individual insurance

Related Articles
New York Times Examines Massachusetts Individual Health Insurance Mandate	27 November 2007
The New York Times on Sunday examined the progress of the Massachusetts law requiring individuals to obtain health coverage, and the lessons it may provide for the presidential campaign and efforts in other states. [click link for full article]
Older U.S. Adults Often Cannot Obtain Affordable Individual Health Insurance Policies	22 November 2007
U.S. adults ages 50 to 64 often cannot obtain affordable individual health insurance policies as they reach a "prime age to start developing health problems," the San Francisco Chronicle reports. According to the AARP Public Policy Institute, more than seven million adults ages 50 to 64, or about 14% of U.S. residents, did not have health insurance in 2005. [click link for full article]
California Fines Health Net $1M For Lying About Linking Employee Bonuses To Policy Cancellations	19 November 2007
The California Department of Managed Health Care on Thursday fined Health Net $1 million for lying to state investigators about paying employees bonuses based on the number of individual health insurance policies they canceled, the San Francisco Chronicle reports (Colliver, San Francisco Chronicle, 11/16). [click link for full article]
Documents Show Health Net Linked Some Bonus Pay To Meeting, Exceeding Policy Cancellation Targets	13 November 2007
California-based Health Net paid its senior analyst in charge of policy cancellations more than $20,000 in bonuses based in part on meeting or exceeding targets for rescinding individual health insurance policies, according to court documents released Thursday, the Los Angeles Times reports. [click link for full article]
Health Insurers Targeting Marketing Efforts At Older Adults	05 November 2007
Health insurance companies increasingly are focusing marketing efforts for individual policies on the estimated seven million uninsured U.S. residents between the ages of 50 and 64 -- a group they once had "a history of avoiding" because of costly claims for health conditions that frequently affect that age group, the AP/Boston Herald reports. [click link for full article]
Senior Sales Executive – Asset Mgmt Software Sales	01 November 2007
Senior Sales Executive – Asset Mgmt Software London 50-75k Base, 150k uncapped OTE + Bens With established offices in The US, Europe and the Far East our client is well placed to serve the worlds leading financial districts. This growing company delivers and maintains trading platforms for some of the largest bankers, brokers and hedge funds worldwide. Due to continued growth they now have an immediate need for a Business Development Manager to lead sales from their London office. As a Senior Sales professional you will responsible as an individual contributor to secure business across an EMEA territory. This will be achieved through a mix of new and existing business, the generation of new license agreements and the renewal and upgrade of existing accounts within the hedge fund, banking, asset management, government and insurance sectors. The ideal candidate will posses a minimum and quantifiable track record of at least 5-6 years of progressive “hands on” sales experience in derivative software products. You will also be an over-achiever with the communication, presentation and relationship management skills to liaise, influence and create opportunities at senior levels. The successful candidate can expect a base salary commensurate with experience in the 50-75k range plus a truly uncapped 150k OTE. Additionally there is an executive benefits package available. Certus Sales Limited is a specialist sales recruitment consultancy with an impressive client portfolio covering opportunities in the following areas: Telecommunication, Business Information, Media, I.T and many more. Vacancy levels recruited include Sales Director, Sales Manager, Account Manager, Sales Executive, New Business Development, Field, Territory and Telesales opportunities. To find out more about us please visit certussales.com
Advocates: Gov't needs to push harder for e-health	26 October 2007
The U.S. government needs to step up its push for electronic health records because they are not being adopted quickly enough, a group of health advocates said Friday.U.S. healthcare providers continue to make errors that hurt tens of thousands of patients each year, and e-health records could prevent many of those problems, said Dr. Alan Lotvin, senior vice president of oncology for Magellan Health Services Inc. The U.S. healthcare system is failing patients "despite the fact we have the knowledge and the technology to really do a much, much better job."About 3.5 percent of all U.S. hospital stays have a drug error associated with them, leading to more than 100,000 significant medical problems and nearly 30,000 deaths each year, said Lotvin, speaking at an e-health forum sponsored by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) and the Health IT Now Coalition.U.S. residents should have a "sense of outrage" when confronted with these prescription errors, which would largely be prevented with e-health records, Lotvin said. He compared the U.S. health-care system's record to Amazon.com, which received 2,000 orders per minute during the 2005 holiday shopping season."I use Amazon a lot -- I have never gotten the wrong book," he said. "We can't seem to get the pills from the pharmacy in the basement to Mrs. Smith in room 631 correctly. This is not acceptable."Lotvin called on the U.S. Congress to pass legislation that would mandate