Science Education & Policy

An analysis from the University of Colorado School of Medicine shows patients with Medicaid insurance seeking care in an emergency department may be driven by lack of alternatives instead of the severity of their illness. With the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, millions of new patients will be enrolled in Medicaid and added to an already overburdened primary care system.   They suggest policy makers should focus on increasing timely access to primary care, especially for Medicaid beneficiaries. Improved care coordination between patients and emergency providers is also…

In the 1970s, during the heyday of progressive social engineering ideas like forced busing, education began to plummet.  President Jimmy Carter's solution to education woes was to create another layer of bureaucracy, and so the Department of Education was born.  They immediately made the National Education Association the most powerful force in education in America and education plummeted ever more. Things were so bad by 2001 that both Republicans and Democrats overwhelmingly authorized No Child Left Behind to try and improve things - and it worked, scores went up for all students…

In every country, centralized government is funded by mandatory public taxation and that means a layer of bureaucracy to go after tax evaders. It can obviously be good for the community - people get along better when they aren't micromanaging the finances of police and fire stations on a monthly basis. And in small communities, self-policing is easy. Everyone knows who the cheats are. In relatively large communities, it is more difficult - individuals do not always know who they are impacting and so some don't obey the rules and often exploit the willingness of others to cooperate.  But…

Sure, post-menopausal women and single men don't need maternity coverage but have to pay for it it anyway. But, the US government can now argue, half of all people are paying for coverage they don't need already. There's just one problem, argues a new report; while currently only a relative handful of the population has been able to sign up for the mandatory program, when lots of people do sign up for healthcare via the new health insurance exchanges set up by the federal and state governments, the fact that more than 80% of consumers may be unable to make a real estimate of their needs means…

http://news.sciencemag.http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2013/04/us-lawmaker-proposes-new-criteri-1.htmlorg/scienceinsider/2013/04/us-lawmaker-proposes-new-criteri-1.htmlNSF  

Social authoritarian cultures like San Francisco want to ban things and limit choice but when it comes to healthier kids, it doesn't require creating higher prices, more taxes or political fundamentalism regarding Happy Meals, it can just mean a few less french fries. That saves McDonald's a little money and kids won't notice the difference. Cornell marketing professor Dr. Brian Wansink and Dr. Andrew Hanks, also of Cornell, analyzed transaction data from 30 representative McDonald's restaurants and found that calories are unimportant to kids when eating. They're obviously important when it…

A paper in the journal Child Development says that children as young as 3 understand multi-digit numbers more than previously believed and may even be ready for direct math instruction when they enter school. This will have implications for the debate over education policy, where the chronic lament is that children are not being taught to the test enough and therefore only score in the middle on international standardized tests. "Contrary to the view that young children do not understand place value and multi-digit numbers, we found that they actually know quite a lot about it," said co-…

California academics have found that banning smoking - including inside the home and in entire cities - will reduce smoking. This makes sense. The death penalty also cuts recidivism of criminals by 100 percent, yet we don't use it for every crime. Meanwhile, Californians want to legalize marijuana, which involve smoking.  Wael K. Al-Delaimy, MD, PhD, professor and chief of the Division of Global Health in the UC San Diego Department of Family and Preventive Medicine, says a survey underscores the public health importance of smoking bans inside and outside the home as a way to change…

In America, where the Obama administration is using surveillance cameras, tracking website visits and monitoring citizens using GPS, many people feel their privacy is slipping away. It's no surprise that, if there is a choice, like with electronic health records, people out opt - at least until the Afforadable Care Act requires it. Already, health records and clinical tissues are being used for medical research purposes, even without patient consent but completely compliant with federal regulations.  With the continued development and importance of the University of Utah's…

There is culture cold war in America over education. One side says American kids are under-performing because teachers are not using agreed upon criteria and so students don't do as well as some other countries on international standardized tests. The other side says American kids are under-performing because the government wants to 'teach to the test' so students do better on international standardized tests. Both sides are manned by teachers, educational institutions and unions. Do tests adequately predict academic success? Not really. When American students took the first international…