The good news is the uninsured rate in the U.S. has fallen to a record low. The bad news is the benefits of health care reform aren't reaching a large swath of the country.
Over the last year, the uninsured rate in the U.S. fell 3.5 percentage points, from 17.3 percent in 2013 to 13.8 percent in 2014, according to the latest data from Gallup. That's the lowest yearly rate that's been recorded by Gallup's Well-Being Index.
According to Gallup, much of the decline can be linked to President Obama's health care reform law, which implemented a number of new policies to help Americans afford health insurance. But some states' refusal to adapt Obamacare's key provisions are causing a startling gap in uninsured rates across the country.
The states with the highest uninsured rates in 2014 are pretty much all found in the South, the Gallup poll found.
Not coincidentally, all 10 of the states with the highest uninsured rates have refused to carry out two key parts of Obamacare.
"States that have implemented two of the law's core mechanisms -- Medicaid expansion and state health exchanges -- are seeing a substantially larger drop in the uninsured rate than states that did not take both of these actions," Gallup announced. "Consequently, the gap in uninsured rates that existed between these two groups in 2013 nearly doubled in 2014."
That said, two southern states -- Arkansas and Kentucky -- saw the sharpest declines in their uninsured rates, which fell by 11.1 and 10.6 percentage points, respectively. Both states expanded Medicaid and had implemented state exchanges. (Arkansas had a state-federal partnership in 2014 and is transitioning to a state-run exchange.)
Ten out of the 11 states that saw their uninsured rates fall the most had expanded Medicaid and offered either a state-run exchange or a state-federal partnership.
WASHINGTON -- In a move that could alter the minimum wage debate and improve the image of the world's largest retailer, Walmart announced it will raise the baseline wage of its current store employees to $10 per hour, bringing pay hikes to an estimated 500,000 workers.
The company said in an announcement on Thursday that it would raise its wage floor to $9 in April, followed by a second boost to $10 by next February.
The decision follows similar moves by other major retailers such as Gap and IKEA, but the sheer size of Walmart sets the company apart. The Arkansas-based retailer is the largest private-sector employer in the U.S., with an estimated 1.4 million employees, and it is largely seen as a trend-setter in the retail industry.
On a quarterly earnings call aligned with the announcement, Doug McMillon, the company's CEO, said raising wages would be good for both employees and customers.
"Overall, these are strategic investments in our people to reignite the sense of ownership they have in our stores," McMillon said. "As a result, we firmly believe that our customers will benefit from a better store experience, which can drive higher sales and returns for our shareholders over time."
According to a Walmart spokesman, the new wage floors will apply to current employees. New hires next year will be earning at least $9, but will be bumped up to at least $10 per hour after roughly six months of training.
Walmart has long been saddled with a reputation as a low-wage employer, and its battles with labor unions -- in particular the United Food and Commercial Workers union -- stretch back decades. In recent years, labor groups have organized high-profile worker strikes to coincide with the company's Black Friday shopping events, pillorying the retailer over its pay practices.
The across-the-board pay hikes should help rehabilitate that image. They will probably also help Walmart improve customer service in its stores. Over the past two years, bare shelves in Walmart supercenters have become a common sight. A report from a research firm last year traced the troubles in part to a lack of investment in the company's labor.
The pay hikes could also help lawmakers in Congress pushing to raise the federal minimum wage, which has remained at $7.25 per hour since 2009. Democrats have proposed hiking the wage floor to $10.10 per hour and tying it to an inflation index, but Republicans in both chambers have blocked the measure from moving forward.
The proposal is extremely popular among Americans in general, polling with broad approval that crosses party lines. The decision by Walmart could make Republicans look even more out-of-touch.
With Congress gridlocked, many states have moved ahead with raises to their own minimum wages, with a slate of ballot measures passing in the November elections. For the first time ever, a majority of states now have a higher minimum wage than the federal level.
It's rare to get a company-wide email from your boss reminding you to sleep. But that’s exactly what happened last week to the employees at Lightspan Digital, a Chicago-based digital marketing agency.
Mana Ionescu, the president of the company, is a big fan of shut-eye and a devotee of celebrity fitness trainer Jillian Michaels. So when Michaels sent a message to her followers extolling the benefits of a good night’s sleep, Ionescu, 37, forwarded it along to her staff.
