More than three years ago, Congress passed the Affordable Care Act and President Obama signed it into law. Last year, the Supreme Court upheld it. Millions of Americans have already benefited from its provisions, and millions more are looking forward to benefits that will soon go into effect. And in November, the American people re-elected the president as an affirmation of the law’s promise that no person should go broke if they get sick.

Yet today, for nearly the 40th time since it’s been the law of the land, House Republicans staged yet another repeal vote in their latest attempt to turn back the clock on progress and deny Americans health insurance coverage they can count on.

For the 37th time, Congress is voting to repeal the health care law, the Affordable Care Act.
Learn what’s at stake for Americans if the law were repealed.

Here’s what Americans would lose if repeal actually happened:

• Repeal Decreases Access to Quality Care. The 6.6 million young people from South Carolina to Ohio to Utah who have gained coverage under their parents’ health plans up to age 26 would lose that option. Insurance companies in many states could return to the days of refusing coverage to 17 million children living with a pre-existing condition like diabetes or asthma. For the 129 million Americans across the country living with a pre-existing condition, repeal would take away the security of knowing that, beginning next year, their health coverage can’t be revoked or denied. Repeal would also eliminate the free, critical preventive vaccines, flu shots, contraception, mammograms, and other screenings that have already helped 71 million Americans stay healthy and active.

• Repeal Hurts Seniors and Undermines Medicare. For America’s seniors, from Florida to Oklahoma to Nevada, repeal would increase medical costs by hundreds of dollars a month at a time when they could least afford it. It would eliminate the discounts that have brought 6.1 million of them an average savings of $706 on their prescription drugs, enough to cover the cost of several months of groceries. Nearly 50 million Medicare beneficiaries from Virginia to Kentucky to Idaho would lose access to free, life-saving preventive care, including cancer screenings and annual wellness visits. And repeal would undo ambitious delivery reforms that have helped reduce projected Medicare spending by hundreds of millions of dollars over the next ten years.

• Repeal Raises Taxes on the Middle Class and Small Businesses, and Increases Our Deficit. Starting next year, 18 million middle-class families across the country the country would be denied access to a tax credit averaging $4,000 each that would make it easier to purchase health insurance. Small businesses from Pennsylvania to Louisiana would also lose access to tax credits that are already helping to provide coverage for 2 million American workers. And repeal would increase the deficit by $100 billion over the next ten years.

• Repeal Returns Unchecked Power to Insurance Companies. The law has slowed the growth of premium increases by doing away with the worst insurance company abuses. Nearly 13 million individuals and families have saved an average of $150 due to a new rule requiring more premium dollars to be spent on delivering actual care instead of on overhead costs and CEO salaries. Insurance companies must also now publicly justify all premium increases of 10 percent or more. Those two provisions alone have already produced more than $2 billion in rebates for millions of Americans who are privately insured. Repealing the law would return the power of unchecked premium increases back to insurance companies in states that haven’t set up their own protections.

• Repeals Denies Women Control Over Their Own Health Care. For American women in every corner of the country, repeal would bring us back to the days when simply being a woman was a pre-existing condition. Insurers would once again be able to charge women far more than men pay for the same health benefits.

By refighting old battles and reopening old wounds, repeal efforts would take away the peace of mind that affordable health insurance provides for the millions of Americans who can’t afford to go back to the way things were.

For the majority of Americans who already have insurance, the law makes it stronger. And for 25 million Americans who lack the security of health coverage, expanded Medicaid in many states and new Health Insurance Marketplaces opening for enrollment in every state this fall will finally give them access to coverage that fits their budget and meets their health needs.

Because of the law, we’re increasing access to affordable care, slowing premium increases, and bringing down health spending growth to its slowest rate in half a century. We’re making health insurance work for small businesses, and providing the strongest consumer protections in history.

We know our health care system’s problems weren’t created overnight, and they won’t be solved overnight. But Americans are far better off today than they would be without the health care law. And while we work to implement and strengthen the law, it’s clear we’re moving our health care system in the right direction. We simply can’t afford to turn back now.

About the Author

Kathleen Sebelius was sworn in as the 21st Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) on April 28, 2009. As Secretary, she leads the principal agency charged with keeping Americans healthy, ensuring they get the health care they need, and providing children, families, and seniors with the essential human services they depend on. She also oversees one of the largest civilian departments in the federal government, with nearly 80,000 employees.

