Kirsten Mortensen's blog

Now added to my blogroll: a great local website called PictureRochester.com.

It’s maintained by one Joseph Moroz; he’s been posting a photo per day (some he’s taken, some taken by guest photographers) because he wants to counter the perception that Rochester “has nothing to offer” its young people:

The goal of this site is to expose all of the beautiful details that the city of Rochester and its local communities have to offer. That’s right, there ARE actually many great things to see and do in Rochester.

And you know what? He’s right. There are many great things to see in this city. If you don’t believe it, spend a few minutes flipping through his gallery.

It’s amazing how much your attitude and preconception count, isn’t it. Look for beauty and you find it. Transcendent beauty, even.

UPDATE: Link fixed.

Technorati Tags: Rochester, New York

Turkeys.

Turkeys in my back yard.

Here’s the same pic, cropped.

I do not live in the country. I live in an old suburban neighborhood a stone’s throw from the city’s edge.

And yet it’s crawling with woodland wildlife. Amazing.

Technorati Tags: turkeys, Rochester, New York

Dontcha love the language academics use to title their papers?

Saweeeeeeeet.

lol

The stuff inside this particular one is even better, though — as reported by the NY Times:

When dogs feel fundamentally positive about something or someone, their tails wag more to the right side of their rumps. When they have negative feelings, their tail wagging is biased to the left.

It happens just today I was thinking about symmetry and the human body — how there is apparent symmetry externally, but the internal organs are not symmetrical.

Which got me thinking specifically about the heart. Why is the heart on the left? Always on the left? Why aren’t there mirror people with right-sided hearts? Would a human with a heart exactly in the middle be . . . different? How? A different species? And I wonder what would it feel like, emotionally, to have a heart smack dab in the middle?

Don’t ask me why I was thinking all this btw. I have no idea. Now if I were a sci fi writer . . .

Anyway, I’m not, so back to the Times article — this biased whole tail wagging thing is because our brains (“our” meaning a whole lotta higher critters) aren’t symmetrical either. And of course the brain’s asymmetry casts a shadow visible on our external bodies, if you know where to look:

Research has shown that in most animals, including birds, fish and frogs, the left brain specializes in behaviors involving what the scientists call approach and energy enrichment. In humans, that means the left brain is associated with positive feelings, like love, a sense of attachment, a feeling of safety and calm. It is also associated with physiological markers, like a slow heart rate.

At a fundamental level, the right brain specializes in behaviors involving withdrawal and energy expenditure. In humans, these behaviors, like fleeing, are associated with feelings like fear and depression. Physiological signals include a rapid heart rate and the shutdown of the digestive system.

Because the left brain controls the right side of the body and the right brain controls the left side of the body, such asymmetries are usually manifest in opposite sides of the body. Thus many birds seek food with their right eye (left brain/nourishment) and watch for predators with their left eye (right brain/danger).

In humans, the muscles on the right side of the face tend to reflect happiness (left brain) whereas muscles on the left side of the face reflect unhappiness (right brain).

But that’s not all. Get this — one researcher speculates that the asymmetry of the brain evolved because of the assymetry of the internal organs:

The asymmetry [of the brain] may also arise from how major nerves in the body connect up to the brain, said Arthur D. Craig, a neuroanatomist at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix. Nerves that carry information from the skin, heart, liver, lungs and other internal organs are inherently asymmetrical, he said. Thus information from the body that prompts an animal to slow down, eat, relax and restore itself is biased toward the left brain. Information from the body that tells an animal to run, fight, breathe faster and look out for danger is biased toward the right brain.

My speculation about how a person with a heart in a different spot might feel different doesn’t sound quite so weird now, does it ;-)

(Humor me, please! LOL)

Technorati Tags: dogs, neuroscience

John at Romantic Ramblings is an HR manager in real life, and has put up a post with some information on how Flexible Spending Accounts can work to an employer’s benefit. The main criteria: whether or not your out-of-pocket medical expenses are predictable.

