“Amy Winehouse 'buys pregnancy tests' - Digital Spy” plus 4 more

Amy Winehouse 'buys pregnancy tests' - Digital Spy
Groups team up to host teen pregnancy sessions, block party - Carroll County Times
Tom Brady Confirms Gisele's Pregnancy - Fashion
Rationed care already exists - Detroit News
Experts address causes, treatment - Longview News-Journal

Amy Winehouse 'buys pregnancy tests' - Digital Spy

Posted: 12 Sep 2009 09:45 PM PDT

WENN

Amy Winehouse has sparked rumours that she is pregnant.

According to OK!, the singer was seen buying 12 pregnancy tests at her local shop.

A source said: "Amy insisted her minders took her to the supermarket. She's desperate to have a baby and talks of nothing else.

"She is adamant that Blake [Fielder-Civil] must be the father. She bought a dozen pregnancy kits, keeping her fingers crossed the whole time.

"Amy demanded everyone around her cross their fingers too."

Recent rumours have suggested that Winehouse's ex-husband Fielder-Civil has been dating both her and model Sophie Schandorff.

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Groups team up to host teen pregnancy sessions, block party - Carroll County Times

Posted: 12 Sep 2009 05:34 PM PDT

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Westminster resident Anissa Magruder's mother had her when she was 17 years old. Because of that, Magruder knows of the financial and emotional struggles that many teenage mothers face. That's why teen pregnancy is an important topic to her ...

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Tom Brady Confirms Gisele's Pregnancy - Fashion

Posted: 12 Sep 2009 02:14 PM PDT

After months of speculation and an obviously growing baby bump, Tom Brady has finally confirmed that his wife Gisele Bündchen is pregnant.In an interview with ESPN's Chris Berman airing this Sunday on SportsCenter and Monday Night Countdown, the New England Patriots quarterback reveals that the couple are expecting their first child in December.While Brady said he would happily attend Lamaze classes with Bündchen, he does have one potential scheduling conflict: "I told her no Sundays," he jokes. "It couldn't be harder than training camp, so I'll be prepared."The baby will be the first for Bündchen and the second for Brady, who has a 2-year-old son John Edward Thomas with ex-girlfriend Bridget Moynahan.

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Rationed care already exists - Detroit News

Posted: 12 Sep 2009 10:21 PM PDT

Clarence Page

"Rationing" is one of the scariest words in the current health care debate.

It conjures up apocalyptic nightmare images from "Soylent Green," the sci-fi thriller about a future in which the old and weak are quietly lured into early extinction for the sake of future generations.

What the scaremongers don't like to talk about is how much our private insurers ration now -- mostly for the sake of their own profits.

They're clever enough to avoid using the R-word. They use other words, like "Read the fine print on your policy."

My friend Sarah Wildman learned the hard way. She's the new mom with what she calls a "$20,000 baby."

That's how much she and her husband had to pay out of their own pockets after her insurer decided her baby was a "pre-existing condition."

Self-employed, Sarah and her husband fall into the individual insurance market, which the American Medical Association estimates to be as high as 27 million people.

Falling between the fully covered and the uncovered, their numbers have grown faster as thousands of Americans lose their job-based insurance every day.

Some of them are women who discover the hard way, as Sarah did, that if you bought maternity coverage after the pregnancy began, the fetus is viewed as an uncovered "pre-existing condition."

The Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978 requires employers with more than 15 workers to include maternity benefits in their insurance packages. But only 14 states require maternity coverage in policies sold on the individual market, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.

And a report last fall by the National Women's Law Center found only 12 percent of 3,500 individual insurance policies included comprehensive maternity coverage. Another 20 percent offered it with a rider that cost as much as $1,100 a month. Others required a two-year waiting period.

Fortunately Sarah's story had a happy ending. She's a freelance writer for magazines like The New Republic, The New York Times, The American Prospect and the online publication Slate.

When she told the company's press rep she was going to write about their "crappy" maternity policy, "I got kicked up the food chain."

In the end, she reports, she was able to get 90 percent of her hospital costs paid by the company, which also promised to adjust claims paid to some similarly situated women.

