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Health care costs are expected to increase by 10.6% into side by side year, the smallest increase in six years, according to a report by Aon Consulting Worldwide, the AP/Baltimore Sun reports. For the report, study managing director Bill Sharon, a senior vice president of the United States at Aon, and colleagues surveyed nigh 70 U.S. health insurers regarding their 12-month evaluation periods origin this twelvemonth between April and September. According to the AP/Sun, costs go along to rise to maintain pace with increasing affected role demand for services, necessities for an aging U.S. population and higher prescription drug and technology costs.
The 10.6% projection is slightly smaller than Aon's 2007 forecast of 10.9% and is far lower than 2002 estimates of more than 16% (AP/Baltimore Sun, 8/12). However, the health care growth rate inactive outstrips the national rate of inflation, the San Francisco Chronicle reports. Aon officials aforesaid that employers could reduce the increment rate of their wellness care costs by three to four percentage points by instituting cost containment strategies, such as health and disease management programs (Colliver, San Francisco Chronicle, 8/12).
According to the AP/Sun, experts aver the written report indicates that nationwide efforts to reduce health costs have been effective. Sharon said that employer health programs stimulate helped reduce health care cost increment. In addition, he aforesaid that efforts by health care providers also have contributed to curbing growth. Robert Zirkelbach of America's Health Insurance Plans aforesaid that health insurers have contributed by enacting disease management programs and encouraging plan enrollees to manipulation generic drugs instead of more expensive, brand-name drugs.
Health care monetary value growth has declined each year since 2002, according to Aon forecasts. However, Sharon said that the reductions in growth make gotten littler each twelvemonth, signaling that current cost-containment strategies are reaching their maximum potential (AP/Baltimore Sun, 8/12).
Reprinted with kind permission from http://www.kaisernetwork.org. You bathroom view the entire Kaiser Daily Health Policy Report, search the archives, or sign up for electronic mail delivery at http://www.kaisernetwork.
Saturday 23 August 2008
Wednesday 13 August 2008
Thug or Tame? Rappers Stray From Street
It used to be that you could take the rapper extinct of the hood merely not the hood out of the rapper.
But what happens when the rapper leaves the streets of Los Angeles for the gold-plated paths of Bollywood?
(ABC News)More Photos
Snoop Dogg, the West Coast doorknocker who ran with the Crips crew and served time for selling cocain, traded his baggy jeans for a slim-fit kurta and his cornrows for a diamond-studded turban to appear in "Singh Is Kinng," a Bollywood moving-picture show that scarce hit theaters in limited release. He raps on the film's title cut, spitting lines like "Yo, what up. This Big Snoop Dogg. Represent the Punjabi," and "What up to all the ladies hanging kO'd in Mumbai."
What up, so: In a video posted online, Snoop said he'd like to follow up the "Singh Is Kinng" track, already bumping in bars and clubs crosswise India, with a tour.
"Snoop Dogg has a portion of fans in India and I love 'em right back," he said. "Get ready for me."
Of course, Snoop's far from the first-class honours degree rapper to look extraneous the hip-hop community to raise his pop culture quotient. Diddy pioneered that trend.
Among Diddy's host of ventures: developing reality series for MTV and VH1, endorsing high-end Ciroc vodka, starring in the Broadway production-cum-Emmy-nominated TV movie "A Raisin in the Sun" and putting out a line of fragrances, the latest of which will be called, simply, "I Am King."
Jay-Z followed in his footsteps. He co-owns the chain of 40/40 Clubs and the New Jersey Nets and latterly sealed a game-changing $150 million handle with concert promoter Live Nation, which promises to finance his entertainment ventures for the next 10 years, however vast they may be.
But some of the up-to-the-minute partnerships 'tween rappers and pop culture seem downright bizarre. Snoop Dogg rapping in a Bollywood film and starring in an E! reality show? LL Cool J designing a kids article of clothing line for Sears? Aren't these guys supposed to be thug?
Apparently, it actually ain't null but a G thang -- that's G as in august, not mobster. With the recording manufacture unsure exactly how to monetize music, rappers demand to go where there's money to be made and a market to be tapped, whether it's the children's clothing department, the South Asian subcontinent or reality TV, street cred be damned.
"It's very much a sign of how times have changed in the hip-hop world," said James Auburn, a hip-hop historian. "MC Hammer did a lot of product endorsements. He was considered a sellout and not true to his base, merely now rappers can startle their have clothing lines and make all the money in the cosmos. It's
Wednesday 6 August 2008
Thursday 26 June 2008
Thursday 19 June 2008
Mattafix
Artist: Mattafix
Genre(s):
Other
Discography:
Signs Of A Struggle
Year: 2005
Tracks: 14
Though Mattafix's Marlon Roudette and Preetesh Hirji come from different backgrounds (Roudette grew up on the island of St. Vincent, where he studied the steel drums, spell Hirji was born to Indian parents in London and was spell-bound by the reckoner), as a band they play urban, poppy music that fits in perfectly on European radio receiver. After merging each other ane day in a transcription studio apartment, the two became friends and decided to take off a ring. Calling themselves Mattafix, a derivative instrument of the West Indian construction "matter fixed," the chemical group released the unmarried "Big City Life" in the summer of 2005, and the song, a mix of island beat and unobjectionable production, was shortly existence played crossways Continental airwaves. Their debut uncut, Signs of a Struggle, came out a few months later, and after a year or so of touring Mattafix began writing and recording their next LP, Rhythm & Hymns. Though the album came out in November of 2007, the duo released the charity individual "Living Darfur" in collaboration with the groups Save Darfur and Crisis Action, in hopes of upbringing sentience about the ongoing conflict there.
