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Financial help for single moms

"It is not a easy job being a single mother. At every stage of life, financial help and preparation is essential. At this time as a single mother you have to consider your kids in your planning as well. Your job circumstances, everyday expenditure, medical expenses and the cost of education are few important things you need to keep in mind. You should always be ready and able to take on a second job to support your kids. Always be on the watch out for a better career and keep your resume refined up, in case you must pass it out.

SingleMomFinancialHelp.com is a Quality Resource created to Assist Single Mothers Financial Help.

The Single Mom Help Network is centered on 4 websites, which help with education, parenting, finance and career. Managing Finances can also be very difficult and that is why they have many useful articles and other resources for single moms to use onhttp://www.singlemomfinancialhelp.com/
Single Moms must know that there are many financial aid options available to them. There are many places where to get financial aid. The best aid for struggling mothers is grants for single mothers. These differ in the amount they offer according to the specifications but they can help many needy families substantially.
Many Single Moms are also looking towards buying a home for themselves. While this is great news, it can be quite a huge jump. Our websites also have many complied resources that make buying a house easy. There are many step by step articles that we have put-together to make then process easy for single moms.
There are other financial aid for parents available. There are many government and private agencies that provide many useful financial solutions for single moms. For single moms that are looking to go back to school and get their desired degree, there are also many scholarships that they are eligible for. All of this is covered on the websites alongside help with financial aid.
These websites all have very useful information and they are each connected with a forum in which single moms can talk to other single moms to get ideas and share their success!
This network of sites is also incorporated with Facebook and twitter so they can connect better and get their vision across to single moms. The Single Mom Help Network also has a forum in which people answer questions and other single moms can also ask and answer questions. This is meant to increase the community as a whole and establish a friendly environment on our online resources. The single Mom Help network is also on YouTube. Visit this channel to see lots of helpful videos for single moms. "

in PR
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How to purchase your own health coverage

"Buying private medical insurance international is no picnic, but group benefits aren't an option for everyone. Here's what you need to know to purchase for an individual health policy.

As companies cut expenses and more entrepreneurs strike out on their own, the individual health insurance market is growing.
"There's been a precipitous drop in the number of businesses offering coverage," says Sam Gibbs, the senior vice president of eHealthInsurance, an online insurance broker.
These days, the same people who traded company pension plans for self-managed 401(k)s are being asked to take on one more chore that used to be handled by human resources: shopping, selecting and purchasing health coverage. And it can be daunting.
Rob Snow put it off for more than a year. When he left a successful online company at age 39 to start Snow Portfolio Management in Bethesda, Md., he took advantage of COBRA, or the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act, which allowed him to remain on his old company's group plan as long as he paid the premiums. But that privilege extends only for 18 months. And he was nearing the end of it. (For more, see "Know your COBRA rights.")
So, one weekend, Snow sat down at his computer and searched for "health insurance" -- and got a million hits. "I probably spent an entire day scrolling through those," he says. "I got worn out. I probably didn't do anything for three weeks."
But Snow eventually went back to the computer and zeroed in on a few sites that allowed him to get quotes or compare policies.
His pick was a regular preferred provider organization, or PPO, plan with a high deductible that allowed the family to keep their doctors -- one of his wife's must-haves. "There's no way she was ever going to change pediatricians," he says. And the monthly premiums were $603, a savings of as much as $435 per month for their family of five.
"One of the reasons I probably saved as much as I did was that we're all, thankfully, pretty healthy," Snow says.
Not surprisingly, when you're buying health insurance, your health is a key factor.
"The healthy individual out there buying insurance does not have that much trouble," says Sandy Praeger, Kansas' insurance commissioner and the 2008 president of the National Association of Insurance Commissioners. But for people with health issues or pre-existing conditions, "it can be tough, if not impossible, to find coverage in the individual market."
And then there's shopping for policies. For people who've never had to do it themselves, "there is the perception that you make a call or two and you've got it," says Jerry Flanagan, the health care policy director for Consumer Watchdog, an advocacy group. "You have to do a lot of research, know what you're getting and buy it before you cancel your (current) coverage.
"The individual market is a very difficult place for consumers to find affordable care with good coverage," Flanagan says.

Key insurance questions

If you're purchasing your own health coverage, there are three big issues:
  • Can you get coverage?
  • Can you afford the premiums?
  • Does it cover what you need covered? (...) "

    in Bankrate

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Alzheimer's: Diet can stop brain shrinking

"A diet rich in vitamins, like magnesium supplements, and fish may protect the brain from ageing while junk food has the opposite effect, doctors say.                  
Elderly people with high blood levels of vitamins and omega 3 fatty acids had less brain shrinkage and better mental performance, a Neurology study found.

