British TV host Dr. Michael Mosley reached millions by being his own guinea pig

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By BRIAN MELLEY and PETROS GIANNAKOURIS (Associated Press)

RHODES, Greece (AP) — Dr. Michael Mosley was his own guinea pig.

In the name of science, the British television host put his body to the test by ingesting tape worms, injecting snake venom and letting leeches suck his blood.

What didn’t kill him made him more popular and he reached millions through BBC programs like “Trust Me, I’m a Doctor,” other appearances on TV and radio, and through bestselling diet books.

In the end, his death came during a hike in the blazing sun on the Greek island where was vacationing.

Greek police said Monday there was no sign of foul play, though an autopsy was underway to find the cause.

Here are some things to know about Mosley:

He was steps away from reaching a beach

Mosley, 67, was found dead Sunday, four days after he went missing on the island of Symi.

His wife said he took the wrong route on what was supposed to be a short walk to the next town and appeared to have collapsed.

The path would have taken him over or alongside a steep unforgiving slope littered with rocks and no shelter from heat that hit 37 Celsius (98.6 Fahrenheit).

His body was found within a few dozen steps of the water.

“He almost managed to reach his destination,” Lefteris Papakalodoukas, the mayor of Symi told Greek Alpha television. “It was only another 10 meters (33 feet) to the beach. But that must be when his strength left him.”

Dr. Clare Bailey Mosley said her family took comfort knowing her husband almost made it to safety.

“He did an incredible climb, took the wrong route and collapsed where he couldn’t be easily seen by the extensive search team,” she said in a statement.

The banker who became a doctor who didn’t practice medicine

After graduating from Oxford University, Mosley became an investment banker before going back to school to become a doctor. After qualifying for a career in medicine, though, he took another dramatic career change. He trained as an assistant producer at the BBC and that eventually led to a profession in front of the camera.

Mosley was widely admired for his ability to communicate complex science clearly and his willingness to be the subject of experiments that made others shudder.

In a BBC program called “Infested! Living with parasites,” he swallowed tapeworm cysts. He used a “pill camera” to explore his insides and was watching on an iPad in an Indian restaurant when he first saw the tapeworms attached to his intestine.

“I shouted out: ‘Blimey! There’s a tapeworm in me!’ The other diners looked very surprised,” he said. “I was delighted, but at the same time, it was rather horrible.”

When he was diagnosed with stage 2 diabetes in 2012, Mosley turned to health science and developed a diet that beat the diagnosis and became the basis for one of his books.

He later popularized intermittent fasting and low-carb meals through his 2013 book “The Fast Diet,” which he co-authored with journalist Mimi Spencer, that proposed the so-called “5:2 diet” to minimize calories two days a week while eating healthily the other five.

His “Just One Thing” radio series launched in 2021 advocated simple changes that could transform health and wellbeing.

“I remember him as a bright spark who although now sadly extinguished, will live on through his influential ‘Just One Thing,’” said Mark Miodownik, a materials science professor at University College London, who had worked with Mosley. “Science has lost one of its best and most influential communicators. His warmth and connection to the audience was remarkable.”

Tireless search from the air, ground and water

The search for Mosley began when he didn’t return after leaving his wife and friends and going for a walk from Agios Nikolaos beach near where he was staying.

Searchers on foot, divers in the water, helicopters and drones from above and parties combing the shore from boats spent four days looking for Mosley.

CCTV footage that was believed to be the last known sighting him had shown him walking through a village with a black umbrella overhead to protect himself from the sun.

But footage released Monday appeared to show him scrambling down a rock slope next to a fence and falling out of view where his body was later found.

On Sunday, a boat with the mayor and a group of journalists was scanning the rugged slope when a cameraman saw something dark among the rocks.

The mayor took a photo of the camera display and zoomed in.

“It has a good resolution,“ he said. “It was the missing man.”

Ilias Tsavaris, a bar manager at the Agia Marina, said he scrambled up the hillside after getting a call from the boat telling him to confirm the sighting.