“I’m a huge advocate for sleep, and I prioritize it the same way I would prioritize going to the gym and seeing my friends,” said Ionescu, who aims for eight hours a night but estimates she gets closer to seven. “It’s so hard because it’s the thing that seems the easiest to sacrifice.”
Ionescu said she’s even been called lazy and weak after expressing her views about sleep. It’s easy to see why -- the American work culture seems to give more value to people who grind away at their jobs at the expense of sleep.
The business leaders who say they get by on very little sleep, such as Fiat Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne and Pepsi CEO Indra Nooyi, seem to get a lot more airtime than those who say the opposite. Everywhere are headlines about “19 Successful People Who Barely Sleep,” “Do history's greatest figures owe their success to sleeping LESS?” and “The secret of success: Needing less sleep?”
But sacrificing sleep could be hurting more than just the executives in need of a good night’s rest. When people don’t sleep, they don’t function at their highest levels, research shows. In a work context, that means missing opportunities to make money. American companies are losing $63.2 billion a year due to sleep deprivation, according to a 2013 study from Harvard Medical School.
That may be why a growing number of bosses, like Ionescu, are waking up (pun intended) to this reality and extolling the virtues of a decent night’s sleep. In the most prominent recent example, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told ABC News earlier this month that he sleeps on average eight hours a night. Other renowned business leaders including Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg have told interviewers in recent years they’ve realized the value in getting a good night’s sleep if they want to operate at their highest levels.
These leaders follow in the footsteps of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, who have been bragging about their eight hours of rest a night at least since 1999, when they discussed their sleep habits with a Wall Street Journal reporter.
More and more research indicates that they’re taking the correct approach. Bosses can get mean and workers less productive when they don’t get a good night's sleep, according to one recent study. Sleep is such an important predictor of the ability to get our jobs done well that getting one extra hour a night can increase wages by 16 percent a year on average, according to a study by economics graduate students at the University of California at San Diego. That’s more than the boost from an extra year of education.
“Sleep is as important as water and food,” said Pat Byrne, the founder of Fatigue Science, a company that works with athletes and companies to help them use sleep to increase performance. But many people struggle to prioritize it.
It’s hard for people who sleep very little each night to detect the consequences, Byrne said, because after a while their bodies “re-norm” so they can continue to go through the motions during the day, even while they’re getting just four or five hours of sleep a night. But that doesn't mean the sleep-deprived person is functioning as well as he or she could be.
“It’s very insidious in that it creeps up on you,” Byrne said of the effects of a prolonged lack of sleep. That dynamic may explain why executives and others think they’re operating just fine on a prolonged lack of sleep.
Of course not everyone has the luxury of a good night’s sleep. Parents of young children and people scraping by on multiple jobs may find it difficult to get eight hours a night. But why is it so common for some of the most powerful people in the world to deprive themselves?
“One common approach to sleep is ‘I’m too dedicated to my job and too important to spend my time sleeping,’” said Christopher Barnes, a management professor at University of Washington’s Foster School of Business. Barnes’ research finds that when bosses get less sleep, they’re meaner to their employees, who end up disengaging from their work as a result.
“They might be partially correct, they might be doing really important stuff, but they might not be appreciating the fact that if they’re not getting enough sleep,” they’re probably not at their highest level, Barnes said.
Sabrina Parsons, the CEO of Palo Alto software, has a more blunt term for business leaders’ tendency to claim they survive on just a few hours of sleep a night: “Bravado bragging.” Parsons’ experience raising three young children taught her that functioning normally on a few hours of sleep a night is nearly impossible.
Now, Parsons tries to get seven or eight hours every night. She encourages her 55 employees to do the same, and to take breaks during the day to exercise or do other activities if they’re feeling sluggish.
She does this to keep workers from getting burned out -- and also to “call bullshit on everybody else” who claims to do their job well despite being sleep-deprived.
“I don’t think you really have someone who sleeps four hours every night for months and months and years and years, who is a functional person,” she said. “You’re not doing that, and if you are, then you’re not being productive.”
Amy Mitchum loves the way her daughter’s kindergarten classmates’ eyes light up when she tells them she works with robots.
The 38-year-old Volkswagen factory worker is a graduate of the automaker’s experimental apprenticeship program, modeled on the vocational training used to educate workers in Germany. In 2012 she left an unfulfilling career in real estate office management and enrolled in the Chattanooga, Tennessee-based Volkswagen Academy's three-year course.