After she wrote about her horror story in Double XX, a woman-oriented Slate spinoff, she heard from numerous fellow sufferers, some with hospital bills bigger than hers. Last Thursday she testified before the House Joint Economic Committee, which released a report that found women more economically vulnerable than men to high medical costs and related bankruptcy.

She also has received the inevitable scolding in today's heated blogosphere from opponents of national health insurance reform. It's her own fault, some said; she should have read the fine print. Right. As if everybody reads the fine print on their insurance policies -- and understands it.

And she hears the fears of those who suspect national reform will lead to government rationing of health care. I'm old enough to remember how similar fears were vented when Medicare was born in the 1960s. It is now so popular that President Obama and others have heard satisfied, if a little confused, constituents say, "Keep your government hands off my Medicare," even though Medicare is a federal program.

Left unsaid by those who raise fears of rationing by any "government-run" or government-related health care is how much rationing the insurance industry does now.

For decades, experts writing in the New England Journal of Medicine and elsewhere have concluded that we do "ration" health care. We just do it through gross disparities in race, sex, age, regions, income and education.

And, although Sarah's insurer may deny it, we also ration it to those who are lucky enough to have access to the big soapbox that she happened to have.

If anything, social conservatives should be on her side. By penalizing mothers in this way, the private insurance industry throws more barriers in the way of parents and prospective parents than the government does.

Under pressure, the private insurance industry has come to the table. A spokesman for the insurance industry recently responded to congressional criticism by listing concessions that the industry has offered as alternatives to a publicly funded option.

The industry has proposed "guaranteed coverage for pre-existing conditions, discontinuing rating based on a person's health status or gender, and a personal coverage requirement to get everyone into the system," said Robert Zirkelbach, spokesman for America's Health Insurance Plans.

Sounds great. But why wait? Insurers don't need the government's permission to reform themselves. Just do it.

Clarence Page writes for the Chicago Tribune. His column is distributed by Tribune Media Services, 2225 Kenmore Ave., Suite 114, Buffalo, NY 14207. You can reach him at cpage@tribune.com.

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Experts address causes, treatment - Longview News-Journal

Posted: 12 Sep 2009 09:52 PM PDT

TYLER — Attention Deficit Disorder and Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, commonly referred to ADD and ADHD, can be frustrating for children, parents and educators, but can also be viewed as a gift, Dr. Ray Scardina said Saturday.

Scardina was one of three experts who spoke on the disorder at a symposium at the University of Texas at Tyler. About 250 people attended the event, sponsored by Parent Services Center, Inc.

"Children who have this have lots of energy and tend to think outside the box," Scardina said. "They also have lots of enthusiasm for learning if it's a subject they're interested in and it's presented to them in the right manner."

While concerns about over-medication and misdiagnosis are valid, Scardina said there is generally more danger in letting the condition go untreated.

"Most people with this disorder will outgrow it by early adulthood," Scardina said. "However, if it's untreated during childhood it can lead to a host of other problems including school failure, an inability to form social relationships and substance abuse."

Medication is usually the key to controlling ADD/ADHD, he said. Although diet restrictions and behavior modification and work for some children, most families see quicker and more lasting results with medication.

The causes of ADD/ADHD are not known for sure, but there seems to be a strong genetic component to the disorder, Scardina said. Other risk factors include maternal tobacco or drug use during pregnancy and a difficult or premature birth.

Suzanne Brian, a licensed counselor who works with children who have ADD/ADHD, said humor is one of the key ingredients in dealing with ADD/ADHD children.

"The best non-pharmaceutical ways of dealing with this problem are humor, exercise and having a structured routine," Brian said.

The seminar was open to parents, students, educators and medical professionals.

Mandi Stephens said she found a lot of the information at the symposium helpful. She is a student at UT-Tyler and the mother of child who has been diagnosed with ADD/ADHD.

"I found it interesting to hear about some of the probable causes, such as there being a strong genetic component and a difficult birth being a risk factor," Stephens said. "I've always kind of believed I had this syndrome as a child myself and there were complications with my daughters' birth."