Usually, you can take care of your bites and stings at home with your parents’ help. Here’s what to do:
Mosquitoes, fleas and other small bugs
Wash the bite with soap and water.
Use calamine (rhymes with “pal–of–mine”) lotion or another cream that will help you stop the itch.
Don’t scratch the bites, even though that’s hard because they itch a lot!
Put ice on a swollen bite.
See a doctor if your bite looks worse or you just can’t stop scratching. Talk to your mom, dad, or another adult about it.
Bees and wasps
Tell a grown-up right away that you’ve been stung.
Take out the stinger if it’s still in your skin – ask a grown-up for help.
Gently wash the sting with soap and water. You might have to do this a few times a day.
Put an icepack on the sting.
Apply a paste made with baking soda and water. Baking soda is something people cook with, but it also can make stings feel a lot better. Ask an adult to help you do this.
Ask your mom or dad if you can take some pain medicine.
Use some lotion or cream to stop the itch if it’s bothering you.
Sometimes, stings can be dangerous. To learn if you might have an allergic reaction to the sting, visit Reactions to bites and stings.
Spiders
Wash the bite with soap and water.Most spider bites can be treated by a grown-up.
Put on an ice pack to make it less puffy.
If you think a black widow or brown recluse spider bit you, tell a grown-up right away. You might need to see a doctor and go to the hospital.
Ticks
Don’t pull off a tick if you find one on your skin, but tell your mom, dad or another adult right away.
An adult should grab the tick with a tweezers close to your skin and pull straight up to remove the tick.
Treating Bites and Stings
Carefully look over the rest of your body. With your parents’ help, check all over, including behind the ears, to be sure there are no other ticks.
Never squeeze or crush a tick, because that can cause more venom to enter your body.
Save the tick in a jar of alcohol in case your doctor wants to see it later. The doctor might be able to tell you if this is the kind of tick that can cause Lyme disease, which can feel like the flu. To learn more, visit Reactions to bites and stings.
In an effort to improve the safety and efficacy of sunscreen products sold in the U.S. and limit misleading claims, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration officially released a new set of requirements that sunscreen manufacturer’s must begin to follow when making and marketing their products. No more claims of “waterproof” or “sweat proof” (thee claims are overstated). No agonizing over SPFs higher than 50 (there is no sufficient data to show that products with SPF values higher than 50 provide greater protection). And if a manufacturer wants to slap a “broad spectrum” claim on the label, first the product will need to pass a test that proves it does indeed protect against both UVA and UVB rays. Some manufacturers will begin to incorporate these mandates right away, while others may wait until the official ruling kicks in the summer of 2012.
So what’s a sun-savvy consumer to do in the meantime? Dermatologist John Anthony, M.D. of Cleveland Clinic’s Strongsville Family Health and Surgery Center weighs in with these helpful tips about choosing the best sun protection:
• The jury is still out on how chemical sunscreens with ingredients such as oxybenzone, Vitamin A (retinol), and PABA (para-aminobenzoic acid) affect human health. But Dr. Anthony says that if you’re looking to avoid chemical sunscreens, choose a mineral-based one instead since these use physical blockers such as zinc oxide or titanium dioxide. Because mineral sunscreens in spray form create nanoparticles that can be absorbed into the lungs, play it safe and use mineral-based creams and lotions instead of sprays.
• Look for sunscreens that block both ultraviolet A rays (UVA rays contribute to photo-aging and may cause skin cancer) and UVB rays (the ones that cause those red sunburns that blister).
• Choose a middle-of-the road sun protection factor (SPF) of 30 to 50. Any lower and you really limit the amount of time you can spend in the sun before getting burned by UVB rays (roughly 30 minutes) and needing to reapply. Any higher and Dr. Anthony says you risk thinking that you’ve got so much protection you need not reapply every two hours or after swimming, the standard recommendation. Be smart and always reapply sunscreen after swimming or exercising.
• Get sun-sensible: If you can avoid being in the sun during primetime sun hours — from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. — do. If not, wear a hat and protective clothing, and seek out the shade, says Dr. Anthony. “Sunscreen isn’t a bulletproof vest against sun damage. It’s just one tool that we can use to help protect us.”
Yoga initiatives improves health and reduces costs according to Aetna studies. A yoga and meditation initiative for stressed employees helped them reduce their heart rates and helped Aetna increase productivity and lower health benefit costs 7%, CEO Mark Bertolini told the Third Metric conference.
Ezekiel Emanuel of the University of Pennsylvania said while data on the efficacy of wellness programs overall is mixed, prevention efforts, including traditional wellness programs, are important for saving money and improving health.