Since taking office, Secretary Sebelius has been a leader on some of the Obama administration’s top priorities. As the country’s highest-ranking health official, she played a key role in the passage of the historic Affordable Care Act and is now leading its implementation. She also coordinated the response to the 2009 H1N1 flu virus. And under her leadership, HHS has provided a wide range of services from health care to child care to energy assistance to help families weather the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

Follow Sec. Kathleen Sebelius on Twitter: www.twitter.com/Sebelius or @sebelius

Create a page and edit text – Start writing your health-related pages straightaway. Format as you like, include images and link to content on the web.

Click body to add a marker – Browse the human anatomy, find relevant body parts and click to mark the locations you want to highlight.

Drag marker to text – Drag and drop the marker into your text to link your note with the body.

Keep it private or share it – Once your page is written, you can keep it private, share it with a secret link via email, or share it with everyone as a public page.

Patients can use this free tool to communicate with their doctor, and the doc can use it to better communicate with patients. That’s important for several reasons.

Patients often complain that doctors don’t seem to actually listen to what they’re telling them, instead staring at a computer screen and tapping on a keyboard. Likewise, nearly 80% of patients forget what the doctor tells them as soon as they leave the office or are discharged from the hospital, and 50% of what they do remember is incorrect, according to this report in the Wall Street Journal.

Healthcorpus shows promise as a cure for miscommunication. Click here to see the sample I created using this text.

Few things in life are guaranteed, yet getting older seems to come with some rather predictable frustrations. I’ve assembled the top five ways that getting older can bring us down — and how to get over all that and live life to the fullest. Remember that no matter how drab things get: getting older always beats the alternative.

1.    Body Pains

“Sometimes I call my grandson for a joint to help the joint pain”

As we get older we are constantly worried about: “what will go next?” These days it seems like hands go first. Typing becomes slower and more painful. Growing up I was told a stiff handshake was a sign of a strong, assertive individual. Now I meet people and just hope they go for the hug and spare my fragile digits.

Then comes (or goes) the hips — if I had a nickel for every person over 50 who complained about their hips I’d have at least enough to pay for a hip replacement.

And finally, the most standard of body pains: the back. Oh the hours of repositioning and adjusting in hope that you may find that sweet spot of temporary relief. Like the drug addict chasing the feeling of that first high, it is unlikely you’ll ever catch a day free of back pain again.

But lets not get ourselves all depressed over these aches and pains. These vexes mark a life well-lived and a body which has many more miles to go. You’ve earned yourself a massage this weekend, and the few extra bucks it costs to get your groceries delivered using freshdirect.com.

2.    Body Looks

“Umm… I don’t think toenails are supposed to look like that”

Old cars show their age. Old houses show their age. Old people show their age. I don’t need to explain this to anybody: as we get older we start collecting new features all over our bodies. New lines, new dots, new bumps, and new colors.

But look, we’re NOT rotting like the rotten apple shown above. We’re just showing some wear and tear. Every aging person in the history of the world has been through the exact same process. And frankly, some signs of aging can be quite endearing, while many others can be beaten back in their tracks.

Lets take nail fungus for example. If you don’t have it, I’d be willing to bet someone you know does. Symptoms include big yellow toenails that look overgrown and disgusting. This incredibly annoying condition actually affects almost 15% of the adult population and is 100% curable (great guide to removing toenail fungus).

So the point is, we need to stop worrying so much about the ways our bodies are changing. You’re not rotting; you’re just aging like every single human has before you. Embrace what you can’t control, and do what you can when you can.

3.    Playing “Catch-Up”

“Wait, so now my emails are on a phone and my whitepages are on a face book?”

Technology moves quickly these days. Quicker than ever before. Chatting with my 6 year old niece feels like taking a college-level technology course, and I missed half a semester of material. Now, I’m sure the older cavemen of their day had to deal with the frustrations of misusing portable fire or whatnot – but we have it worse. Last I checked, a camera phone was an awesome new invention. Now, if I’m not “instagraming” with the rear camera on my iPhone 5, I’m “doing it wrong.”

The best advice I have for those who feel they’re constantly playing “catch-up” is to “give-up”. Well, not give-up completely, just don’t try to GET everything. Young and old, we are all working to navigate through this constantly changing landscape of innovations. Most of the great new tools today will be long forgotten next year. Don’t try so hard, and the things that really matter will become obvious in time.

As editor, I have to take one exception to this and encourage seniors to get online and become a bit tech-savvy. Banking is harder to do by check and increasingly demands that you use ATMs and online banking. Even social security checks and IRS refunds are moving online. Your kids and younger friends are online too, so to stay in touch you need be too. You don’t need every gadget, but you may need to invest time in catching up. Maybe your kids can help.