Louis Chen and Ya Dong
Wednesday 4 June 2008
My Blueberry Nights - movie review
It's always a tightrope when foreign filmmakers, particularly those from the Hong
Kong market, come to American shores to ply their trade. Though it doesn't appear
that Wong Kar Wai is going to be setting up shop permanently in Hollywood (nobody's
going to be after him to direct the next Die Hard installment), My Blueberry Nights marks his
first English-language film, with an entirely American and British cast. It shows
that the director is not just a foreign-language specialty, his gifts are quite apparent
even when the veil of mystery is lifted for English-speaking audiences once the subtitles
are gone. However, My Blueberry Nights also shows that for all Wong's rightly vaunted
abilities and passionate sense of cinema, there are some glaringly obvious rough
patches in his approach, brought into sharp relief by transplanting the action from
the teeming streets of Hong Kong to the wide open spaces of America, where his instincts
for actors seem less sure.
An odd road movie of sorts that spends most of its time hanging around in diners,
bars, and casinos (and precious little of it on the road), My Blueberry Nights will be
noted in many quarters for it being the feature film-acting debut of jazz chanteuse
Norah Jones. To put it briefly: No actress is she. Playing a lovelorn young woman
named Elizabeth, she first shows up in a Brooklyn diner run by Jeremy, a charming Manches
ter immigrant played with the expected lighthearted dash by Jude Law. In the middle
of a breakup, Elizabeth moons about the caf� eating the excellent pie (best in the
city!) and chatting with Jeremy, winning his heart even as hers is breaking over some
body else. Then Elizabeth ups and skips out, landing next in Memphis, where she waitresses
at a caf� and a bar, telling everyone she's working two jobs to save up for a car.
Although the first segment is supposed to be this episodic tale's romantic backbone,
it stands in weak relief against the Memphis-set scenes. There, Elizabeth meets a
sad drunk named Arnie, played with masterful ease by David Strathairn, who seems
able to wring more pathos out of a glance than Law can in three pages worth of dialogue.
The stormy cause of Arnie's trauma, his ex-wife, comes whipping into the bar in the
form of Rachel Weisz, performing here on utter screaming overdrive and ratcheting
what had been a moody jazz number up into a raucous electric blues howler. Later, Elizabeth
washes up in the Nevada desert at a down-at-the-heels casino where she falls in with
a bleach-blonde cardsharp played by Natalie Portman with all the jagged edges of
a young Sharon Stone. Meanwhile, Elizabeth sends cryptic postcards back to Jeremy,
pining handsomely behind his diner counter.
The whole affair can appear terribly artificial, of course, what with all those iconic
bar and diner scenes, the wind-whipped desert of Nevada sequence, and the soundtrack
of Ry Cooder, Motown, and jazz standards by Jones herself. Wong keeps himself from fa
lling down the same trap of freeze-dried Americana that some foreign directors like
Wim Wenders always seem to do, and he's able to do that by hewing to the same kind
of potent heartbreak that nailed down overstylized romances like In the Mood for
Love and 2046. True, the look of My Blueberry Nights suffers somewhat from not having Wong's
usual cinematographer Christopher Doyle on deck, but Darius Khondji does admirable
work nonetheless (those close-ups of ice-cream melting in rivulets into pie). Wong's
decision to film on location across the country pays off also; although he could have easily
reconstructed most of the film's sets on a Toronto backlot, there is a certain grit
of authenticity visible behind these admittedly melodramatic stories (scripted with
a pulp writer's punch and occasional laziness by mystery author Lawrence Block).
What doesn't work in any way, really, is Jones herself. Given the dialogue's sometimes
over-obvious nature, Jones's blank expression and dull line readings bring little
to the party; she is only occasionally juiced into more expressive performance when
the actor playing opposite (particularly Strathairn and Portman) is working in overdrive.
It's a nearly soulless bit of acting, and frustrating because of how it hampers the
film from ever really taking flight. As a first English-language film, My Blueberry
Nights is mostly a success, though set apart from Wong's previous work in that it won't
have people coming back over and over again. The film does, however, whet one's appetite
for what might come next.
It's the rhubarb days that get you down.
See Also
Friday 30 May 2008
Institute
Artist: Institute
Genre(s):
Rock: Pop-Rock
Discography:
Distort Yourself
Year: 2005
Tracks: 12
Color Yourself, Institute's September 2005 debut, marked Gavin Rossdale's return to rock, as he hadn't been heard from much since Bush's 2001 album Halcyon State. The cast opposite his famously pebbly vocals with guitar player Chris Traynor (Orange 9mm, latter-day Helmet) and bassist Cache Tolman (CIV, Rival Schools), and Color Yourself featured production from Helmet founder Page Hamilton. Institute got an early promotional boost when Rob Cohen featured the track single, "Twine Yourself," in his summer 2005 activity extravaganza Stealing.
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