that healthcare providers report their error rates. He also called for a law that would require healthcare providers that have made mistakes on a patient to pay for any subsequent care required. Many medical errors can result in long hospital stays or expensive procedures, and in many cases, patients or their insurance providers pay, he said."You break it, you fix it," he said. "That's a very simple concept. It's been around in china shops for years."In addition, the ITIF, in a report released Friday, recommended several steps Congress could take to encourage the adoption of e-health records:* Congress should pass legislation that supports the adoption of national health data standards. The report mentioned two bills that provide funding and organization at a national level, the Wired for Health Care Quality Act in the Senate, and the Promoting Health Information Technology Act in the House of Representatives.* Congress should pass a bill to support the creation of health record data banks, data centers where individual patients could store and control their health data. The Independent Health Record Trust Act in the House would regulate data bank operators, prohibiting them from charging fees to health-care providers for accessing or updating an e-health record upon permission of the patient.* The U.S. government should lead by example by covering the monthly access fees at health record data banks for patients covered by government-funded programs such as Medicare and the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP).* Congress should allow patients free access to e-health records held by healthcare providers. Currently, medical privacy laws allow patients to get paper copies of their medical records, but healthcare providers can charge fees for copying and mailing those records. Congress should phase out those fees, a measure that would encourage doctors to move to electronic records, ITIF said.Currently, only about 25 percent of U.S. doctors use e-health records, and only about 10 percent of them have e-health records fully integrated into their practices, ITIF said. But in Sweden, 90 percent of doctors use e-health records, and in Denmark, 88 percent do, according to the ITIF.That shows that adoption in the U.S. is a matter of the right policies and incentives, said Robert Atkinson, ITIF's president. "This is not rocket science," he said.More people need to push Congress to create incentives for e-health records, added Nancy Johnson, a former U.S. representative and co-chairwoman of the Health IT Now Coalition."Why, when we know this would help so much, are we not doing it?" Johnson said. "We know how to deliver a higher quality of care, and we're not doing it."
Reports Examine Health Insurance Reform, Single-Payer System NEJM Perspective Discusses New Medicare Reimbursement Rule	19 October 2007
"A Roadmap to Health Insurance for All: Principles for Reform," The Commonwealth Fund: The report describes how health care proposals by presidential candidates and lawmakers fall into three general types: tax incentives and individual markets; mixed private-public group insurance with shared responsibility for financing; and public insurance. [click link for full article]
U.S. Should Move Away From Employer-Based Health Care Coverage, Op-Ed States	16 October 2007
As the U.S. "prepares for the next great debate on its ailing health care system, support is growing for a shift from the traditional employer-based financing to publicly subsidized individual health insurance," Washington Post columnist David Broder writes in an opinion piece. [click link for full article]
Security vendors bring zombie fighters to life	04 October 2007
(InfoWorld) - Data leakage prevention might currently be the hottest IT security submarket, but vendors are also tuning up their product offerings to help customers ward off the presence of botnet-infected zombie computers. As botnet operators continue to advance the sophistication of their attacks and the manner in which they use and manipulate their armies of infected devices, businesses are asking technology providers for new defense mechanisms, vendors claim, with both anti-virus market leader Symantec and network security specialist Arbor Networks introducing new products to address the problem this week. Symantec -- which only last week launched its much awaited Endpoint Protection integrated desktop security suite that promises to help identify botnet-feeding malware, among many other things -- introduced a new botnet-fighting technique that is its offering at no extra charge to customers of its MSS (Managed Security Services). In essence, the company is promising to begin correlating botnet data gathered by its 40,000-sensor-strong Global Intelligence Network with behavior detection tools it has running inside its services customers to look for zombie network activity. The process involves the piecing together its collective intelligence about known botnet command and control centers, the malware programs that are used to propagate the attacks, and the type of behavior on corporate networks that indicates the presence of infected machines to help customers keep their PCs from getting caught up in the threats. "We're collecting data from firewalls, network intrusion detection systems, host intrusion protection systems, and another of other technologies in real time and feeding that into our data centers where it can be correlated to look for botnet activity," said Grant Geyer, vice president of MSS at Symantec. "This allows us to look at all the destination IP addresses for network traffic