pre-existing condition made it impossible to find insurance.
Editor's note: Nancy Brown is CEO of the American Heart Association, Larry Hausner is CEO of the American Diabetes Association, and John R. Seffrin is CEO of the American Cancer Society and American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network.
(CNN) -- Health coverage is easy to get if you're healthy. The problem is when you're sick or have a history of illness.
For decades, people with life-threatening chronic diseases such as cancer, diabetes, heart disease or stroke faced numerous barriers to getting the care they needed. Insurers could deny coverage to anyone with a pre-existing condition, terminate coverage when the cost of a patient's care exceeded arbitrary dollar limits, or raise premiums to unaffordable levels in response to a diagnosis. As a result, patients had to skip or cut short their treatment because of costs, or go deeply into debt to pay for needed care.
The patient protections enacted into law in 2010 are changing that, enabling more Americans to afford lifesaving care. These protections provide patients with the best chance to beat their illness. When fully implemented in 2014, they will require insurers to cover people with pre-existing conditions, eliminate dollar limits on the coverage a patient can receive and ban the practice of inflating premiums for people with health concerns.
The law makes these protections possible by requiring that most Americans buy health insurance. By ensuring that coverage extends both to healthy people, who are less expensive to insure, and to those who are sick, who cost more, the law helps to keep costs down for those who need care the most.
Unfortunately, the "individual responsibility" requirement has been attacked as unconstitutional, posing a grave threat to the law's critical patient protections. Federal appeals courts are divided on the issue, and the U.S. Supreme Court hears arguments on the matter this week.
Our organizations, which represent tens of millions of people across the country with life-threatening chronic diseases, together submitted a friend-of-the-court brief asserting that the individual responsibility provision is essential to preserving the protections that patients desperately need and deserve.
We already know what a health care system without such a requirement looks like: Many healthy Americans opt not to buy health coverage until they are ill, and costs skyrocket as insurance pools fill with people in urgent need of treatment and care. People with pre-existing conditions are charged exorbitant rates for health coverage, putting critical care out of reach for many American families. As a result, many people with a chronic illness must resort to emergency room care, which lowers their chances of surviving their illness and drives up costs system-wide.
2. Adult Mystery: Sudden 'Allergy'
The Wall Street Journal Aug.16, 2011
Teri Augustyn developed a runny nose and itchy eyes when she went near grasses, trees and even the dog she'd had for years after she moved from Michigan to Washington when she was 38.
Pollen may irritate respiratory passages more as people age.
At age 25, Kiley Gwynn started having headaches and stomachaches and one day her regular soy chai latte gave her a 20-minute coughing fit. Her allergist traced the reaction to soy, which she'd eaten all of her life without problems.
Lauri Granoff was 53 when she opened a package of wet wipes and suddenly couldn't breathe. The fragrance set off an asthma-like reaction that made her throat close up and her chest tighten. Now, coming close to perfume, hairspray, hand lotion or other chemical fragrance will leave her gasping for breath. She enclosed an insert in her son's wedding invitations begging guests not to wear scented products of any kind.
Severe reactions like these to foods, drugs, pollen and other substances can develop, seemingly out of the blue, at any age.
The symptoms mimic allergy attacks, and the misery they cause can be just as severe.
But many times, they aren't true allergies, experts say. The reactions involve different biochemical pathways than those in allergies, and they often respond to different treatments.
3. Is fear of failure holding you back?
By Robert Kelsey, Special to CNN
CNN March 23, 2012
Fear of failure can stop you reaching your potential, says Robert Kelsey.
(CNN) -- Why was it that, while others in your class were happy to study law or go into finance, you wanted to be a popstar? Or maybe you were the rebel: an unruly and disruptive influence the teachers disliked. That said, you could have been the procrastinator -- somehow never getting started -- or the dreamy idler living in an invented parallel universe.
Their commonality? All are signs you are a High-FF: someone with a high fear of failure as I call them in "What's Stopping You?" my book on understanding, accepting and navigating the insecurities that drive career failure.
Fear of failure was first uncovered in the 1960s by psychologists such as John Atkinson. Working at Stanford University, Atkinson conducted a series of experiments on children -- setting them reward-based tasks in order to test their motivation.
He noticed they divided into two camps: those focused on winning the reward, who approached the task with what he called a "need for achievement," and those focused on their seemingly inevitable failure, who had what Atkinson termed a "fear of failure" based on their desire to avoid the public humiliation of failure.