Technorati Tags: Flexible Spending Accounts

One of the people I reached out to today, in my quest to find out how many Flexible Spending Account dollars are forfeited by employees each year, was David Harlow, a healthcare lawyer and consultant who blogs here.

He sent me a link to a Bankrate article which includes this tidbit:

Studies by benefits specialists regularly show that employees typically forfeit more than $100 each year in flexible medical accounts.

So let’s do some math. According to the Department of Labor, as of March 2007, there were 146.3 million people employed in the U.S.

And according to this brief published by the National Business Group on Health, about 15-20% of employees use FSAs.

We’ll be conservative and use the lower percentage.

Fifteen percent of 146.3 million means that 21,945,000 Americans contribute to these accounts.

If we’re conservative again, and say on average these employees forfeit $100 each, that’s nearly $2.2 billion that U.S. employees have earned, but which — thanks to Congress — go to employers instead.

That’s being conservative. The actual number is probably higher.

This, for a program that is supposed to help consumers ease the burden of health care costs.

As if.

Technorati Tags: Health Care Flexible Spending Account

Well, unused Flexible Spending Account contributions aren’t pocketed by the insurers who administer them, like I’d assumed. As reported here in a video piece by Channel 6 in Corpus Christi, the money goes to . . . your employer.

Reporter Liz Crenshaw frames it as being the unintended consequence of shoddily written legislation:

In creating FSAs, Congress was careful to make sure the accounts could not be used as tax-free savings accounts. That’s why it’s ‘use it, or lose it.’

But no one gave much thought to the ‘lose it’ part of the plan: where the lost money goes.

Rep. Carolyn McCarthy (D-NY) is interviewed for the piece, and says she’s talked to people who have lost $240-300 per year.

McCarthy was one of the people who fought for the creation of the program originally. She says she didn’t even know (!) that the money, if unspent, would go to the employer.

Now she’s trying to get the program changed so up to $1000 of unused money can be rolled over at the end of the benefit year.

What I don’t understand is why it isn’t just given back to the employee as taxable income. These accounts don’t earn interest. Wouldn’t returning it as taxable income remove the incentive for FSAs being “used as tax-free savings accounts”?

Technorati Tags: Flexible Spending Accounts

Suppose your bank launched a new product. They’re calling it a “pay your unexpected bills” savings account.

Here’s how it works. You guess estimate what your unexpected bills will be over the next twelve months. You then deposit that amount in your shiny new account, which, by the way has a nice front-end incentive built in — say, a very attractive interest rate.

But there’s a catch. If, at the end of the year, you haven’t spent all the money — if you underestimated your unexpected bills for the year — the bank gets to seize and keep all the unused funds.

Would you do it?

Or would you laugh all the way to a different bank?

What would you assume about the bank’s motives?

Maybe something along the line of: why, those guys are gambling that a nice percentage of people will mess up their estimates!

“What a scam!”

“I’d like to be in THAT business!”

Isn’t that what you’d think?

So why do people march happily off the “Health Care Flexible Savings Account” cliff without so much as a peep?

Yeah, I know. FSAs are “tax advantaged.” But so what? You make a modest error estimating your next 12 months’ worth of medical bills and you easily wipe out the tax break — and then some.

Am I the only one who bristles at the idea that the insurers who run these things actually get to keep people’s money if they don’t spend it?

Am I the only one who wonders why our politicians, who are certain we aren’t intelligent enough to, you know, manage our own social security contributions, do think we can look in our crystal balls and figure out what prescriptions we might need five months from now? Or whether we’re going to get the flu? Or the likelihood that junior will break his leg? Let alone that any more serious health crisis crop up?

And not only are we apparently all of a sudden smart enough to do that, we’re also smart enough to take our health insurance deductable, figure out what the c0-pays and other uncovered amounts will be for each of these events, and add them all together to reach the final FSA figure.

Am I the only one who’d like to know exactly who came up with this brilliant idea?