4.     Dumb ‘aint Dementia

“My keys, I know I just had my keys”

We forget some things, and we lose other things. It starts to get worse the older we get. It requires us to be more careful about where we place things. Throwing a bunch of junk into a purse or a drawer and keeping track of it is a young man’s game. Stop doing that kind of stuff. Forgetfulness is not dementia. Pick up the slack of your aging mind by get yourself a bit more organized. You’ll thank yourself later, if you remember to.

I heard President Gerald Ford speak one time and remember his comment about getting older and forgetting things. It went something like, “My senior moments are due to a limited brain size that’s already stuffed with so much knowledge that there’s hardly room for more.”

5.     Conclusions

“Goodbye”

Your career may be ending or over. Relationships may be nearing their final years, weeks, or days. We all signed up for this. We all know good things come to an end. To provide you with advice on how to accept these sometimes-tragic endings is far above my pay grade. But let me say this: life goes on. Things change and end. People end. But our world will keep on spinning, and new lives will keep on starting. All around us is the magic of human existence – starting, stopping, pausing, resuming. It’s a massive world and we each play an invaluable role in it. Our roles made fade away but the fact that we lived them is the important part. Savor your memories, keep making new ones, and do everything you can to age well. After all, getting older sure beats the alternative. That much we know for sure.

Speaking of memories, consider your legacy in this digital world and check out Recalling & Recording Your Life’s Story for those you leave behind.

About the Author

Sandy Getzky is an associate editor at ProveMyMeds, a medication review site for common ailments that plague people everyday.

Hospital Prices No Longer Secret As New Data Reveals Bewildering System, Staggering Cost Differences

By Jeffrey Young and Chris Kirkham

When a patient arrives at Bayonne Hospital Center in New Jersey requiring treatment for the respiratory ailment known as COPD, or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, she faces an official price tag of $99,690.

Less than 30 miles away in the Bronx, N.Y., the Lincoln Medical and Mental Health Center charges only $7,044 for the same treatment, according to a massive federal database of national health care costs made public on Wednesday.

I encourage you to read the rest of the article and join in the conversation here at HuffPost. What follows is one more snippet from the article any my personal perspective.

Overhaul of Taxes & Fees

Upper-Income Households — Starting Jan. 1, individuals making more than $200,000 per year, and couples making more than $250,000, will face a 0.9 percent Medicare tax increase on wages above those threshold amounts. They’ll also face an additional 3.8 percent tax on investment income. Together these are the biggest tax increase in the health care law.

Employer Penalties — Starting in 2014, companies with 50 or more employees that do not offer coverage will face penalties if at least one of their employees receives government-subsidized coverage. The penalty is $2,000 per employee, but a company’s first 30 workers don’t count toward the total.

Health Care Industries – Insurers, drug companies and medical device manufacturers face new fees and taxes. Companies that make medical equipment sold chiefly through doctors and hospitals, such as pacemakers, artificial hips and coronary stents, will pay a 2.3 percent excise tax on their sales, expected to total $1.7 billion in its first year, 2013. They’re trying to get it repealed.

Insurance Industry — The insurance industry faces an annual fee that starts at $8 billion in its first year, 2014.

Pharmaceutical Companies — Pharmaceutical companies that make or import brand-name drugs are already paying fees; they totaled $2.5 billion in 2011, the first year.

People Who Don’t Get Health Insurance — Nearly 6 million people who don’t get health insurance will face tax penalties starting in 2014. The fines are estimated to raise $6.9 billion in 2016. Average penalty in that year: about $1,200.

Indoor Tanning Devotees — The 10 percent sales tax on indoor tanning sessions took effect in 2010. It’s expected to raise $1.5 billion over 10 years. The 28 million people who visit tanning booths and beds each year – mostly women under 30, according to the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology – are already paying. Tanning salons were singled out because of strong medical evidence that exposure to ultraviolet lights increases the risk of skin cancer.

Editor’s Perspective

This article reinforces the excellent work of Steven Brill, who wrote a 38-page special report for TIME Magazine. It also generated thousands of reader responses, so I recommend going to HuffPost  to browse through them and to join in the discussion. Below are a few of the responses I posted.

COMMENT: This new government report is in line with Steve Brill’s 38-page TIME Magazine special report, “Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills are Killing Us.” Brill described the lack of competition in healthcare and also puts much of the blame on the charge-master. He even says that non-profit hospitals often have the highest prices. For a much shorter summary and a video intro, see www.mhealthtalk.com/2013/02/why-high-medical-bills-are-killing-us/.

COMMENT: Docs & nurses generally have the patient’s best interests in mind, but others in the healthcare system (hospitals, insurers, pharma, testing companies & equipment providers) have perverse incentives to keep patients as paying Customers, treating symptoms and profiting from each visit, test, procedure & prescription. They don’t want you to die but don’t seem to want you better either, because they’re only paid when you’re sick. It’s a Sick-Care system, not a healthcare system.

