State efforts to expand health coverage: One bite at a time

For more than twenty years, health scholars and advocates have warned us about the lack of adequate health coverage among a growing number of Americans. Health insurance premiums are rising. Many employers, especially small employers who employ over half of the country’s workforce, and individuals are seeing premium increases of 30, 40, and even 50 percent. Not surprisingly, America’s uninsured population is rising— to more than 41 million people. States are feeling the budget crunch as the economy sags and more and more people turn to state Medicaid and other public health care systems. This all means that state policy makers are looking for solutions. Yet no consensus has emerged on what to do about the uninsurance problem. Conservatives propose encouraging individuals to buy private health insurance and place more reliance on market forces. Liberals continue a struggle initiated during the New Deal to provide publicly financed health coverage

Acute alcohol ingestion and sympathetic neural responses during orthostatic stress in humans

Acute alcohol consumption has been reported to decrease mean arterial pressure (MAP) during orthostatic challenge, a response that may contribute to alcohol-mediated hypotension and eventually syncope. Muscle sympathetic nerve activity (MSNA) increases during orthostatic stress to help maintain MAP, yet the influence of alcohol on MSNA during orthostatic stress has not been determined. We hypothesized that alcohol ingestion would blunt arterial blood pressure and MSNA responses to progressive lower body negative pressure (LBNP). MAP, MSNA, and heart rate (HR) were recorded during progressive LBNP (-5, -10, -15, -20, -30, and -40 mmHg; 3 min/stage) in 30 subjects(age 24 ± 1 yrs). After an initial progressive LBNP protocol (pre-treatment), subjects were randomly assigned to consume alcohol (0.8g ethanol/kg body mass; n=15) or placebo (n=15) and then repeated the progressive LBNP protocol (post-treatment). Alcohol increased (drug × treatment, P ≤ 0.05) resting HR (59 ± 2 to 65 ± 2 beats/min) and MSNA (13 ± 3 to 19 ± 4 bursts/min) when compared to placebo. While alcohol increased MAP (83 ± 2 to 87 ± 2 mmHg), these increases were also observed with placebo (82 ± 2 to 88 ± 1 mmHg; treatment, P \u3c 0.05; drug × treatment, P \u3e 0.05). During progressive LBNP, a prominent decrease in MAP was observed after alcohol (drug × time × treatment, P \u3c 0.05), but not placebo. There was also a significant attenuated response in forearm vascular resistance (FVR) during progressive LBNP (drug × time × treatment, P \u3c 0.05). MSNA and HR increased during all LBNP protocols, but there were no differences between treatments or groups (drugs). In summary, acute alcohol ingestion induces an attenuation in blood pressure response during an orthostatic challenge, possibly due to the effect that alcohol has on impairing peripheral blood vessel constriction

Interview with Kathryn Stream

An oral history interview with Kathryn Sheaffer Stream

Risky business: Effectiveness of state market-based health programs

Since the 1990s, state governments have been leaders of health care reform. Today, approximately 47 million people are without health insurance. As health care costs and uninsurance levels continue to rise, states are pursuing a variety of government- and market-based strategies to address this growing social problem. Health care research has indicated that state-based programs have proven to be successful in extending access to coverage. However, the question remains as to whether the market-based programs have had a positive impact on state health care. Advocates for market-based state health programs argue that the reforms benefit the greater good because they serve an economic development function by improving the economic productivity and overall health of state citizens. Whether market-based policies are accomplishing these goals is a matter of debate. This study examines the effects of the various market-based state policies. The evidence generated by this research sheds light on the societal effectiveness of market-based health care strategies used by state governments. The results of our analysis indicate that programs enacted by states to promote increased access to medical care have developmental effects beyond the client population directly served

One year after Katrina: Tragedy of the Crescent City

One year after Katrina, New Orleans and the surrounding area are slowly showing signs of growth and a return to normalcy. Two recent studies provide excellent overviews of the economic impacts the hurricane had on the area as well as the efforts New Orleans has made to recover from the storm’s devastation. The first study which was published in August of 2006 was done by the Brookings Institution. A “Special Edition of the Katrina Index: A One-Year Review of Key Indicators of Recovery in Post-Storm New Orleans” by Amy Liu, Matt Fellowes and Mia Mabanta, provides an overview of key social and economic indicators on New Orleans’ progress since the storm. The other study, published in June 2006, “Advancing in the Aftermath II: Tracking the Recovery from Katrina and Rita,” by Dr. Loren C. Scott, provides an extremely detailed account on the progress of recovery in the four MSAs along the Gulf Coast. In this brief article, we summarize key economic indicators and look at how the city and region’s economy has been impacted by the storm and its progress since. We rely heavily on these two studies and recommend them as outstanding sources for the economic impact the hurricane had on New Orleans

MA Defence: “Tweeting Tsunami: Early Warning Networks in British Columbia†by Amanda Oldring

Our dear colleague, Amanda Oldring, will defend her MA Thesis on Wednesday, December 16, 2015 at Harbour Centre, Room 1500 (1:00 pm - 3:00 pm). Here is the abstract of her thesis “Tweeting Tsunami”

Introducing "Surveylady": A Case for the Use of Avatars as Part of Gaming Research

The popularity explosion of Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMOs) such as World of Warcraft provides researchers with a venue to reach a wider research subject base than ever before. But what is the best way to collect data about these virtual worlds? This paper illustrates the rich potential of using an avatar to interact with MMO participants while players are immersed in the game’s virtual environment. Rather than observing from the periphery, this paper makes the case for the researcher to ‘dive right in’ and interview gamers within their (virtual) environment. This paper will argue that this methodology acts as a means for collecting rich, nuanced data about the gaming community

Corpus Linguistics in Critical Discourse Analysis: A Case Study on News Reports of the 2011 Libyan Civil War

This paper reports a comparative analysis of the news coverage of the 2011 Libyan civil war in two national media (China Daily and The New York Times). The 2011 Libyan civil war attracted wide attention and was extensively covered by various media around the world. However, news discourse regarding the war was constructed differently across various news agencies as a result of their clashing ideologies. Based on corpus linguistics methods, two small corpora with a total of 22,412 tokens were compiled and the comparative analyses of the two corpora revealed the following results. First, although the two corpora shared a lot of commonalities in word frequency, differences still exist in several high ranking lemmas. On the one hand, words such as “Qaddafi†and “war†ranked similarly in the two corpora’s lexical frequency lists; on the other hand, the frequencies of the lemma “rebel/rebels†were much higher in The New York Times corpus than in the China Daily corpus, which indicated that the image of the rebel received more attention in the reports by The New York Times than in those by China Daily. Second, although the word “Qaddafi†achieved similar frequencies in the two corpora, a follow-up collocation analysis showed that the images of “Qaddafi†contrasted with each other in the two corpora. In The New York Times corpus, the words and phrases collocating with “Qaddafi†were mainly negative descriptions and highlighted the pressure on Qaddafi whereas many neutral and even positive descriptions of Qaddafi appeared in the China Daily corpus. Based on these findings, the paper further discusses how discursive devices are applied in news coverage of warfare, as well as some methodological implications of the case study (Reprinted by Permission of Canadian Association for the Studies of Discourse and Writing)