Health and Disability

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• Private, customized caring solutions allow families to develop their own plan for caring
• Easy to use tools to identify and track what needs to be done, when and by whom
• Find and share products and services to help aging parents stay at home
• Coming soon - An online community of caregivers and experts to share advice and practical strategies

One of the most publicized and popular change under the Affordable Care Act allows young people to stay under their parents' health-care plans until they turn 26. Thanks to a lesser-known provision in the same law, a handful of states are working hard to make sure foster kids know they are eligible for the same benefit.

Under the 2010 federal health law, individuals who were in a state's foster care system when they turned 18 qualify for Medicaid until the month of their 26th birthday -- but only if they still live in the state where they were in foster care. To avoid punishing people for pursuing out-of-state employment or education opportunities after 18, 11 states have taken the additional step of extending Medicaid to former foster care youth who lived in another state at the time they were in the child welfare system. Several advocacy organizations, such as such as the Center for Law and Social Policy and First Focus, say the federal foster care provision alone may be too narrow and recommend that states include former foster care youths from other states.

This lively, practical handbook can help you and the people you care about stay productive and independent in familiar surroundings.

Find out how to:

• Tactfully talk about the “A” word (aging)
• Collaborate and find essential resources
• Boost independence as abilities change
• Customize furnishings, layout and décor
• Cope with vision, hearing and other sensory changes
• Use the home to stay productive and physically fit

Aging in place doesn’t have to break your back or your budge

Not Dead Yet, the Center for Disability Rights, and 11 other NY based disability organizations, submitted public comments on the New York State Medicaid Delivery System Reform Incentive Payment Program (DSRIP) on May 28, 2014, alleging that one of the proposed projects would fund Medicaid providers to save money by steering people to choose death over living with disability. 

Giving provider networks financial rewards for being successful in this effort allows them to reduce hospitalizations and healthcare costs by encouraging individuals to “choose” death over treatment. The method by which the “Conversation Ready” Project proposes to influence people are set forth in The Conversation Project, a website listed on page 57 of the state toolkit for grant applicants.

The Conversation Project makes it clear that the fear of living with a disability is what drives the seemingly innocuous decision-making process designed to steer people away from receiving care.

Faces of Sepsis™ stories have been submitted by people who have been touched by sepsis. Some stories are of survival, of fighting back from this devastating illness. Other stories are written by people who have been left behind because someone they loved died of sepsis.

There is a list of names of submitted stories and below is a collage of  people whose stories are here. A few stories do not have photos, a choice by the submittor. You can browse through the pages or click on a photo below to learn about the different people affected by sepsis.

Hospitals are increasingly placing elderly patients on "observation status," which means that even if they spend several days in a hospital they're still considered an outpatient.

Medicare beneficiaries may not know what their patient status is, or what ramifications that status has on the services the program will cover, advocates say.

Medicare rules requiring seniors to receive three days of inpatient treatment prior to paying for follow-up care in a nursing home has left many on the hook for thousands in medical bills.

Lois Whitmore, 71, of Essex Junction, a Medicare beneficiary, said she learned about the problem from a friend whose husband uses a pacemaker.

The friend's husband went to the hospital for complications related to his heart condition, and Whitmore's friend told her, "I hope they don't put him in observation status, because then his rehab stay won't be covered."

Many employers had thought they could shift health costs to the government by sending their employees to a health insurance exchange with a tax-free contribution of cash to help pay premiums, but the Obama administration has squelched the idea in a new ruling. Such arrangements do not satisfy the health care law, the administration said, and employers may be subject to a tax penalty of $100 a day — or $36,500 a year — for each employee who goes into the individual marketplace.

The ruling this month, by the Internal Revenue Service, blocks any wholesale move by employers to dump employees into the exchanges.

Obamacare is the law that extends health insurance coverage to millions of Americans.

It is also the law that requires restaurants to post calorie labels, employers to provide adequate break times for breast feeding and starts funding programs meant to train people for adulthood (seriously).

Tucked inside the Affordable Care Act's 2,000 pages of legislation are hundreds of new programs that have little, if anything, to do expanding insurance coverage. Some are pet favorites of legislators, who tacked a tiny provision into a very large law. Others raise small amounts of revenue to help pay for the insurance expansion. And others are just... weird. Here are 21 programs that are, indeed, part of Obamacare.

A decade of Alzheimer's disease research dominated by artificially creating symptoms in genetically modified mice has failed to find a single cure that works in human patients, and could be delaying progress towards effective treatments, says a new paper published in Drug Discovery Today.

The paper by Dr Gill Langley, senior science adviser to Humane Society International, calls for a fundamental paradigm shift in Alzheimer's disease research - utilising state-of-the-art techniques based on human rather than non-human biology. Next-generation tools such as functioning human brain cells in a test tube, neuroimaging and genomics must form the basis of a new framework for research that analyses the disease 'pathways' leading to Alzheimer's, from the cell and tissue level to the whole body scenario.