COMMENT: We currently spend over $2.8 trillion/year on healthcare and could save over $1 trillion with universal healthcare, more emphasis on wellness, addressing the drug patents issue, and helping seniors age-in-place rather than in nursing homes. BUT… That’s an awful lot of money that someone in our sick-car system will no longer get, and they’ll fight like hell to keep what they think they’re entitled to. The problem then comes down to the corrupting influence of money in politics and the fact that the medical industrial complex spends three times more on lobbying than the military industrial complex, which only makes about $1.7 trillion/year.

Are you busy right now? Are you already behind on what you wanted to accomplish today? Or this week? Or this year? Are you hoping this will be a short post so you can get back to the million things on your to-do list that are breathing down your neck? Okay, I’ll get on with it: Our culture is obsessed with time. This is our real deficit crisis, and one that, unlike the more commonly discussed deficit, is actually getting worse.

In order to manage time — or what we delude ourselves into thinking of as managing time — we rigidly schedule ourselves, rushing from meeting to meeting, event to event, always just a little late and trying to save a bit of time here, a little bit there. We download apps for “productivity” and eagerly click on links promising time-saving life-hacks. We fear that if we don’t try to cram as much as possible into our day, we might be missing out on something fun, or important, or special.

We’re all suffering from an epidemic of what James Gleick, in his book Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything, calls “hurry sickness.” As any reader of my Twitter feed likely knows, I’m among the afflicted. “Our computers, our movies, our sex lives, our prayers — they all run faster now than ever before,” Gleick said in an interview in 2000. “And the more we fill our lives with time-saving devices and time-saving strategies, the more rushed we feel.”

In fact, researchers have given this feeling a name: “time famine.” And feeling like you’re experiencing a time famine has very real consequences, including increased stress and diminished satisfaction with your life. On the flip side, one can enjoy “time affluence,” the feeling of having enough time, or even a surplus of time. As Keith O’Brien wrote in the Boston Globe, “studies have shown that feeling ‘time affluent’ can be powerfully uplifting, more so than material wealth, improving not only personal happiness, but even physical health and civic involvement.”

Some people are naturally time affluent. My mother, for instance. She wasn’t just time affluent, she was time-filthy-rich. For her, the world was truly timeless. She moved through her days like a child does, living in the present, stopping, literally, to smell the roses — a trip through the farmers market might be an all-day affair — with little thought of All The Things That Must Be Done. My sister and I once tried to give her a watch — she gave it away almost instantly. And I still often think of the advice she’d give my sister and me when we were faced with a hard decision: “Darling, let it marinate.” In other words, give yourself the luxury of time.

As it turns out, my mother’s sense of time is backed by science. As Paul Davies wrote in Scientific American, though most of us feel time is something that flows, that it is always coming at us and then rushing behind us, that’s not actually what’s going on. “Physicists prefer to think of time as laid out in its entirety — a timescape, analogous to a landscape — with all past and future events located there together,” Davies wrote. “It is a notion sometimes referred to as block time.”

Sadly, time affluence turns out not to be an inherited trait. While my mother agreed with the physicists, I’ve always been more in tune with Dr. Seuss:

How did it get so late so soon?

December is here before it’s June.

My goodness how the time has flewn.

How did it get so late so soon?”

Happily, however, even if you’re not born time affluent, there are things you can do to turn your time famine into a feast. Studies have shown that, as Keith O’Brien puts it, “small acts, simple emotions such as awe, and even counterintuitive measures like spending time doing tasks for someone else — essentially giving time away,” can make us feel more time affluent. “It’s not just that people felt less impatient,” said Jennifer Aaker, a Stanford business professor and co-author of one of the studies, “but… they reported higher levels of subjective well being, that they actually felt better in their lives.”

Interestingly, according to a 2011 Gallup poll, the more money you have, the more likely you are to suffer from time famine. “The more cash-rich working Americans are,” the poll concluded, “the more time-poor they feel.”

Not surprisingly, when it comes to winning the war on time famine, we are our own worst enemy. To win the war, first we have to declare it — we have to want to change. According to a 2008 PEW report, when asked what was important to them, 68 percent of Americans replied: having free time — which ranked even higher than children, which came in at 62 percent, and career, at 59 percent. Yet the way we live doesn’t reflect those priorities. As long as success is defined by who works the longest hours, who goes the longest without a vacation, who sleeps the least — in essence, who is suffering from the biggest time famine — we’re never going to be able to enjoy the proven benefits of time affluence.

