Proposed Regulations Could Limit Access to Affordable Health Coverage for Workers' Children and Family Members

Outlines implications of how the health reform law's premium subsidies apply if employer-sponsored self-only coverage is affordable but family coverage is not. Suggests basing family members' eligibility and affordability on additional cost to employee

Health Coverage Expansion in California: What Can Consumers Afford to Spend?

Analyzes Californians' current spending on insurance premiums and out-of-pocket expenditures to assess whether proposals to make obtaining health insurance mandatory include sufficient measures to make it affordable for low- and middle-income families

What Does It Take for a Family to Afford to Pay for Health Care?

Addresses how much Californians can afford to pay for health care based on their current insurance premiums and out-of-pocket expenses as well as other basic necessities, such as housing, child care, transportation, food, and taxes

The State of Health Insurance in California: Findings From the 2009 California Health Interview Survey

Analyzes sources of coverage and uninsurance rates by county, effects of declines in income and employer-sponsored insurance, disparities, access to and affordability of care, role of public insurance, and projected impact of federal healthcare reform

Data Mining Techniques for Wind Speed Analysis

Weather Data Mining is a form of Data mining concerned with finding hidden patterns inside largely available meteorological data, so that the information retrieved can be transformed into usable knowledge. In this paper we used meteorological data mining to analyze wind speed behavior. The data was recorded between 2004 to November 2006 daily historical data by meteorological station of Gaza. After preprocessing the data, we applied data mining techniques: association rules, classification, cluster and outlier analysis. From these four tasks, we found the most appropriate of these techniques to be applied on weather data is classification task, especially the neural networks method because the nature of the data is time series

Newly Insured Californians Would Fall by More than 1 Million Under the Affordable Care Act Without the Requirement to Purchase Insurance

Compares the estimated number and percentage of currently uninsured Californians who will be insured by 2019 under the Affordable Care Act with the individual mandate and without. Highlights the need for the mandate to ensure affordable coverage

Cryptic diversity and database errors challenge non-indigenous species surveys: An illustration with Botrylloides spp. in the English Channel and Mediterranean Sea

Molecular tools have been extensively used in recent decades to examine biological invasion processes, and are increasingly being adopted as efficient tools to support non-indigenous species surveys, notably through barcoding approaches, i.e., the use of a reference sequence specific to a given species to validate its identification. The technique is easy to use but requires reliable reference sequences to be available in public databases. In addition, the increasing discovery of cryptic species in marine taxa may complicate taxonomic assignment. We illustrate these two issues in the ascidian genus Botrylloides, in which at least three global marine invaders have been recognized, including B. violaceus and B. diegensis. We obtained COI sequences from >750 colonies of Botrylloides spp. sampled in W Europe or provided by expert colleagues from other regions. Phylogenetic trees clearly distinguished our targeted taxa [i.e., B. violaceus, B. diegensis and B. leachii (native)]. They also revealed another discrete lineage apparently related to a recently described eastern Mediterranean species. By examining public databases, we found sequences of B. diegensis erroneously assigned to B. leachii. This observation has major implications as the introduced B. diegensis can be misidentified as a putatively native species. We also checked published sequences of the genus Botrylloides in the Mediterranean Sea, complemented with new samples. Based on our custom reference database, all published sequences of B. leachii corresponded to B. diegensis, although this NIS has hardly been reported at all in the Mediterranean region. Such database errors are unfortunate, as the barcoding approach is a powerful tool to identify the recognized Botrylloides species currently present in European seas. This is of particular importance because a trait often used during field assessment, i.e., single-color vs. two-color colonies, is misleading to distinguish B. violaceus and B. diegensis respectively: a substantial proportion of the single-color morph are actually B. diegensis in both the Mediterranean Sea and the English Channel. Altogether, this study exemplifies the advantages and disadvantages of molecular barcoding in NIS surveys and studies. The limitations that were identified are all easy to resolve once proper vouchers and collections are set up

Achieving Equity by Building a Bridge From Eligible to Enrolled

Calls for multilingual outreach and enrollment efforts to enable Californians of color and those with limited English proficiency to benefit from the Health Benefit Exchange. Recommends targeting high-need groups and strengthening data collection