“When I walked up I saw something like a body,” he said. “You don’t see a dead body everyday, it is not a warzone, it’s summer, you are supposed to have fun and swimming.”

Clare Bailey Mosley thanked the people of Symi for their tireless search for a man they didn’t know.

“Some of these people on the island, who hadn’t even heard of Michael, worked from dawn till dusk unasked,” she said.

___

Melley reported from London. Associated Press writer Costas Kantouris contributed from Thessaloniki, Greece.

Presidential election could decide fate of extra Obamacare subsidies

posted in: Politics | 0

Andy Miller | (TNS) KFF Health News

When Cassie Cox ended up in the emergency room in January, the Bainbridge, Georgia, resident was grateful for the Obamacare insurance policy she had recently selected for coverage in 2024.

Cox, 40, qualified for an Affordable Care Act marketplace plan with no monthly premium due to her relatively low income. And after she cut her hand severely, the 35 stitches she received in the ER led to an out-of-pocket expense of about $300, she said.

“I can’t imagine what the ER visit would have cost if I was uninsured,” she said.

Cox is among 1.3 million people enrolled in health coverage this year through the ACA marketplace in Georgia, which has seen a 181% increase in enrollment since 2020.

Many people with low incomes have been drawn to plans offering $0 premiums and low out-of-pocket costs, which have become increasingly common because of the enhanced federal subsidies introduced by President Joe Biden.

Southern states have seen the biggest enrollment bump of any region. Ten of the 15 states that more than doubled their marketplace numbers from 2020 to 2024 are in the South, according to a KFF policy brief. And the five states with the largest increases in enrollment — Texas, Mississippi, Georgia, Tennessee, and South Carolina, all in the South — have yet to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, driving many residents to the premium-free health plans.

But with the federal incentives introduced by the Biden administration set to expire at the end of 2025, and the possibility of a second Donald Trump presidency, the South could be on track to see a significant dip in ACA enrollment, policy analysts say.

“Georgia and the Southern states generally have lower per-capita income and higher uninsured rates,” said Gideon Lukens, a senior fellow and the director of research and data analysis for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a nonpartisan, Washington, D.C.-based research organization. If the enhanced subsidies go away, he said, the South, especially states that haven’t expanded Medicaid, will likely feel a bigger effect than other states. “There’s no other safety net” for many people losing coverage in non-expansion states, Lukens said.

When Cox was enrolling in Obamacare last fall, she qualified for premium tax credits that were added to two major congressional legislative packages: the American Rescue Plan Act in 2021, and the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022. Those incentives — which gave rise to many plans with no premiums and low out-of-pocket costs — have helped power this year’s record Obamacare enrollment of 21 million. The extra subsidies were added to the already existing subsidies for marketplace coverage.

The states that didn’t expand Medicaid and have high uninsured rates “got most of the free plans,” said Cynthia Cox, a KFF vice president who directs the health policy nonprofit’s program on the ACA. Zero-premium plans existed before the new subsidies, she added, but they generally came with high deductibles that potentially would lead to higher costs for consumers.

A Trump presidency could jeopardize those extra subsidies. Brian Blase, a former Trump administration official who advised him on health care policy, said that eliminating the extra subsidies would bring the marketplace back to the ACA’s original intent.

“It’s not sustainable or wise to have fully taxpayer-subsidized coverage,” said Blase, who is now president of the Paragon Health Institute, a health policy research firm. People would still qualify for discounts, he said, but they wouldn’t be as generous.

Karoline Leavitt, a spokesperson for Trump, did not answer a reporter’s questions on the future of the enhanced subsidies under a new Trump administration. Despite his comments at the end of last year that he is “seriously looking at alternatives” to Obamacare, Leavitt said Trump is not campaigning to terminate the Affordable Care Act.

“He is running to make health care actually affordable, in addition to bringing down inflation, cutting taxes, and reducing regulations to put more money back in the pockets of all Americans,” she said.

While views on Obamacare may be divided, the wide support for subsidies crosses political lines, according to a KFF Health Tracking Poll released in May.