We just need to redefine success. But right now we’re passing down our time famine habits to the next generation. Though getting enough sleep doesn’t guarantee a feeling of time affluence, not getting enough sleep definitely puts you on the road to time famine. Writing in the New York Timeslast week, Vatsal Thakkar, a psychiatry professor at the NYU School of Medicine, suggested that many cases of ADHD in children are, in fact, sleep disorders. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an astounding 11 percent of school-aged children have received a diagnosis of ADHD. Feeling lethargic from not getting enough sleep is more of an adult symptom. Sleep-deprived children, writes Thakkar, “become hyperactive and unfocused.” In one study he cites, of the 34 children diagnosed with ADHD, a sleep disorder was found in every single one.

Sleep, he notes, is especially crucial for children, who need the deep, slow-wave type called “delta sleep.” But compared to a hundred years ago, today’s children get a full hour less. “And for all ages,” writes Thakkar, “contemporary daytime activities — marked by nonstop 14-hour schedules and inescapable melatonin-inhibiting iDevices — often impair sleep.” In other words, solving the sleep crisis is not as simple as choosing an early bedtime — it’s about changing how we overschedule our children’s days so that they can begin their nights sooner. We helicopter over our children, ensuring their physical well-being in unprecedented ways — from car seats, to BPA-free plastic, to organic food. But we don’t apply the same level of care to our children’s time diets as we try to do to their food diets — so that we make sure they grow up to be time affluent. That’s something we should be passing on to them, the benefits of which will likely outweigh all those trips to soccer and violin practice. As Quentin Compson’s father says to him while giving him a watch in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, “I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it.”

So what can you do to fight back against “hurry sickness” and the American worship of speed and rushing and the resulting time famine? You can walk — don’t run — and join the slow movement. It began in Italy in the mid-’80s when a Slow Food group was formed to protest the opening of a McDonald’s in Rome.

Since then, the movement, with almost inappropriate speed, has widened to include Slow Travel, Slow Living, Slow Cities, and, now, Slow Thinking. In 2009, the book In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed, by Carl Honore, was my first pick for the HuffPost Book Club. “Slow Thinking is intuitive, woolly and creative,” wrote Honore on HuffPost in 2009. “It is what we do when the pressure is off, and there is time to let ideas simmer on the back burner. It yields rich, nuanced insights and sometimes surprising breakthroughs.” And, he notes, it also has particular relevance to the financial crisis and what will come afterward. “Returning to business as usual is not the answer to this crisis,” he wrote. “The future will belong to those who can innovate their way back into shape — and innovation comes from knowing when to slow down.”

In Gleick’s Faster, he writes about how timekeeping devices “served as agents of social organization,” a process that intensified in the industrial revolution, which required mass coordination in factories. “No wonder,” he writes, “some historians describe the spread of timekeeping in terms of dehumanization and enslavement.” In fact, the word deadline is thought to have its American origin in Civil War prison camps. Instead of a physical perimeter, there would often be an imaginary line — the dead line — that the prisoners were not to cross. Much like our own sense of time: an imaginary construct that we use to enslave ourselves.

So how about redefining success to include a third metric, beyond money and power — time affluence, which will lead, without doubt, to greater well-being and deeper wisdom. Not a bad thing to put on top of our to-do lists.

About the Author

Arianna Huffington is the chair, president, and editor-in-chief of the Huffington Post Media Group, a nationally syndicated columnist, and author of thirteen books.

Editor’s Perspective

If Arianna’s interesting perspective seems a bit out of touch with those who work paycheck-to-paycheck and struggle to just keep their heads above water, consider this.

With wages stagnant or declining relative to costs over 30 years or so, the middle class is working harder and over longer hours, often with two jobs or with both parents working and rushing to care for their kids and elderly parents too. All of this is to maintain a standard of living that sometimes seems to be leaving us behind, partially because advertisers impart a false sense of need. And with our melatonin-inhibiting i-devices, those we bought to fulfill that need, we’re always connected with little time to ourselves.

Then with more stress and less time, we want to squeeze more out of the hours we do have, including our Sleep time, investing in ways to get better sleep, as opposed to finding ways to relax and get more sleep. That dangerous trend is affecting the health and weight of our nation. I see part of the problem as our widening income & wealth gaps and the oppression of middle class workers. Here are some related articles about poverty, stress, sleep, and health:

• Poverty in America – featuring The Line, an important documentary that covers the stories of people across the country living at or below the poverty line
• Working Poor Families Struggle to Pay Bills – featuring statistics and a video of Congresswoman Nancy Peloci about the direct relationship between poverty, obesity, and the cost of healthcare
• Sleep Apnea and Poverty – a byline article by doctors Susan Redline and Michelle Williams about how socioeconomics impacts proper diagnosis and treatment
• A Place at the Table – a new documentary about the relationship between Poverty, Hunger & Health
• Wealth Inequality, Healthcare and the Economy — infographic video illustrates how bad the inequity has become
• Nine States Deny The Poor Health Care – Republican governors in nine states have indicated that they will turn down federal money and continue to run their Medicaid programs as they do now, setting their own standards for eligibility, and denying care for the poor.