Or who suspects it was proposed over an expensive dinner paid for by Washington lobbyists? “Have some more wine, Congressman. That’s right. Good, isn’t it! Now, here’s our idea . . .”

“Do you really think that will fly?”

“Sure! Just tell everyone you’ve done it because you care about the healthcare crisis.”

“I still think people might think — sorry to be indelicate — that it’s . . . well. . . a rip-off.”

“We’ve got it covered. We’ll just tell them it’s the IRS. The IRS makes us keep their money.”

“Why, that’s brilliant! So even if they do notice it’s a rip-off, they’ll blame the IRS and not Congress!”

“Exactly! More cake, Congressman?”

You know what else? I tried googling to find out how much unspent FSA money has gone into insurers’ pockets since this program was launched. I couldn’t find that number.

Wouldn’t you like to know what it is?

UPDATE: My bad — it’s not the insurers who pocket the money. Employers get it. But turns out I’m not the only one who’s had trouble figuring that out . . .

Technorati Tags: Health Care Flexible Spending Account Scam

The FDA, for a long time, has been tinkering with the idea that it ought to be protecting you — from the horrors of using, say, supplements to treat medical symptoms.

Here’s a draft “Guidance” document here that outlines the agency’s “current thinking” on the matter. It boils down to something like this: We, the FDA, say we’re in charge of a whole bunch of things you guys are running around with more or less on your own right now.

They aren’t proposing regulatory changes. They’re just claiming turf; the document outlines their reasoning in the turf claim (this is stuff you eat; this is stuff you use to address certain medical conditions).

Here’s the comment that I’ve submitted:

Hi. Given that resources are limited, I think it’s a poor use of the FDA’s time to expand its mandate to cover relative innocuous substances like probiotics. You have more important things to do, such as preventing the contamination of produce with feces, as one example, or figuring out how to trace cows that die of mad cow disease.

I am also concerned that expanding your mandate as outlined by this document strays dangerously close to suggesting that you should be regulating the use of foodstuffs, if they’re ingested to promote health or address medical symptoms. So, if I eat carrots and that improves my night vision, have I suddenly rendered myself subject to FDA oversight? How about if I switch to whole wheat bread for constipation? It’s a gray area; the functional line between drugs and foodstuffs is bound to become more & more blurred as science increasingly links diet and health, and I believe strongly that the FDA should exercise extreme discretion in formulating any wording that might serve to pervert an individual’s right to modify his diet for health reasons, or that might make it more onerous for healthcare providers to advise individuals on these issues.

I object to your suggestion that probiotics should be listed as “biological agents.” Does this give you the right to regulate the critters that occur naturally in the gut? How about in breast milk? Are you staking out territory that may one day mean I can’t culture yogurt, unless I promise I’m eating it just for the taste?

Last but not least, alternative health care is in many cases much more affordable than mainstream health care, and I’m concerned in general at the potential for overregulation to make it less affordable. The relative affordability of alternative HC is, in my opinion, an incentive for people to use it; insofar as it helps some people adopt healthier lifestyles and address symptoms before they’ve reached a more critical stage, it helps reduce the overall societal cost of healthcare in the US. If you make it more expensive, this benefit will be blunted, if not lost completely.

Please leave “CAM” alone. You’ve got better things to do, and the alternative healthcare industry is managing quite well without you getting more involved than you already are.

If you want to get in on the conversation, here’s where you can submit your comment. Deadline is April 30.

Technorati Tags: FDA Draft Guidance for Industry on Complementary and Alternative Medicine Products

I went out my back door with my dog this afternoon and nearly tripped over one of those four deer I photographed the other morning.

A few minutes later I was able to get some digital video of them as they made their way along the hedgerow in the back yard.

Technorati Tags: suburban deer, Rochester, New York

My dad’s Nor’easter blogging.

They’ve lost power and won’t have it on again until tomorrow sometime.

Here in Rochester things aren’t so bad, although it’s not over yet.

Technorati Tags: snowstorm