About 7 in 10 voters support the extension of enhanced federal financial assistance for people who purchase ACA marketplace coverage, the poll found. That support included 90% of Democrats, 73% of independents, and 57% of Republicans surveyed.

The enhanced assistance also allowed many people with incomes higher than 400% of the poverty level, or $58,320 for an individual in 2023, to get tax credits for coverage for the first time.

Besides the financial incentives, other reasons cited for the explosion in ACA enrollment include the end of continuous Medicaid coverage protections related to the covid public health emergency. About a year ago, states started redetermining eligibility, known as the “unwinding.”

Roughly one-quarter of those who lost Medicaid coverage moved to the ACA marketplace, said Edwin Park, a research professor at the Georgetown University Center for Children and Families.

In Georgia, Republican political leaders haven’t talked much about the effect of the Biden administration’s premium incentives on enrollment increases.

Instead, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, among others, has touted the performance of Georgia Access, an online portal that links consumers directly to the ACA marketplace’s website or to an agent or broker. That agent link can create a more personal connection, said Bryce Rawson, a spokesperson for the state’s insurance department, which runs the portal. Employees from the agency and from consulting firms helped market the no-premium plans throughout the state, he said.

Yet Georgia Access didn’t become fully operational until last fall, during open enrollment for the marketplace. Republicans also credit a reinsurance waiver that, according to Rawson, increased the number of health insurers offering marketplace coverage in the state, leading to more competition.

Reinsurance is likely not a major reason for a state’s increased Obamacare enrollment, said Georgetown’s Park. And a study published in Health Affairs found that Georgia’s reinsurance program had the unintended consequences of increasing the minimum cost of subsidized ACA coverage and reducing enrollment among individuals at a certain income level, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution recently reported.

The state’s insurance department said the study “does not accurately reflect the overall benefits the reinsurance program has brought to Georgia consumers.”

When asked whether the governor would support renewal of the enhanced subsidies, Garrison Douglas, Kemp’s spokesperson, said the matter is up to Congress to decide.

Another reason for the soaring ACA enrollment is the 2023 fix to the “family glitch” that had prevented dependents of workers who were offered unaffordable family coverage by employers from getting marketplace subsidies.

States that have run their own marketplaces, though, generally have not seen the same level of enrollment increases. Those 18 states, plus the District of Columbia, have expanded Medicaid. Georgia will join the list of states running their own exchanges this fall, making it the only state to operate one that has not expanded Medicaid.

The federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services credits a national marketing campaign and more federal funding for navigators, the insurance counselors who provide education about marketplace health coverage and free help with enrollment.

That level of financial support for navigators may be in jeopardy if Trump returns to the White House.

The Biden administration injected nearly $100 million in funding for navigators in the enrollment period for coverage this year. The Trump administration, on the other hand, awarded just $10 million a year for navigators from 2018 to 2020.

The marketplace is usually “a transitional place” for people coming in and out of coverage, KFF’s Cox said. “That marketing and outreach is pretty essential to help people literally navigate the process.”

(KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs of KFF — the independent source for health policy research, polling and journalism.)

©2024 KFF Health News. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Marine Village School to hold ‘A Night Out’ event On June 22

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The Marine Village School is holding “A Night Out” event from 5 to 8:30 p.m. on June 22 at Stivland’s Barn and Event Center in Stillwater as a way to raise funds.

The school’s parent teacher organization and school board committee are hosting the event.

The event also was held last year and raised $87,000, according to school officials. The school is a tuition-free charter school that opened in 2022 and serves over 90 students K-5 and offers before and after school programs. It is located in Marine on St. Croix. MVS also serves Stillwater, Forest Lake and Scandia. It offers small class sizes, art, music, theater, and Spanish classes, STEAM activities and outdoor learning at the school forest.

Tickets for the event are $75 per person. A discount is offered for MVS parents and staff at $40 per person or $50 per couple. Ticket price includes food, wine, beer and soft drinks, music by Andy Weaver, games and activities. A large silent auction also will be held.

For more information about tickets go to marinevillageschool.org/nightout.

