Californians have recently been targeted by Aetna Health Insurance and a number of other insurance companies who were looking to dramatically increase the rates that individual policyholders pay on their plans.

However, Aetna announced on Friday that their supposed 19% rate increase would not go into effect after all, and would instead be thrown out the window due to a high number of computation errors in their papers submitted to the California Insurance Department.

Approximately 65,000 Californians would have been affected by the rate increase. Luckily for consumers, an independent contractor whom the state hired was able to fish out the mathematical flaws, and promptly reported the errors to state officials.

Aetna Health Insurance spokeswoman Anjanette Coplin said “this was a simple human error,” and that once they sniffed out the snafus, “we informed the California Department of Insurance.”

The policies Californians currently hold with Aetna Health Insurance will continue to be billed at their normal rates. Given recent events, any news of planned rate hikes for Californian insurance providers, including Aetna, will now be posted on the California Insurance Commissioner’s website.

Whooping cough, also known as pertussis, has wreaked enough havoc in California for the state to declare an epidemic last Wednesday, and has some doctors more concerned than ever about their expenses. Doctors in rural areas are particularly affected by the high cost of vaccines for the illness.

The cost of supplying a single whooping cough vaccination to a small child can often cost $450 for a doctor. This expense is what the doctor must cover after the amount that most insurance companies tend to offer for covering the cost of vaccinations.

Insurance companies typically treat vaccinations differently than other procedures at a doctor’s office because of the preventative nature of the medicine. From their standpoint, the probability of a patient actually catching whooping cough, or any disease for that matter, is just that – a probability, not a certainty. Insurers do not cover the full price of vaccines because they cannot be sure that the patient would have been affected by the disease had they not received the vaccination.

Ironically, uninsured children in California are far easier for a doctor to vaccinate for whooping cough because the full cost of these treatments is covered by the federal Vaccines for Children Program, which is sometimes referred to as Medi-Cal.

The rising costs that doctors have to pay for vaccines, as well as various insurance companies’ tendency to delay their reimbursements, are endangering the ability for small town doctors to provide vaccines to children at a manageable rate for parents. If the trend keeps up, Californians in rural areas could have to start looking to the city for their whooping cough vaccinations.

Cloodlebing and Great Kindness / Flickr

Whooping cough, a disease that is not well known in this day and age, is rearing its ugly head in California and has experts calling it an epidemic. Whooping cough was well known in the 1950’s and continued through the 1970’s as a major disease. Thanks to many modern medical advances and scientific breakthroughs the disease has hardly been heard of in recent years.

However, the increase in cases of the disease has placed a lot of attention on the bacteria levels around the world. Whooping cough is highly infectious and one need only be in proximity of someone that is coughing to contract the disease. This makes it very easy to spread and even harder to control.

There are vaccines for whooping cough but many families have turned against the idea of vaccines in recent years. The dramatic upswing in vaccine costs has sent many running in the other direction and kept young children from being protected from these dangerous illnesses.  Others have concerns over the safety of the vaccines after various studies have shown links to autism and other health risks.

The standard treatment for whooping cough is antibiotics that are administered at the earliest sign of the disease. They are not nearly as effective when administered at the later stages but can still stop the disease if taken properly.

The main focus for those affected is the protection of children. Babies and very young children are at risk of severe disabilities or even death from whooping cough as their immune system is not strong enough to fight off the bacteria.

Experts agree that vaccines are the answer to preventing the spread of diseases like whooping cough. Protecting children that have reached the vaccination age is an important step to maintaining their health as they mature. Once the spread of whooping cough has started it is incredibly hard to control and those affected will continue to spread the disease unless treated.

Christina Kennedy / Wiki Commons

The Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) has announced that they plan on suing McDonald’s for giving out toys with their Happy Meals.  According to the group, this practice goes against consumer protection laws in four states and Washington D.C.

Executive director of CSPI, Michael Jacobson, gave an interview to Yunji de Nies of ABC News, detailing the group’s views.

“Dangling a toy in front of a kid to try to get them into your restaurant is unfair and deceptive, because it’s targeted at kids who are what, four years old, six years old?,” said Jacobson.  “Who don’t even understand the concept of advertising.  It’s not just a meal.  It’s the technique you’re using to get kids to buy a meal.”

CSPI conducted what they call a study, by anonymously visiting 44 McDonald’s restaurants across the country.  During those visits, researchers ordered 75 Happy Meals without requesting a side dish or drink.  What they say as a result of the data collected is that 93% of the time, McDonald’s employees automatically gave french fries instead of asking parents or pointing out healthier choices.

Margo Wootan, director of nutrition policy for CSPI, says of McDonald’s practices, “we’ve asked them not to promote unhealthy meals with toys and to have the default side dishes and beverages be the healthy choices”.

She says that Disney’s choice to make the healthier choice the option given when the customer doesn’t specify has resulted in parents sticking to the healthier options two-thirds of the time.

McDonald’s issued a statement disagreeing with the CSPI, saying that the ad campaign in the US specifically focuses on the lower calorie Happy Meal choices.

“McDonald’s is committed to a responsible approach to our menu, and our Happy Meal offerings,” said William Whitman, spokesman for the fast food giant. “We have added more choice and variety than every before, a fact that has been widely reported and recognized.”

momomomo / Flickr

At the Harvard School of Public Health, researchers have found that replacing white rice with brown rice can lower the risk of developing Type 2 diabetes by up to 16 percent.

The researchers took results from 3 large health studies and tested over 190,000 patients. By comparing the people who consumed 5 or more portions of white rice a week to the risk of those who consumed rice less than once a month, they found that the patients who were eating white rice often had a higher chance of getting diabetes. In fact, they had 17 percent higher chance than the other group.

They then compared it with the data from those patients who consumed brown rice twice a week or more. Their research showed that this group had even less risk than those who rarely ate white rice. The chances of getting diabetes were then dropped by another 11 percent.

Brown rice is the whole grain and is served as nature made it. White rice is made by taking the bran and most of the germ away. Therefore brown rice has a lower GI index and the body takes longer to process the food. The rise in blood sugar and energy levels is much slower in brown rice compared to refined grains of white rice which is digested fast and makes the blood levels rocket sky high.

“The high glycemic index of white rice consumption is likely to be the consequences of disrupting the physical and botanical structure of rice grains during the refining process – in which almost all the bran and some of the germ are removed,” says Dr. Qi Sun, the head of the study.

“The other consequence of the refining process includes loss of fiber, vitamins, magnesium and other minerals, many of which may be protective factors for diabetic risk.”