She completed her training in August and now spends her workday overseeing an assembly line of spindly robots coating glossy paint onto the tempered-steel shells of what will ultimately become Passat sedans.
“When I tell the little kids I work on robots, they think that’s the coolest thing in the world,” Mitchum told The Huffington Post. “I go in the classroom once a month to and spend the day, and I wear my Volkswagen shirt.”
Mitchum is among the first wave of U.S. workers to graduate from Volkswagen's five-year-old, learn-on-the-job program, which operates in partnership with Chattanooga State Community College. Hoping its experiment can serve as a new paradigm for American workers, the German automaker pays a wage throughout the education -- starting at $10 an hour and increasing $1 for each completed semester -- and offers jobs to graduates.
Of the 25 who have completed the program so far, all but two now work at the Chattanooga plant: One opted for a job elsewhere; the other has a position reserved for him when he finishes the classes he is taking outside Volkswagen’s program.
Apprentices spend a portion of their education in classrooms, and the rest getting hands-on training on the factory floor.
Apprenticeship programs in the United States dropped 40 percent from 2003 to 2013, in part because of their blue-collar image and fear among businesses that workers will leave company-sponsored programs after getting their education, according to the National Center for Policy Analysis.
But the skills learned during such programs are crucial, and the demand for adequately trained workers is real. The U.S. manufacturing sector couldn't fill 600,000 jobs in 2012 due to a lack of skilled workers, according to a study by consulting firm Deloitte LLP.
Volkswagen is now ramping up marketing for its apprenticeship program and proselytizing the benefits of this approach to learning. Company executives crisscross the U.S., calling on leaders to advocate for apprenticeships as a means of educating more American youths, whose unemployment rate stood last month at 12.2 percent, more than double the national average.
“Right now we’re in a situation where, on the one hand, we have these high levels of youth unemployment and on the other hand, we have employers saying we can’t hire the people we need to hire,” Sarah Ayres-Steinberg, a senior policy analyst at the nonprofit Center for American Progress. “Clearly there’s some friction in the labor market -- and apprenticeship eliminates that friction.”
In Germany -- a country known for worker-friendly practices -- apprenticeships are part of the school system. Between the ages of 12 and 14, students choose between two educational paths: One is a vocational apprenticeship, the other leads to university. Labor unions, chambers of commerce and industry groups help determine the learning criteria for apprentices, to make sure they leave school with the skills needed to enter the workforce.
Just this week, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon praised Germany’s apprenticeship programs for training students to get jobs out of school. Last December, the youth unemployment rate in that country was 7.2 percent, though standards for measuring unemployment rates vary from country to to country.
Volkswagen isn’t alone in trying to import Germany’s apprenticeship model. BMW and engineering giant Bosch, both German companies, have started similar programs at plants in South Carolina, where there is a state program encouraging apprenticeship.
But there are challenges to implementing U.S. versions of Germany's programs. Volkswagen has had a particularly tough time convincing parents that an apprenticeship is an adequate alternative to college.
A college degree generally translates to making more money. A recent study found that college grads can earn about $800,000 more than those with just high school degrees. But college isn't for everyone, and in a competitive job market, an apprenticeship may be a decent option.
“There is a negative attitude and a common behavior that everyone has to go to a college or a university instead of running to a vocational training or an apprenticeship,” Sebastian Patta, Volkswagen of Chattanooga’s vice president of human resources, told HuffPost in his thick German accent.
People, Patta said, have misconceptions about Volkswagen's factory floors. “They think it’s dirty, it’s dark, it’s loud, it’s crazy -- it’s a completely wrong picture," he said of the factory in Chattanooga. In reality, he added, the place is pristinely clean.
Apprenticeships could also make workers feel good about themselves. The sense of pride instilled in people paid to learn a trade boosts morale, says Robert Lerman, an American University economics professor who specializes in youth employment and family structure.
“These systems tend to convey a strong sense of occupational pride that too many of our middle-skilled positions don’t,” he told HuffPost. “They don’t have a strong sense that they’re part of a community of practice, and as a result, they don’t get sufficient respect or feel self-respect.”
The hottest drink in America is water with bubbles.
Long a kitchen table staple in European households, sparkling water is making inroads in the U.S. thanks largely to Americans’ waning interest in soda. Between 2009 and 2014, the volume of carbonated bottled water sold in the U.S. has increased by 56.4 percent, according to data from Euromonitor International, a market research firm. Soda drinking declined sharply during the same period.