and compare that to our lists of botnet command centers to find matches we might otherwise miss." According to Symantec's most recent Internet Security Threat Report, published in September, the company's sensors detected more than 5 million distinct botnet-infected computers during the first six months of 2007, which represents roughly a 7 percent increase when compared to the same period last year. Heightening the issue is the speed at which botnet operators are changing the locations of their command and control centers, which act as the brains of the distributed zombie computer systems. The average command and control center stays up and running for only four days at a time at this point, according to Symantec's latest research. Geyer said that one of the biggest misconceptions among customers is that IDSes (intrusion detection systems) are sufficient to protect their networks from botnets. He said that unless the tools have been configured perfectly, they can be easily circumvented by the attacks. "There's a pretty good chance that the more advanced botnet programs can get around IDS, and firewalls only offer secondary signs of infection. If the only indicator of an infection is data leaving the network on a port, then there's no chance that IDS will see it," Geyer said. "But, when we gather all this intelligence together and compare it to latest command center blacklists, it's pretty easy to tell what's going on when this traffic is heading to known botnet servers." While Symantec has essentially been conducting the same work in a more manual fashion to ward off botnets for some time, automating the process should help protect customers from zombie attacks even as they are unfolding, he said. Arbor catches botnets further upstream Arbor, which markets technologies used by enterprises, ISPs, and other carriers to monitor for attacks in the traffic flowing over large networks, launched an updated version of its PeakFlow SP platform, which includes new capabilities for sniffing out botnets. Among the upgrades to the package that will help its customers separate zombie activity from legitimate traffic are new capabilities that give network operators the ability to see what type of applications are responsible for individual packets of data, company officials said. In addition to helping carriers and large enterprises figure out how to best align their network resources to adjust to the growing adoption of emerging technologies like VoIP, the latest version of PeakFlow will allow the companies to identify botnet attacks before they ever reach end-users, cutting off the threats further upstream, said Rob Malan, Arbor's co-founder and CTO. "We're finding that with all the latent firepower in the networks, there are greater numbers of botnet controlled endpoints. You have all these homes and offices that have been connected to broadband, and they're being targeted, and dealing with the problem is at the top of a lot of the carriers' priorities," Malan said. Industry watchers said that customers are looking for ways to fight the botnet issue but contend that they remain wary of being forced to pay for additional products to address the problem. In that sense, Symantec's addition of the botnet-fighting service at no extra charge to its services customers and Arbor's play to arm carriers with defense mechanisms to protect users upstream could be well received by enterprises. Andrew Jaquith, a security analyst for Yankee Group, said that many large corporations remain unaware of botnet activity on their networks, as evidenced by the "30 Days of Bots on the Fortune 500" project carried out by software maker Support Intelligence, which has recently highlighted the presence of zombie PCs on IP addresses controlled by massive firms, including Intel, Nationwide Insurance, and Bank of America. Jaquith said that while more of the infections are being discovered all the time, he believes that the undiscovered botnet issue may be the biggest untold security story of 2007. The analyst said that customers are desperate for any way that they can prevent the attacks, but he believes that if carriers attempt to turn anti-botnet technologies into paid services, then enterprises might begin pushing back. "It's encouraging to see activity that's looking to solve the problem, but it's hard to tell if there will be a market for paid products and services, especially when the industry could use some simpler root cause techniques to address it instead of adding technology," Jaquith said. "Enterprises like those named by Support Intelligence might have an interest, and for carriers it makes sense if they approach it the right way, but they might find that they do not get good a reception from enterprises if they're looking to add more charges." The analyst contends that carriers should be the parties responsible for protecting customers against botnets and that they could already do so if they adopted more of a white-list style approach to the types of traffic they allow onto their users' networks. "I'm not sure if the world needs more solutions to solve this problem; what would really be helpful would be if carriers would stop pretending that they simply provide dumb pipes that deliver traffic," he said. "The approach shouldn't be charging for extra services to keep the network clean," Jaquith said. "It would be much better if they were to limit the types of acceptable traffic in general and deny anything unusual unless customers want to pay for extra services because they support the types of traffic in which the botnet attacks are typically hidden."