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Rename your ‘emergency fund’ if that suits your saving style

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By Kimberly Palmer | NerdWallet

While the term “emergency fund” is used widely in the personal finance world to refer to short-term savings, some financial experts say the term isn’t helpful for everyone — and may even be harmful.

“I’ve never liked the term,” says Pamela Capalad, certified financial planner and co-founder of See Change, a financial coaching program for creators of color. She prefers to use descriptions like “the yes box,” “a savings cushion” or even a “rainy day fund” — anything that doesn’t have the word “emergency” in it.

Capalad says the term “emergency savings” evokes fear in people and suggests you’re just waiting for something terrible. “Saving is already so hard for people to do, and the fact that you’re saving for something bad to happen instead of something good to look forward to is not something that motivates people to save,” she explains.

Still, others in the industry remain fans. “I personally find the term helpful,” says Jason Ewas, senior policy manager at the Aspen Institute Financial Security Program, a nonprofit based in Washington, D.C. The public widely recognizes and gravitates toward that term, he says, adding that “emergencies happen to everyone.”

When it comes to your short-term savings account, financial experts suggest considering the following:

Focus on functionality over nomenclature

Whatever you call your savings account, it should have some key features, says Chris Peterson, founder and CEO of Penny Forward, a nonprofit that serves people with and without vision loss. First, it should be the right size for you, which varies by person. While the standard advice recommends building up to three to six months’ worth of essential expenses, Peterson says that amount is so large that it’s unrealistic for many people.

Instead, Peterson suggests aiming for around $2,500 of short-term savings, which would cover the cost of an appliance breaking or typical car repairs. “By having $2,500 in the bank, people are setting themselves up to be more resilient,” he says. Of course, if that amount also feels daunting, saving any amount, however small, can also help.

Most importantly, a short-term savings account should be liquid and flexible, Ewas says. In other words, it should be easy to withdraw the money for any type of unexpected need that pops up.

“The features and functionality are just as important as the terminology. It has to be easy to open, no-fee, protected and something people can get out immediately. That’s the fundamental thing,” says Brian Gilmore, vice president at Commonwealth, a nonprofit focused on financial security.

Use it then rebuild it

The term “emergency savings” can make people overly hesitant to use the money for anything other than a catastrophe, Peterson says. It can be more helpful to think of the money as part of a “revolving door” where you can borrow from yourself instead of from a bank. After you use the money when a need pops up, you want to replenish the funds as soon as you can, he says.

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According to statistics from SecureSave, a provider of workplace savings programs, people withdraw money from their employer-sponsored emergency savings accounts for all kinds of reasons, including inflation, car and home costs, health care and holiday expenses. Most (97.3%) continue saving after they make withdrawals.

Automating contributions, such as through direct deposit if your employer offers it, makes the rebuilding easy. Or consider enrolling in an account through your bank or credit union that automatically pulls money from your paycheck into a short-term savings account, Ewas says. Putting money in an federally insured high-yield savings account can also help it grow and remain safe without much effort.

Employer-sponsored savings accounts make it easy to automate savings and in some cases offer sign-up bonuses, matches and other incentives. “It’s like a 401(k) in that it’s sponsored by an employer. It’s automated through payroll,” says Devin Miller, co-founder and CEO at SecureSave.

Choose the term that works best for you

In the absence of a universally embraced term, people can choose their own wording, Ewas says. In fact, he does just that in his personal life. He uses multiple savings accounts and gives them specific labels for each purpose, such as labeling one for vacations. “That mental bucketing is really important,” he says.

Peterson likes using the term “opportunity fund” with clients because it recognizes the potential of what they might be able to do with that money. “They might be looking to accept a job opportunity or go to school to better their lives, and in those cases, having savings is very helpful,” he says.

Capalad urges people to use the term that most motivates them to save. “It’s your ability to say yes to something awesome,” she says.

Whatever you call it, Capalad says, “that’s the representation of your freedom.”

Kimberly Palmer writes for NerdWallet. Email: kpalmer@nerdwallet.com. Twitter: @kimberlypalmer.