Still, sparkling water sales are a fraction of soda sales. The U.S. soda market is worth about $39 billion, according to Euromonitor. The market for unflavored sparkling water, flavored sparkling water and "functional" water -- a category that includes flavored still water and enhanced still water like Smartwater -- is just $4 billion.
It has a way to go before it catches up to soda, but sparkling water is indeed having a moment.
The growth in millions of liters of sparkling water sold in the U.S.
The decline in millions of liters of soda sold in the U.S. Note that the scale is very different from the chart above, with soda sales still dwarfing sparkling water sales.
Americans’ growing obsession with health is the biggest reason for the shift, according to Jonas Feliciano, a global beverage analyst at Euromonitor. Coke and Pepsi have resorted to hawking products like energy drinks and even milk to boost sales as Americans become increasingly wary of the high levels of sugar in soda.
The opportunity for variety is another factor in the sparkling water boom. These beverages are available in a range of flavors, from orange-pineapple to kiwi-strawberry. Feliciano noted that most mainstream soda comes in just cola and lemon-lime flavors. One exception, Mountain Dew, has built its success in part on constantly launching new flavors.
“[Americans] are turning away from things that identify with soda and instead are turning toward things that identify with water,” Feliciano said. “If I’m looking for health and I’m looking for variety, sparkling water with different flavors seems to provide that.”
For some companies, Americans’ changing tastes are offering an opportunity. The growth in sales at Washington-based Talking Rain Beverage Company, which makes flavored sparkling water, has pretty much directly mirrored the rise of the beverage's popularity. The company brought in more than $384 million in sales in 2014 compared to just $2.7 million in 2009. Sparkling Ice, a Talking Rain line of zero-calorie sparkling water in flavors like pink grapefruit and peach nectarine, is responsible for most of that growth.
Kevin Klock, Talking Rain’s CEO, says the company doesn’t try to make health claims about its drinks because shoppers recognize on their own that sparkling water is probably healthier than soda.
“It’s great that it’s zero calories, but it’s probably not the number one thing the consumer is looking for,” Klock said. “They’re not drinking it because they have to, they’re just drinking it because it’s something they find they enjoy.”
Sparkling Ice on display in New York.
Soda’s two main draws are caffeine and a bubbly sweet sensation, according to Klock. As concerns about soda’s health consequences mount, drinkers are turning to coffee and energy drinks for their caffeine fix, and flavored sparkling waters for that throat-tickling combination of bubbles and sweetness.
“I don’t see it as a fad,” Klock said of flavored sparkling water, noting that the trend in all beverages, including liquor and beer, is toward more variety and flavor.
SodaStream is betting big that interest in sparkling water continues to grow. The at-home carbonation machine company has shifted its marketing in recent months to focus more on the product's ability to make sparkling water and less on its ability to make soda. SodaStream rebranded its devices as sparkling-water makers instead of soda makers, and it has changed its slogan from “set the bubbles free” to “water made exciting.”
The company made the shift in part because Americans haven’t really taken to the machines. In the U.S., SodaStream is probably better known for its Scarlett Johansson commercials than for its carbonation device. So far, just 1.5 percent of households in the U.S. have a SodaStream, compared to about 20 percent of households in Finland or Sweden, according to Daniel Birnbaum, SodaStream’s CEO.
SodaStream's 2014 Super Bowl ad.
Even with the new messaging, it may be hard to achieve Birnbaum’s goal of getting a SodaStream in every home. Feliciano notes that low-income shoppers aren’t likely to make the switch from soda to sparkling water anytime soon. Even those who don't shell out for a SodaStream machine -- the cheapest option on the company's website is $79.99 -- will probably find better deals on soda than sparkling water.
While there's not that much difference in the average price per liter ($1.10 per liter for soda versus $1.30 per liter for sparkling water, according to Euromonitor), the supermarkets, discount outlets and convenience stores where most low-income Americans shop offer promotional deals on soda that often make it much cheaper than sparkling water, according to Feliciano.
“This is still not for the masses,” Feliciano said.
But Birnbaum is confident that Americans' shift away from soda is more than just a whim.
“We feel like we are now at the early stages of a revolution in the beverage industry in America,” Birnbaum said, noting that about 70 percent of SodaStream’s customers globally use the machine only for carbonating water.
“The death of soda comes with the life of something else,” Birnbaum said.