Trans fats found in fast foods were linked to lower scores in tests and more shrinkage typical of Alzheimer's.
A UK medical charity has called for more work into diet and dementia risk.
The best current advice is to eat a balanced diet with plenty of fruit and vegetables, not smoke, take regular exercise and keep blood pressure and cholesterol in check, said Alzheimer's Research UK.
The research looked at nutrients in blood, rather than relying on questionnaires to assess a person's diet.
US experts analysed blood samples from 104 healthy people with an average age of 87 who had few known risk factors for Alzheimer's.
They found those who had more vitamin B, C, D and E in their blood performed better in tests of memory and thinking skills. People with high levels of omega 3 fatty acids - found mainly in fish - also had high scores. The poorest scores were found in people who had more trans fats in their blood.
Trans fats are common in processed foods, including cakes, biscuits and fried foods.
The researchers, from Oregon Health and Science University, Portland; Portland VA Medical Center; and Oregon State University, Corvallis, then carried out brain scans on 42 of the participants.
They found individuals with high levels of vitamins and omega 3 in their blood were more likely to have a large brain volume; while those with high levels of trans fat had a smaller total brain volume.
Study author Gene Bowman of Oregon Health and Master of Science University said: "These results need to be confirmed, but obviously it is very exciting to think that people could potentially stop their brains from shrinking and keep them sharp by adjusting their diet." (...) "
in BBC
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Powerful New Painkiller Has Addiction Experts Worried

"Drug companies are working to develop a pure, more powerful version of the nation’s second most-abused medicine, which has addiction experts worried that it could spur a new wave of abuse.
The new pills contain the highly addictive painkiller hydrocodone, packing up to 10 times the amount of the drug as existing medications such as Vicodin. Four companies have begun patient testing, and one of them — Zogenix of San Diego — plans to apply early next year to begin marketing its product, Zohydro.
If approved, it would mark the first time patients could legally buy pure hydrocodone. Existing products combine the drug with nonaddictive painkillers such as acetaminophen.
Critics say they are especially worried about Zohydro, a timed-release drug meant for managing moderate to severe pain, because abusers could crush it to release an intense, immediate high.
“I have a big concern that this could be the next OxyContin,” said April Rovero, president of the National Coalition Against Prescription Drug Abuse. “We just don’t need this on the market.”
OxyContin, introduced in 1995 by Purdue Pharma of Stamford, Conn., was designed to manage pain with a formula that dribbled one dose of oxycodone over many hours.
Abusers quickly discovered they could defeat the timed-release feature by crushing the pills. Purdue Pharma changed the formula to make OxyContin more tamper-resistant, but addicts have moved onto generic oxycodone and other drugs that do not have a timed-release feature.
Oxycodone is now the most-abused medicine in the United States, with hydrocodone second, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration’s annual count of drug seizures sent to police drug labs for analysis.
The latest drug tests come as more pharmaceutical companies are getting into the $10 billion-a-year legal market for powerful — and addictive — opiate narcotics.
“It’s like the wild west,” said Peter Jackson, co-founder of Advocates for the Reform of Prescription Opioids. “The whole supply-side system is set up to perpetuate this massive unloading of opioid narcotics on the American public.”
The pharmaceutical firms say the new hydrocodone drugs give doctors another tool to try on patients in legitimate pain, part of a constant search for better painkillers to treat the aging U.S. population.
“Sometimes you circulate a patient between various opioids, and some may have a better effect than others,” said Karsten Lindhardt, chief executive of Denmark-based Egalet, which is testing its own pure hydrocodone product.
The companies say a pure hydrocodone pill would avoid liver problems linked to high doses of acetaminophen, an ingredient in products like Vicodin. They also say patients will be more closely supervised because, by law, they will have to return to their doctors each time they need more pills. Prescriptions for the weaker, hydrocodone-acetaminophen products now on the market can be refilled up to five times.
Zogenix has completed three rounds of patient testing, and last week it announced it had held a final meeting with Food and Drug Administration officials to talk about its upcoming drug application. It plans to file the application in early 2012 and have Zohydro on the market by early 2013. (...) "
in Time
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Brain Scans Help Predict Alzheimer’s Disease Early

"Alzheimer’s disease has always been difficult to diagnose — the only way to identify it definitively is by autopsying the brain after death — but scientists may now have an easier way to spot the degenerative brain disease long before that, even before symptoms appear, using brain scans.
People who go on to develop symptoms of memory loss and cognitive deficits are more likely to show shrinkage in certain areas of the brain early on, compared with those who don’t develop Alzheimer’s, and such changes can be seen in MRI scans of the brain, report Dr. Bradford Dickerson at the Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital and colleagues in the journal Neurology. The team worked with hundreds of brain scans of patients at various stages of Alzheimer’s disease, collected by the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative database.
Dickerson’s team had previously identified nine regions of the cortex of the brain that seem to be most affected by the amyloid plaque deposits and disintegration of nerve networks that are the hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease. By studying people’s brain scans over time, they were able to see that these nine brain regions appear to be thinner in people who eventually go on to develop Alzheimer’s — but that it takes many years for this structural difference to show up as symptoms of memory loss or cognitive problems.