In Huffington Post article Company Wellness Programs May Boost Bottom Lines, Aetna CEO Mark Bertolini Says when Aetna determined in 2010 that its workers with the highest levels of stress were costing the company $2,000 more each year than co-workers, the company created an initiative to promote yoga and meditation. Bertolini said at the Third Metric conference co-sponsored by The Huffington Post in New York Thursday. The results include improvements in heart rates and increased productivity.
“Stress can have a significant impact on physical and mental health, so there is a strong need for programs that help people reduce stress as part of achieving their best health,” said Aetna Chairman and CEO Mark T. Bertolini. “The results from the mind-body study provide evidence that these mind-body approaches can be an effective complement to conventional medicine and may help people improve their health, something that I have experienced personally.”
Yoga and Stretching
The study participants included 239 Aetna employees in California and Connecticut who volunteered for the two mind-body stress reduction programs. As part of the studies, 96 employees were randomly assigned to mindfulness-based classes, 90 were randomly assigned to therapeutic yoga classes and 53 were randomly assigned to the control group.
The Affordable Care Act recognizes the benefits of wellness which also includes alternative medicines such as yoga, massage therapy, acupuncture etc. Long awaited guidance on how employers can institute a wellness program using financial incentives and discounts were released recently – Final Wellness Incentive Rule Released.
Does your company offer a wellness program? For more information, you may review the final rulesin their entirety. For MMS Corp previous blogs on wellness, clickhere. we will keep you posted on future PPACA wellness program opportunities. Ask us for more info on Aetna Wellness, Yoga, and how we can help you implement a healthy program for your staff.
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The views expressed in this post do not necessarily reflect the official policy, position, or opinions of MMS Corp. This update is provided for informational purposes. Please consult with a licensed accountant or attorney regarding any legal and tax matters discussed herein.
Final Wellness Incentive Rule Released. Final rules set forth the criteria for wellness programsoffered in connection with group health plans that must be satisfied in order for the plan to qualify for an exception to the prohibition on discrimination based on health status under the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). The final rules will be effective for plan years beginning on or after January 1, 2014.
Many employers already offered incentives for employees participating in wellness programs. The main change in the new rule is an increase in the maximum incentive levels for several PPACA designated programs. For smoking cessation efforts, employers will be allowed to offer a reward or penalty of up to 50% of an employee’s health plan cost. For all other wellness programs, the number will be 30%, up from the current 20%. These increases are intended to promote healthy behavior which in turn, advocates claim, reduce health care spending.
Key Highlights Significant provisions included in the final rules include:
Increasing the maximum permissible reward under a health-contingent wellness program, from 20% to 30% of the cost of coverage;
Further increasing the maximum permissible reward for wellness programs designed to prevent or reduce tobacco use, from 20% to 50% of the cost of coverage; and
Clarifications regarding the reasonable design of health-contingent wellness programs and the reasonable alternatives they must offer in order to avoid prohibited discrimination.
Types of Participatory Wellness Programs The final rules continue to divide wellness programs into two categories:
1)”participatory wellness programs,” which are a majority of wellness programs,
2)and “health-contingent wellness programs.”
A participatory wellness program is one that either does not provide a reward or does not include any conditions for obtaining a reward that are based on an individual satisfying a standard related to a health factor. These include programs that reimburse for the cost of membership in a fitness center; provide a reward to employees for attending a monthly, no-cost health education seminar; or reward employees who complete a health risk assessment, without requiring them to take further action.
Participatory wellness programs are generally permissible under the HIPAA nondiscrimination rules, provided they are available to all similarly situated individuals regardless of health status.
Health-Contingent Wellness Programs In contrast, a health-contingent wellness program requires an individual to satisfy a standard related to a health factor to obtain a reward. This standard may be performing or completing an activity (an “activity-only wellness program”), or it may be attaining or maintaining a specific health outcome (an “outcome-based wellness program”).
Examples of health-contingent wellness programs include programs that provide a reward to those who do not use, or decrease their use of, tobacco, or programs that reward those who achieve a specified health-related goal, such as a specified cholesterol level, weight, or body mass index, as well as those who fail to meet such goals but take certain other healthy actions.
In order to qualify for an exception to the HIPAA nondiscrimination rules, health-contingent wellness programs must meet five additional standards related to frequency of opportunity to qualify; size of the reward; reasonable design; uniform availability and reasonable alternative standards; and notice of the availability of reasonable alternative standards.
Example
The final rule provides an example of how this reward/penalty might work:
An employer sponsors a group health plan. The annual premium for employee-only coverage is $6,000 (of which the employer pays $4,500 per year and the employee pays $1,500 per year). The plan offers employees a health-contingent wellness program with several components, focused on exercise, blood sugar, weight, cholesterol, and blood pressure. The reward for compliance is an annual premium rebate of $600…[T]he plan also imposes an additional $2,000 tobacco premium surcharge on employees who have used tobacco in the last 12 months and who have not enrolled in the plan’s tobacco cessation program (Those who participate…are not assessed the $2,000 surcharge).