From Richard: “The Wheelchair Gym was design for the growing wheelchair or power-chair population. It’s an undeserved group, and to that end I developed this simple, user-friendly piece of equipment called The Wheelchair Gym.”

Learn more at http://www.lotechusa.com/

The Bionic Eye will improve over time with increased resolution. (simulation)

Dr. Mark Humayun was going to be a doctor all along, but when a family member lost her eyesight, he soon began his journey as an innovator. “When I was going through medical school, my grandmother went blind and there was really no cure for her,” the Duke University graduate says. “And it made me rethink my career and focus more on how to restore sight to those who are going blind.”

Now a professor at the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California, Humayun has invented the Argus Ocular Implant, which allows blind patients to see again. According a press release on the school’s website, the intraocular retinal prosthesis “restores some visual capabilities for patients whose blindness is caused by Retinitis Pigmentosa (RP). RP is an inherited retinal degenerative disease that affects about 100,000 people nationwide.”

Read the rest of the story and comment at Huffington Post.

Future implications

As a futurist, I like to think about the impact of trends I see today. Just think of how digital imaging has evolved in our own lifetimes, from when Kodak’s first solid-state sensors converted light into a cluster of picture elements (pixels, or dots) in 1970. A sensor array on a computer chip already includes thousands of pixels (640×480 = 307,200 of them) or millions (3872×2592 = 10,036,224). And since semiconductor technology evolves exponentially, according to Moore’s Law, picture resolution and image sensing will continue to improve beyond what human eyes can see, or what we can imagine today.

Digital imaging in night goggles already amplifies light so we can see in the dark. Take that further and imagine being able to sense energy that’s beyond the wavelength of visible light, including X-rays, ultraviolet, and infrared.

How will we perceive and use new digital imaging? Will we wear goggles, Google Glasses, or contact lenses where the images are converted to what the retina in our eyes can see? Or will we tie into the optic nerve or somehow otherwise interface with the brain. If we consider how far imaging has come in 40 years and how the tech innovation evolves exponentially, what’s possible in the next 40 years seems beyond our imagination. In many ways it may be driven less by what’s technically possible, and more by what society wants and needs. Dr. Humayun’s work is addressing one of those needs.

ROANOKE, Va. — William McCormick remembers from his working-class upbringing in Covington, Va., that neighbors took care of neighbors.

“Both my parents worked in the mill,” he said. “For people in the neighborhood who were hungry we’d make up two or three bags of groceries, put $5 or $10 in it, set it on the porch, knock on the door and leave. We wouldn’t tell ‘em who did it.”

Now McCormick is 70 years old and living alone in a one-bedroom apartment in a six-story building. Only about 40 of the building’s 144 units are occupied. The parking lots are barren and the hallways are dingy with torn carpets. McCormick considers the building “spooky.”

Some Disturbing Stats:

• There are already 40M seniors 65+ today, with 10,000 more reaching age 65 every day.
• 40% of them are low-income (below 150% of poverty level) and will need public assistance.
• The poverty threshold for a family of four is $22,113, and the 2010 average income of the bottom 90% was $26.364.
• People 90+ had a median income of just $14,760 in 2010, about half of it from Social Security. 37.3% of them lived alone and depend on services like Meels on Wheels.

He’s lived here since 2005, and for most of that time he has benefited from food charity every week day — not left at his door anonymously, but brought to him by Meals On Wheels volunteers. Since 1972 the Administration on Aging has provided federal funding for senior nutrition, and today volunteers from some 5,000 Meals On Wheels affiliates across the country distribute a million meals a day.

But federal funding for senior nutrition has been reduced by budget cuts known as sequestration, meaning less food for old people here and elsewhere. The White House has said the cuts would mean 4 million fewer meals for seniors this year, while the Meals On Wheels Association of America put the loss at 19 million meals. In general, the federal government subsidizes only a portion of the cost of every meal, so whether individual seniors will stop receiving food really depends on the circumstances of whatever local agency serves them.

