Being a young driver aged less than 25 is quite uncomfortable from the insurance perspective as you’re always charged with premiums that can be twice as high as your parents pay. That is because insurance companies regard younger car owners as being the most risky age group to insure. And while this may seem as a form of discrimination, the hard facts are on their side and you can’t do anything about it. Young drivers have less experience, end up in accidents more often and tend to take more risk while behind the wheel, which reflects in more at fault claims and more serious accidents. Still, even if you make part of this age group this doesn’t mean that there are no ways to get affordable insurance for your policy. Here are a few tips on how to do it right:
Ask your parents to include you to their policy
Although it may seem like a move that’s not very independent this still may help you save some money. Especially if your parents are paying the premiums. By including a high risk teen driver to the policy the premiums will automatically go up, however it will still cost you less than buying two separate policies for parents and the teen driver apart. So consider talking to your parents about such a move, especially if they already have very competitive premiums on their policy. more…
So here’s the big dilemma. You’ve been having pain and problems “down there” and, finally after much argument and debate, you go see a doctor. There’s prodding and even more embarrassing tests. Finally, a big gun surgeon appears and confirms your worst fears. You have prostate cancer, but it’s treatable. So this surgeon is just getting into the spiel about the new advances in robotic prostatectomy and you interrupt with the most important question. “How will this affect my sex life?” There’s a pause. Now does the surgeon tell you the truth or does the surgeon smile with the magic confidence that comes from having perfect teeth and tell you that all his/her patients are “fine” after the procedure?
In the midst of this, of course, there’s an assumption the surgeon actually knows the truth. The reality is more likely to be that, after the surgery (which is the easiest part of the whole process), you get passed on to the urology department and our famous surgeon never follows up on what happens to you afterwards. That explains why the perfect smile of confidence is so convincing. He/she is protected by a lack of information and so can appear sincere. More importantly, there have been very few research studies looking at significant numbers of men going through the surgery. That’s just changed. Now surgeons have no excuse for not knowing the “truth”. But that brings us back to the dilemma.
Every year, about 240,000 men are diagnosed with prostate cancer. Suppose you’re only in your 40s and have been expecting an active sex life for the next twenty or thirty years. Loss of hard erections would seriously affect your quality of life. But if you’re already in your 60s and sex has become a slightly distant memory, the potential loss of erections is not going to be so troubling. The tendency among older men with active sex lives has been to refuse surgery. They apparently believe they would prefer a few more years of happiness. They hope to die of natural causes before the inconvenience and pain of the cancer comes to dominate their lives. So which is better from your friendly neighborhood surgeon? Reassuring confidence you’ll be just fine, or total frankness about the risks? more…
The GOP has a field of candidates who want to run for President. When the race began, the front runner was Mitt Romney but, when Rick Perry joined in, he surged into a lead. Whether he can maintain that lead is something only time can tell. The first signs are that the enthusiasm of the evangelicals and tea-partiers may not be shared by the rest of the country. Governor Perry has some interestingly partisan ideas and a Texan style of delivering them. But, if Perry is not likely to be electable, where does that leave Mitt Romney. He’s more the thinking-person’s candidate and, of course, he’s controversial” because of his health care reforms in Massachusetts. more…
As we emerge from the recession, we find the nation in crisis. Think of the bursting of the housing bubble and the loss of credit as like a wound. Now the nation has to endure the pain of unemployment with more people living in poverty in 2010 than at any other time since we began keeping records. To give you an idea of just how bad the situation is, a recent survey of the hundred most prosperous city areas by the Brookings Institute found only 16 have managed to replace more than half the jobs lost during the recession itself. That means increasing financial pressures to pay unemployment benefits at a time when tax revenues are low. Except, ask yourself whether just paying unemployment benefit is a sufficient treatment. If your body had just received a wound, would you think it sufficient if the only treatment was sewing you back together and leaving you to get better? No! You would expect there to be follow-up treatment through physical therapy to help rebuild muscles and improve mobility. If there was continuing pain, you would expect experts to help you find better ways to live your life with less discomfort. This might involve redesigning your home, changing the way you work, offering you various drugs to keep the pain under control, and so on.
When you move beyond the original cause but still have consequences flowing from it, you hope and expect there will be an expert in consequences. Just talking to the surgeon who sewed you up is not really the right person to be talking to. That’s why we’re all frustrated with Washington right now because none of the politicians can agree how to treat the pain. The result? There’s no treatment for the pain as they fight among themselves about whether FEMA should have money to deal with emergencies like hurricanes and other minor issues. more…
When our grandparents were growing up, there were microscopes but, by modern standards, they were primitive. There were moderately sophisticated chemical tests for different medical problems and conditions. Sadly, they were not very precise. So, when a doctor or any other scientist made announcements, the numbers were very general. We found this acceptable. No one expected science to develop into the modern wonders of today where we can measure the presence of trace elements as parts-per-million. We may even have discovered an atomic particle capable of traveling faster than the speed of light. Einstein would be turning in his grave to get a better look at this magic neutrino that might just shoot down one of his best known theories.
Because we’ve moved from general statements that there were traces of a chemical to a precise measurement there were 39 parts-per-million, many now believe even minute traces can be dangerous. We’ve lost the sense of scale. When we can detect the presence of particles at a subatomic level, we want to believe science has more answers. It’s going where no one has been able to go before, therefore it must know more than those who tried to go before. Except, science doesn’t work like that. The best it can do is say people have been able to replicate the same results from experiments, so this suggests a theory is correct. But the theory is only correct until a better theory comes along with experimental evidence to back it up.
When the erectile dysfunction drugs were going through their clinical trials, there were some effects noted on eyesight. This fell into two classes. First, some men experienced a slight color shift so many objects appeared tinged with blue. Second, some men experienced photosensitivity, i.e. their eyes were painful in bright light. This affected between 3 and 10% of all men going through the trials, and the effects were duly noted on the labels and accompanying patient information. Suddenly, there were stories about men going blind. As a knee-jerk reaction, the FDA required the manufacturers to change the labels to include a warning.
In a sense, this is the precautionary principle at work. As a responsible regulator, the FDA prefers not to take any chances. Except, just how many verified cases of vision loss were there to encourage the FDA into action? The answer comes in a new piece of research. A team went through all the published reports in the peer-reviewed literature. All the results were analyzed using the international probability scales. The result? Between January 2006 and February 2011, there were eight reported cases. Eight cases over five years! And even in these cases, there’s no certainty the loss of vision was due to the use of an erectile dysfunction drug. There were other equally valid explanations. more…
