Eliminating the need to ascertain eligibility.Years of double-digit increases in health care costs are devastating business, federal, state and family budgets. While the United States pays more per capita for health care than any other industrialized country, 44 million people lack assured care. “Most people overlook the most affordable way to achieve universal coverage – putting all of us under the Medicare umbrella,” says Merton C. Bernstein, a founding member of the National Academy of Social Insurance and the Coles Professor of Law Emeritus at Washington University in St. Louis. “That single-payer system would reduce non-benefit spending by doctors, hospitals, clinics, laboratories and health care insurers by about $300 billion a year, providing funds to insure everyone without additional outlays.”
It’s tax-time. For many people that means handing some hard-earned money over to Uncle Sam. But for others tax time is refund time. Theoretically, that refund is money you’ve earned as a part of your salary, and should be accounted for and spent like regular income. However, most people view it as “found money” and generally find a way to justify spending it on something they didn’t necessarily need. According to a professor of marketing at the Olin School of Business, people mentally credit their refunds to specific budgetary accounts to justify spending it on desirable luxuries. The result is people end up spending too much, making it harder to pay other, more essential accounts.
The first detailed studies of two of the largest human chromosomes have revealed enormous gene “deserts” lacking any protein-coding sequences and relics of the merger of two ape chromosomes to form a single human chromosome.
Washington University’s George Warren Brown School of Social Work and Kathryn M. Buder Center for American Indian Studies are hosting the 15th annual powwow, in conjunction with American Indian Awareness Week and the celebration of the Buder Center’s 15th anniversary. The powwow, which is free and open to the public, will run noon to 10 p.m. Saturday, April 9 at the University’s Athletic Center near the intersection of Forsyth Boulevard and Olympian Way. Arts & crafts booths will be open at 10 a.m. This year’s anniversary powwow features American Indian arts, crafts, music, food, a stomp dance exhibit and an expanded dance contest, which is expected to draw tribal dancers from throughout the Midwest. Grand entries of dancers will be showcased at 1 and 7 p.m.
Eric Wright*Hiroshima Maiden*In 1955, a group of 25 women disfigured by the nuclear blast at Hiroshima visited the United States to undergo reconstructive surgery. Their bizarre odyssey climaxed on the television program “This Is Your Life” in a live, face-to-face meeting with Enola Gay pilot Robert Lewis. In Hiroshima Maiden, performance artist Dan Hurlin recreates this stranger-than-fiction tale though a combination of Japanese Bunraku-style puppetry and dance. The show makes its St. Louis debut Friday and Saturday, April 22 and 23, as part of the Edison Theatre OVATIONS! Series.
Acclaimed writer and physician Rafael Campo will read from his work at 7 p.m., Friday, April 15, at Washington University’s Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum. The talk is free and open to the public and is sponsored by The Center for the Humanities and The Writing Program, both in Arts & Sciences, in conjunction with the Kemper Art Museum’s Inside Out Loud: Women’s Health in Contemporary Art (through April 24).
Researchers at the School of Medicine are seeking volunteers to participate in a study to determine if botulinum toxin (Botox) injections can help heal diabetic foot ulcers.
Anita Diamant, author of the bestselling novel, The Red Tent, will deliver the Women’s Society of Washington University Adele Starbird Lecture for the Assembly Series at 11 a.m., Wednesday, April 20th in Graham Chapel. Her talk is entitled “Imagining the Past: A Conversation with Anita Diamant.”
Scientists studying a common childhood brain tumor have uncovered a pleasant surprise: evidence that the tumors may be vulnerable to a class of drugs that has been in use for years.
Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis is rated the third best medical school in the nation, according to this year’s U.S. News & World Report rankings of graduate and professional programs released April 1.