Michele Daley, director of nutrition services at the Local Office on Aging, which serves Roanoke, Alleghany, Botetourt and Craig counties in Virginia, said the agency expects to receive $95,000 less in federal funds this year (it has an operating budget of $1 million). They’re gradually reducing the number of people receiving daily meals from 650 to 600 as a result of the budget cuts. Already, the office has planned to stop handing out most emergency meals — bags of shelf-stable items like canned beans distributed in advance of snowstorms and holidays. And they’ve instituted a waiting list.

“We’ve never had a waiting list,” Daley said. “This is the first time ever and it’s a direct result of sequestration.”

After he learned about the cuts on the news, McCormick thought long and hard about whether he really needed the meals. He’s got no car, and can’t walk long distances, but sometimes he can get a ride to the grocery store and the food pantry, and he’s got a small stockpile of canned goods sitting on a wooden desk in his living room.

“I’ve run into people who’ve been a whole lot worse off than I was,” he said.

Every weekday, all across America, volunteers — the wheels who move the meals — pull into church parking lots and other venues where they pick up food to deliver to hungry seniors.

Bob Field, 82, has been volunteering for the program in Roanoke for almost 20 years, ever since he retired from his job with the railroad. He didn’t want to be idle. “I like to be with people that need help, need a little friendship, need food,” he said. “I like what Meals On Wheels does.”

On Wednesday morning, he rolled up to St. Mark’s Lutheran Church in the Old Southwest neighborhood and loaded two coolers into the rear of his white Subaru Outback. One cooler held the hot food — roasted chicken with gravy, peas, and carrots inside a tin — and the other had pistachio pudding, cornbread, and frozen milk. Freezing the milk helps keep the coolers cold and saves money on ice packs.

Field is struck by the poverty of some of the clients he sees — the shirtless old man in swimming trunks on the couch, the World War II-era vet, a guy with no teeth who’d lived 56 years in a 110-year-old house, a man sitting on his porch in a wheelchair wearing sunglasses with only one lens.

“I don’t know what they do,” Field said. They’re not healthy enough to jaunt around town. As best he can tell, some of them sit in their apartments all day watching TV. But he does know them all because every time he volunteers, he follows the same route in Old Southwest, the neighborhood where he grew up.

Many seniors would prefer to live independently in an apartment than dwindle away in a nursing home, and that’s partly the point of bringing them food at home. It’s also fiscally prudent: A Brown University study found the more states spend on meals, which are not expensive, the less they spend housing seniors in nursing homes, which costs much more.

Field knocks, the clients open their doors cheerfully and he asks them where to set the food — usually on a coffee table by a couch. At two separate apartments on Wednesday, Field set the items down next to a Bible.

Field did not drive to William McCormick’s lonely apartment tower, and neither did any of Roanoke’s other Meals On Wheels volunteers, at least not to visit McCormick. Last month, after taking stock of his own access to food and considering people less fortunate, he decided to drop out of the program.

“I thought about it for two or three days and I said, ‘Right now my health’s pretty good,’ and so I just gave it up,” he said. “I just couldn’t bear the thought of me having something to eat and maybe somebody else needing it and they couldn’t apply for it so I just voluntarily gave it up.”

Watch:

McCormick worked in fast food and retail after getting out of the military in 1965. He earned an associate’s degree in business management in the 1980s and subsequently oversaw operations for a series of fast food restaurants, a hotel and a retail store. He was working at a Walmart when health problems caught up with him. A series of strokes and a mild heart attack left him disabled. He’s got asthma, arthritis and diabetes and relies on an electric wheelchair to get around because he can’t walk long distances. He said he’s got about $100 a month left over from Social Security and his veterans pension after paying bills.

“I love concerts and music and plays and things like that but buses don’t run after 8 o’clock and I can’t afford $40 cab fare for going back and forth,” he said. “For me, it’s hard not to get out and be with people. When you’re older, most people tend to ignore you if you’re not immediate family and they don’t have to put up with you.”

He said he misses his hot meals and also the “super nice” volunteers who brought them. Whoever gets to eat thanks to McCormick’s sacrifice won’t know it, just like the people who got bags of groceries from his mom and dad. He recalled how his parents kept their charity secret.

“We would usually do it either early in the morning or we’d watch for the car to go out,” he said. “They knew the neighbors did it, but they didn’t know which neighbors did it.”

More at Huffington Post

Please visit the original article to learn about other sequestration cuts and watch Nancy Pelosi scold Congress for the Meals on Wheels cuts.