NEW YORK -- The lobby of the Ace Hotel was bustling on a recent Monday afternoon. Twenty- and 30-somethings in scarves, chunky sweaters and jeans typed at laptops and huddled around French-press coffeepots at communal tables.
Not the typical hangout of a corporate executive. But then Kat Cole -- the former Hooters waitress who in 2011 became president of Cinnabon, Inc. -- is not the typical corporate executive. And that may be the key to her success.
In blue jeans, boots and a black top, Cole, 36, blended so well into the Ace Hotel’s hipster hive that she was difficult to spot. She was in New York promoting Cinnabon’s starring role in the pilot of AMC's eagerly anticipated “Breaking Bad” spinoff, “Better Call Saul.”
Cinnabon gave away mini-bons Monday in honor of the brand's appearance on the show.
A week earlier, after four years running Cinnabon, Cole had been given a bigger job, overseeing licensing, manufacturing and e-commerce at Focus Brands -- the company that owns Cinnabon and other chains.
She’s come a long way in a short time, and took an unusual route to get there. She started her career as a teenage waitress at Hooters. By age 20, she had dropped out of college and at age 26 she became a vice president at the wing chain. Cole eventually earned her MBA at Georgia State University, graduating shortly after she started at Cinnabon as the company's chief operating officer in 2010. But today she’s still a rarity in the highest echelons of corporate America, which are largely populated by middle-aged white men, many of whom have elite degrees.
This atypical career path has not hurt Cole. In a lot of ways, it seems to have helped. Cole thinks her background has made it easier for her to find solutions that somebody with a classic pedigree might have overlooked. And her experience has taught her that any one of her employees is worth consulting -- because, who knows? They too could be corporate-executive material.
Cole at an event in 2013.
“When you’re not used to having doors opened for you," Cole told The Huffington Post, "you will do things and have meetings with people and spend your time in places that maybe someone with a more traditional path would think is too small or not deserving of their time or their energy."
Cole said she has developed a “really tough skin,” a quality that she credits with helping her handle failure more constructively.
“When you have people who question why you are where you are, or who treat you very differently, as if you don’t deserve to be there because you’re young, or female, or in my case, a Hooters girl, it’s really interesting the muscle that that builds,” she said. “You have to develop that over time to not be totally shaken every time you walk into a boardroom, or every time someone is an asshole.”
Research suggests that traditional backgrounds don’t always help corporate leaders succeed. For example, CEOs with Ivy League degrees do no better than other CEOs when it comes to things like stock performance and profitability, according to a study from Brian Bolton, a finance professor at Portland State University’s School of Business.
Still, boards seem to love hiring alums of elite schools. Fifteen percent of CEOs at the nation’s 1,500 largest companies in 2012 had at least one degree from Harvard, according to Bolton’s research. More than one-fourth of the CEOs in the sample with MBAs got them at Harvard. And Bolton estimates that only 3 or 4 percent of CEOs lack a college degree. Less than 2 percent of the CEOs in the sample were women.
“It’s hard for boards or for executives to hire unknowns,” Bolton told HuffPost. “They default to what’s safe, and hiring an MBA from Harvard is safe. It’s going to be accepted by stockholders and employees.”
But if Cole’s success is any indication, the safe option may not always be the best one.
Cole took the reins of Cinnabon four years ago during what she calls a “really shitty” time. The sluggish economy was keeping people away from the malls and airports that are Cinnabon’s typical environs.
Her plan to turn the company around involved reaching out to others for partnerships -- a tactic she believes was heavily influenced by her background. She speculates that leaders with a more typical pedigree might have been less willing to look outside the company for help.
Cole approached it differently. She and her team pitched packaged-good companies and other fast-food chains on the idea of working together to create a line of Cinnabon-branded products, such as Cinnabon-flavored Green Mountain coffee, Cinnabon Air Wick and Cinnabon Vodka. (And in some cases the companies came to Cinnabon as well).
It worked. Sales of those products grew to more than $1 billion by 2013, and now they make up about 75 percent of Cinnabon’s total global product sales.
“We had this serious humility -- we weren’t too good for anything,” Cole said. “I’ve seen other leaders not be that scrappy and take much longer and spend a lot more money trying to turn something around.”
It turned out to be a trendsetting approach. Darren Tristano, executive vice president at the market research firm Technomic, said he expects McDonald’s and other chains to get more branded products into grocery stores down the line.
“That’s something we’re going to see a lot of,” Tristano said.
