Personal Finance

Why Low-Income People Buy Lottery

Poverty plays a central role in people buying lottery tickets. It’s a losing game. I don’t think rich people buy lottery tickets. Although state lotteries, on average, return just 53 cents for every dollar spent on a ticket, people continue to pour money into them — especially low-income people, who spend a larger percentage of [...]

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Americans Face Rising Medical Bills

Many U.S. residents experience enormous difficulties with rising medical bills and face medical debt due to the rising cost of health care and lack of affordable health insurance. A survey by Commonwealth Fund questioned 3456 Americans aged from 19 to 64 and found that health care costs increase more rapidly than family income does. This [...]

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Five Ways To Save Money Without Sacrificing Your Healthcare

When the economy sputters and the cost of living spikes, people inevitably look for ways to cut financial corners — even on basics like healthcare. A poll released this week by the National Association of Insurance Commissioners found that 22 percent of people who responded said they were cutting back on doctor visits. Eleven percent [...]

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Did you know McCain plans to tax your health care benefits?

The mainstream media has barely mentioned John McCain’s plan to tax the health care benefits people receive from their employers. Since the corporate-owned media isn’t providing this information, we need to get the facts to the voters. Please spread the word on John McCain’s radical proposal that would increase the taxes of most Americans and [...]

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Medicare Advantage plans overpayments to total $8.5 billion in 2008

Overpayments will remain significant even after payment reductions in new Medicare legislation are implemented. Private Medicare Advantage (MA) plans will be paid an average 12.4 percent more per enrollee in 2008 compared to what the same enrollee would have cost in the traditional Medicare fee-for-service program, according to a new report from The Commonwealth Fund. [...]

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Farmers, Ranchers Have Higher Premiums For Health Care

Farmers and ranchers on average spend about twice as much on health care than non-farmers, according to a report released on Tuesday by The Access Project, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reports. The report was based on a 2007 survey of 2,017 noncorporate farm and ranch operators in Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota and [...]

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Attitudes About Tradional Gender Rolls Lead to Less Pay For Women

According to a large study published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, traditional thinking about gender roles leads to less pay for women and even greater pay for the “traditional” thinking men compared to their more modern counterparts. Although women have been making strides over the past few decades for “equal pay for equal work”, [...]

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How Wall Street Worries Take a Toll on Your Heart

How Wall Street financial crisis and “ticker shock” may be taking a toll on your heart. Protect your heart from stress. The big idea is that as stock prices go down, stress to your heart may go up–if you’re the kind of person who’s glued to the news and fearing gloom and doom. In several [...]

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Save Money By Being Savvy Health Care Shoppers

According to a survey of insured consumers released today by Plan for Your Health, the public education program from Aetna (NYSE: AET) and the Financial Planning Association (FPA), 45 percent of respondents were unaware that they can save money in the coming year by making smart decisions about their health benefits. In these tough economic [...]

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Obama Tax Cut Calculator Shows Facts On Savings

As the presidential election nears to conclusion many Americans are using various tax calculators trying to understand the real and hard facts of how many a family or an individual may save in taxes under Barack Obama’s or John McCain’s health care or tax cut plans. Barack Obama has made the job of those Americans [...]

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People Forced To Choose Between Medical, Home Payments

The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday examined how the U.S. “housing market’s collapse is forcing a growing number of Americans sitting on large medical bills to choose between paying the mortgage and paying the doctor.” According to the Journal, “People have long resorted to borrowing against their homes to pay for medical care in times [...]

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Which Patients Can Afford To Pay Medical Bills?

Medical Bills For-profit hospitals are having an increasingly difficult timedetermining which patients are able to pay their medical bills asprivate health insurers shift more costs to members, experts say, Reuters reports. A 2006 Kaiser Family Foundation/Health Research and Educational Trust surveyfound that workers’ average contribution for monthly health carepremiums was $248 for family coverage, up [...]

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