About the Author

Arthur Delaney writes for HuffPost, covering unemployment and other economic issues. He has written for the Washington City Paper, The Hill newspaper, Slate Magazine, and ABCNews.com. In 2008 he won the Street Sense David A. Pike Excellence in Journalism award for a City Paper story about a man living on the median strip of a freeway in Washington. He and HuffPost D.C. bureau chief Ryan Grim won a Sidney Award from the Hillman Foundation for their 2010 story ”The Poorhouse: Aunt Winnie, Glenn Beck, and the Politics of the New Deal.” In 2011, HuffPost published a collection of Delaney’s stories as an ebook titled A People’s History of the Great Recession.

Le Web Paris (see video) explores a future of technology that connects everyday devices all the time, often described as The Internet of Things.

This story and video from Reuters and the Huffington Post form the basis of my own observations and developer recommendations as a 30-year IBM technologist, futurist and Digital Home consultant. Included at the end are four interesting infographics from Cisco, Intel, Casaleggio Associati, and Beecham Research.

By 2020, You’ll Own 50 Internet-Connected Devices

TORONTO (Reuters) – Tired of checking the washing machine to see if a cycle has completed, or worrying that the lights were left on at home? Apps are increasingly helping people monitor and control objects remotely on their mobile devices.

From Internet-connected washing machines and smart refrigerators to bathroom scales, gadgets that connect to the Internet are on the rise in homes, and apps are the means to monitor and control them.

By 2022, the average household with two teenage children will own roughly 50 Internet-connected devices, up from approximately 10 today, according to estimates by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. This trend has been dubbed the “Internet of Things”.

“(Apps) are the people end of the Internet of things,” said Stephen Prentice, vice president and fellow at research advisory firm Gartner.

“On one hand you’ve got all these devices giving out information, and on the other you have people accessing them increasingly through their tablets or mobile phones.”

Home control is a popular use of the technology. A washer and dryer produced by Samsung, for instance, can be remotely controlled with an Android app to start and stop the machine, and control factors like temperature. Users can even get notifications when a load is finished.

Overhead lights called Philips Hue can be controlled with the accompanying iPhone or Android app to switch them on and off remotely, set timers, and change mood lighting.

Temperature in the home can be controlled remotely with Nest Mobile for iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad and Android, while air quality can be measured with Netatmo, a personal weather station and air quality monitor. With the iPhone or Android app, users can view information on indoor air quality, such as the level of carbon dioxide and humidity in the room, and the app suggests ideal times to ventilate.

There’s even an app and gadget for plant owners. Koubachi, a plant sensor placed in the soil of a potted plant, connects to an iPhone app to send notifications when it needs watering, misting, sun or shade.

“The diversity of these devices is huge,” said Prentice.

“The vast majority of the future devices of this type don’t exist today — they’re new things. If you can measure it, then someone is going to have a device to do that and someone will find a use for that data,” he said.

Apps and gadgets are also playing a role in monitoring and tracking health.

For weight tracking, the Withings Health Mate app for iPhone and Android automatically tracks weight by connecting to one of Paris-based company Withings’ smart bathroom scales. A similar app for babies, Withings Baby Companion app for iPhone, tracks a baby’s weight and compares it to others the same age.

Those who want to improve their posture can turn to the LUMOback, a device worn around the waist that connects to an iPhone app that notifies users when they’re slumping, and track their posture over time.

To track calories burned, distance traveled or steps taken, there are a flurry of options available, including wristbands like the Nike+ FuelBand and Larklife, which connect to iPhone apps, and the Jawbone UP and Fitbit One, which connect to iPhone and Android apps.

However, with this new technology on the rise, Prentice is concerned that privacy laws may not yet account for the collection of personal data that these gadgets and apps may have access to, such as location.

“It’s a bit of a wild west out there,” said Prentice. “The regulatory environment just hasn’t caught up with the technology,” he said.

“At the moment it’s a case of buyer beware.”

(Editing by Paul Casciato)

Le Web Paris video

My Advice to Developers

Don’t rely on “Build it and they will come.” First understand market needs and avoid designing the Smart Fridge sort of device, because you can, when simpler solutions cost less and offer more benefit.

With that said, it’s relatively easy to add wireless (using Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Zigbee, or Z-Wave) to access smartphones & tablets and exploit their processing power, storage, Internet access, and accessible & adaptable user interface. Philips is already embedding Wi-Fi in its LED lightbulbs so the smartphone can control light intensity and color temperature. As the price/performance trend continues, I would not be surprised to see many more than 50 connected devices by 2020, but they may not be Internet connected if privacy is a concern.

Privacy & security is less of an issue for devices that only communicate within the home, as opposed to those that automatically access the Internet. The Withings bathroom scale, for example, needs only to communicate a short distance to reach your smartphone. Once data is collected, you may then choose to send it to a wellness center if you want, but that can be done over a secure connection from the phone and not from the scale itself.

Infographics