The total of all the rewards (including the absence of a surcharge for participating in the tobacco program) is $2,600…which does not exceed the applicable percentage of 50% of the total annual cost of employee-only coverage ($6,000 x 50%=$3,000). Tested separately, the $600 reward for the wellness program [excluding] tobacco use does not exceed the applicable percentage of 30 percent of the total annual cost of employee-only coverage ($6,000 x 30%=$1,800).
In excellent article in the Atlantic –The Future of Getting Paid to Be Healthy“Incentive programs are not wellness programs,” said Dr. Ronald Goetzel, Director of Emory University’s Institute for Health and Productivity Research and President and CEO of The Health Project. “That can be a component, when done smartly, of a comprehensive program, but if that’s all your program is going to be, you’re going to fail miserably, and people are going to be resentful,” he explained. According to Goetzel — who has studied worksite wellness programs at large corporations such as Dow Chemical and Johnson & Johnson, and is being funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to study best practices in the field — incentive programs can help get people excited about health and keep them on track, but ultimately people’s habits will only change if they are given the resources to change them and if the workplace norms and environments change.
Without the other pieces to facilitate behavior change — healthy cafeterias, opportunities to exercise, flexible work hours, supportive leadership and middle managers, and health risk assessments and coaching — incentive programs will only penalize, not change, those who are least healthy.
For more information, you may review the final rules in their entirety. For MMS Corp previous blogs on wellness, click here. we will keep you posted on future PPACA wellness program opportunities. In the meantime, please visit to view past blogs and Legislative Alerts at https://360peo.com/feed.
The views expressed in this post do not necessarily reflect the official policy, position, or opinions of MMS Corp. This update is provided for informational purposes. Please consult with a licensed accountant or attorney regarding any legal and tax matters discussed herein.
Want to cook up a plan to keep your immune system in tip-top shape? Some experts believe that even slight deficiencies in certain nutrients can lower our defenses. hile an apple a day is a good start, it definitely takes a bigger — and brighter — cornucopia to boost your disease-fighting ability. Here below are natural best foods to boost immunity.
Quick, Don’t Get Sick! We’ve all been there: We feel a cold coming on, so we start popping megadoses of vitamin C. We’ve been doing it for decades even though there’s little evidence to suggest it will keep us from getting sick. According to the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, which looked at 30 trials involving a total of 11,350 participants,vitamin Chad no effect on how often people caught colds. It did slightly reduce the cold’s duration — by 8 percent, or roughly 9.5 hours for a five-day illness — but only if taken before symptoms arose.
However, a Canadian over-the-counter pill (available in the U.S.) called COLD-fX, made from North American ginseng, has shown dramatic results. Healthy people reduced their risk of colds by 56 percent, the severity by 31 percent and duration by 35 percent. And in nursing home seniors, it reduced their risk of the flu by 89 percent. The only downside: You have to take it twice a day for the entire cold and flu season (four months).
Color of Health A healthy diet full of antioxidant-rich fruits and vegetables is a vital part of a well-functioning immune system. Antioxidants are food-based chemicals, such as vitamins and minerals, that neutralize free radicals in our bloodstream. Free radicals — toxic by-products of digestion, pollution and cigarette smoke — damage DNA, cause many types of cancer and suppress the immune system.
Eating fortified, processed foods, supplemented with a multivitamin, might get you all of the vitamins you need, but, explains Joel Fuhrman, MD, author of Eat for Health and Eat to Live, we’re depriving ourselves of thousands of micronutrients that we haven’t even discovered yet. “It’s very hard to duplicate Mother Nature,” he says. “More than half of the micronutrients in plants are phytochemicals, not vitamins.” Phytochemicals are compounds produced by plants to protect themselves from environmental stresses like UV damage. Research shows that by eating foods rich in phytochemicals, we can boost our health as well. According to Dr. Fuhrman, these chemicals keep our cells from aging, while some even cause cancer cells to self-destruct. A few of the heavy hitters you’ve probably heard of include lycopene (tomatoes), polyphenols (tea) and resveratrol (grapes). Broccoli and other cruciferous vegetables, like cabbage, brussels sprouts and cauliflower, contain some of the most powerful cancer fighters that we know of — actually shrinking tumors in laboratory experiments.
For the best protection, David Katz, MD, MPH, director of the Yale University Prevention Center, and Dr. Fuhrman recommend eating a wide variety of fruits and vegetables that cover the entire color spectrum. “Foods work together to maximize immune function, which then prolongs health and helps prevent chronic disease,” Dr. Fuhrman says.