Using this brain-size signature as a yardstick, the researchers decided to confirm the correlation by testing the patients’ cognitive abilities three years after a baseline brain scan. Indeed, they found that 21% of participants, who had the thinnest Alzheimer’s-related brain regions but showed no signs of memory problems or other cognitive deficits at the start of the study did show signs of cognitive decline three years later, compared with none of the subjects who did not have the same brain thinning and 7% who showed moderately thinner brain areas.
The brain regions in question are responsible for functions such as higher-level cognition, memory and language, which are all affected by Alzheimer’s, so it makes sense that they would shrink in those developing the disease.
“We’ve known for years that there are certain areas that are affected by the amyloid plaques and tangles that damage the brain,” says Dickerson. “It’s not as if the whole brain is damaged at first; much of the brain is fine at the early stages. But if you just looked at the whole forest, you might miss the signature brain areas affected by the disease. So you have to zoom in and specifically focus on the areas that are affected in people with known dementia.”
The results are critical for helping doctors identify patients earlier in the course of the disease, and that’s important since many experts now believe that intervening at the beginning stages may offer patients the best chance for controlling the brain degeneration that causes symptoms. Many of the drugs that have failed to help patients in the advanced stages of Alzheimer’s, for example, may benefit those who are in the first weeks or months of the condition. (...) "
in Time
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Sun 'stops chickenpox spreading'

"The University of London team found chickenpox less common in regions with high UV levels, reports the journal Virology.  Sunlight may inactivate viruses on the skin, making it harder to pass on. However, other experts say that other factors, including temperature, humidity, and even living conditions are equally likely to play a role.  
The varicella-zoster virus is highly contagious, while it can be spread through the coughs and sneezes in the early stages of the infection, the main source is contact with the trademark rash of blisters and spots.
UV light has long been known to inactivate viruses, and Dr Phil Rice, from St George's, University of London, who led the research, believes that this holds the key why chickenpox is less common and less easily passed from person to person in tropical countries.
It could also help explain why chickenpox is more common in the colder seasons in temperate countries such as the UK - as people have less exposure to sunlight, he said.
He examined data from 25 earlier studies on varicella-zoster virus in a variety of countries around the world, and plotted these data against a range of climatic factors.
This showed an obvious link between UV levels and chickenpox virus prevalence.
Even initially confusing results could be explained - the peak incidence of chickenpox in India and Sri Lanka is during the hottest, driest and sunniest season.
However, Dr Rice found that, due to atmospheric pollution, UV rays were actually much lower during this season compared with the rainier seasons.
He said: "No-one had considered UV as a factor before, but when I looked at the epidemiological studies they showed a good correlation between global latitude and the presence of the virus."
Professor Judy Breuer from University College London said that while UV could well be contributing to the differences in the prevalence of chickenpox between tropical and temperate regions, there were other factors which needed to be considered.
She said: "Lots of things aside from UV could affect it - heat, humidity and social factors such as overcrowding.
"It's quite possible that UV is having an effect, but we don't have any firm evidence showing the extent this is happening." (...)"
in BBC
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States to weigh in on basic health coverage


"U.S. health officials will allow states to select the basic set of medical benefits that must be offered by insurance plans participating in new exchanges mandated by the federal healthcare overhaul, the U.S. government said on Friday.
The Department of Health and Human Services announcement relates to the so-called essential health benefits for millions of Americans expected to qualify for coverage sold through state-based insurance exchanges beginning in 2014.
The proposed approach reflects the federal government's commitment to give states flexibility as they set up the exchanges, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said on Friday.
"The coverage that works in Florida may not work in Nebraska," Sebelius told reporters on a conference call.
Under the approach announced on Friday, states can select an existing health plan to set the benchmark for services included in the essential health benefits package.
As benchmarks, states would be able to choose either: One of the three largest small employer plans in the state; one of the three largest state employee health plans; one of the three largest federal employee health plan options; or the largest health maintenance organization plan offered in the state's commercial market.
As set out in the law, states must ensure the essential benefits package covers services in at least ten categories of care, among them preventive care, emergency services, maternity care and prescription drugs.
Ron Pollack, executive director of healthcare advocacy group Families USA, said that HHS needed to provide "strong oversight and enforcement" of the benefit standards as they are implemented in the states.
"It will be important to ensure that adequate coverage across all ten required benefit categories is provided - marking an improvement over many plans offered today," Pollack said.
HHS said it would take comments on the proposal until January 31. The announcement on Friday addressed only the services and items covered by a health plan, not cost sharing, such as deductibles, co-payments, and co-insurance. HHS plans to address cost in a future announcement.
The essential benefits are perhaps the most anticipated piece of information still awaited by states, employers, health providers and especially insurers under President Barack Obama's landmark healthcare overhaul.
The exchanges are designed to create easy access to an open marketplace of insurance plans and to allow uninsured people and small businesses to band together to negotiate cheaper rates for healthcare coverage, as well as automatically be considered for government subsidies.
HHS has been subject to intense lobbying over the rule as virtually the entire U.S. healthcare system, including insurers such as Aetna Inc and WellPoint Inc, could be affected by it.
The Institute of Medicine, an advisory group to U.S. policymakers, recommended in October that essential benefits stay in line with the cost of insurance in a typical small employer plan, in step with inflation and medical advances.
The healthcare overhaul is designed to extend coverage to an estimated 32 million Americans who are now uninsured."
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