Good Fat, Bad Fat To beef up your immune system, try to reduce the amount of red meat and saturated fat that you eat, and replace them with fish andomega-3 fatty acids, recommends Charles Stephensen, PhD, a research scientist with the USDA at the Western Human Nutrition Research Center. “Saturated fats activate the immune system, promote inflammation and are associated with increased cardiovascular risk,” Dr. Stephensen says.
Inflammation occurs when the immune system senses an intruder, so in a sense, these fats make the body think there’s an invader that has to be isolated and wiped out. Chronic inflammation can result in Alzheimer’s, diabetes, heart disease and arthritis.
“Omega-3s, on the other hand, seem to have the opposite effect on the immune system,” Dr. Stephensen says. Eating fatty fish or taking afish oil supplement (one to two grams a day) reduces levels of inflammation in the body.
D Is for Defense When we talk about boosting the immune system, what we’re really discussing is making it run optimally, Dr. Stephensen says. Once an infection or virus is gone, the immune system needs to be able to stop its attack. An overactive response can lead to autoimmune diseases, where the body turns on itself, attacking its own tissue as if it were a foreign threat. Some examples are rheumatoid arthritis, type 1 diabetes and lupus. According to Dr. Stephensen, it is now suspected that a vitamin D deficiency may increase our risk of flu and worsen the effects of autoimmune diseases. “Vitamin D can act directly on the immune system. It seems to be able to protect against bacterial infections and regulate our immune response. A deficiency allows an overstimulation of the system,” he explains.
Vitamin D is produced in our body when our skin absorbs the sun’s ultraviolet rays. Because it’s present in very few foods, and sunscreen blocks the sun’s effects, it’s very difficult to get your daily recommended dose. In fact, a recent study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine reports that 75 percent of U.S. teenagers and adults are vitamin D deficient. What’s more, Dr. Stephensen says that the recommended daily allowance, which ranges from 200 to 600 IU, depending on your age, may be too low. Thomas Morledge, MD, of the Center for Integrative Medicine at the Cleveland Clinic,recommends aiming for 1,000 IU daily. Although higher doses may be needed, this should be guided by your doctor. Good sources include fortified milk and fish; a 3.5-ounce serving of salmon contains 360 IU, while a glass of milk has about 100 IU. Ten minutes of sun (sans sunscreen) is also a good source of vitamin D. That said, Dr. Morledge recommends that everyone take a vitamin D supplementsince it’s unlikely you will get your required daily allowance through food and limited, unprotected sun exposure.
Is EmblemHealth (GHI formerly) leaving the small business market? Yes and no. The popular traditional EPO is slated to be chopped up for new business May 1 pending State approval. The remaining consumer driven health plans which have deductibles and coinsurance (a %) will stay in tact. With that Broker compensation commissions will be significantly cut as well. The family popular 2-tier rating is also phased out and new groups must submit everything clean within 30 days.
Our quote in todays Crains Health Pulse Crains EmblemHealth pulls small business plans Feb 2013 | Crain’s New York Businessreflects our deep concerns on market consolidations. “The unintended consequences of legislative changes has created a de facto single-payer system where Oxford is empowered to dictate to the New York market,” said Alex Miller, founder of Millennium Medical Solutions Corp. in Armonk, N.Y. To be fair Emblem has been steadily streamlining plans with in network only plan offerings and lowest HSA (Health Savings Account) family deductible starting out at $11,600. They are not the first insurer to do this as Empire Blue Crossissued a broader exit back in Nov 2011.
A healthy health insurance marketplace depends on competition as we all agree. From approximately 12 insurers 15 years ago we are today down to 2 active insurers Aetna and Oxford with Oxford claiming approx 2/3 of the small business marketplace. In NYS theMLR(Minimum Loss Ratios) are higher than any other state with additional state taxes. See NYS Surcharge on Health Insurance. The tight State Regulators allowing for razor thin margins while requiring insurers to maintain high reserves makes a burden many insurers are not excited. This resembles more of a utility company environment except ConEd realizes a 10% operating profit and do not have to have insurance reserves to prove solvency. Is there any surprise why there is no rush by outside insurers to compete here?
While on topic of ConEd we all know how customer care was in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. When was the last time an independent veteran consultant (not an ESCO) worked with you on your utility bill, servicing, negotiating, educating, and maximizing savings? Sure you can use a different supplier or ESCO but its still the local singular utility company that you are using. In comparison, same is happening in the health insurance field and the consequential exit of Health Insurance Brokers. Sadly, this is precisely the time when their training is most in demand and the most in need will be least likely to afford them.
Mosquitoes, fleas and other small bugs
Spiders