Cole’s experience has also given her a healthy respect for the rank-and-file worker. When she took over Cinnabon, instead of shelling out for consumer research, she spent 60 days visiting franchises all over the country, meeting with owners and workers, making Cinnabons and ringing up customers to get a feel for what the company needed.
“It hasn’t been that long since I’ve been that hourly employee," Cole told HuffPost. "I remember that people doing the work every day are the ones who really know what the answers are."
Cole’s days as a server are so fresh in her mind that it still hits a nerve when she sees a customer treating one poorly. She recalled an incident a few years ago, in the same Ace Hotel lobby, when a man sitting next to her berated a waitress for not bringing sugar with his coffee.
“As I was watching her and sitting so close, I just remembered it. I remember people yelling at me, I remember people being unnecessarily disrespectful and looking at me -- because I was in orange shorts, serving chicken wings -- like I was the scum of the earth,” Cole said, sipping coffee about a foot away from where the incident took place.
Cole said she scolded the man and gave the waitress “the biggest tip I think I’ve ever given in my life,” in the hope that it would encourage her to stay positive.
As her career advanced, more and more people began asking Cole to speak about her history, which included watching her mother feed her and her siblings on just $10 a week for three years after she divorced Cole's father who was an alcoholic at the time. A year or so ago, Cole, wary of overexposure, briefly considered taking a break from talking to the media. Then a mentor criticized her for not using her platform to inspire others. That mentor died just weeks after giving Cole that piece of advice.
Other executives may want to embrace aspects of their past that don’t fit the CEO stereotype, Cole said. She suggested that her story may not actually be that unique.
“A lot of executives were waitresses and bartenders and hostesses, but they don’t connect those things” to the success they’re having now, said Cole.
Raising her hand slightly above her head, she added, “It’s like they have to stay so up here."
With only a few days remaining in the second-ever Obamacare sign-up season, the White House, insurance companies and enrollment workers expect a big rush as Americans hurry to get health coverage.
“Consumers should consider Feb. 15 as their last opportunity to get coverage,” said Andrew Slavitt, principal deputy administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, during a conference call with reporters Wednesday. “Interest in signing up for coverage in the final week of open enrollment is beginning to increase,” he noted.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services is the federal agency that oversees enrollment under Obamacare.
In the weeks leading up to the deadline, federal and state officials, the insurance industry and enrollment workers around the country have stepped up their outreach, marketing and assistance activities. They expect a wave of new sign-ups in the final days, as happened when the first Obamacare enrollment period wound down last April. Traffic to HealthCare.gov was 58 percent higher Wednesday than a week before, and calls to the hotline have increased 37 percent, Slavitt said.
“People are going to perk up and people are going to start paying attention close to those deadlines,” said John Gilbert, national field director for Enroll America, a Washington-based nonprofit that organizes sign-up campaigns.
After this Sunday's deadline, the next open enrollment period for private health insurance sold on the Affordable Care Act’s exchanges won’t begin until October. Anyone who starts an application prior to the Feb. 15 deadline will have time to complete it, Slavitt said. In addition, people can access the insurance exchanges during the year if their life circumstances change -- if they get married, for instance, or have a baby. Plus, there is no deadline for enrolling in Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program.
The second Obamacare sign-up period has gone considerably more smoothly than the first, which launched with a thud in October 2013 amid confusion and near-catastrophic technological failures of HealthCare.gov and the websites of several state-run exchanges. The websites have been running much better this year, and the numbers of enrollees reflects that and the greater public awareness of the Affordable Care Act.
“In every respect, this is working not just as intended but better than intended,” President Barack Obama said at the White House last week. “I want everybody to get on HealthCare.gov. Find out what options are available to you in your state and in your community.”
The president may be overstating the case for his signature program, but round two of Obamacare is going much better from the perspective of those seeking to enroll people. “Certainly, it is much improved from last year,” said Kurt Kossen, vice president for retail markets at Chicago-based Health Care Service Corp., which operates Blue Cross and Blue Shield health insurance plans in Illinois, Montana, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas.
Since this year’s sign-up period began on Nov. 15, almost 10 million people have enrolled in private health insurance plans selected via the exchanges. Those include the 37 sites run by the federal government via HealthCare.gov and the 14 operated by states and the District of Columbia, like Covered California and Your Health Idaho. About 3 million of those customers were new to the online marketplaces, and the remainder were individuals with exchange policies last year who had renewed, the Department of Health and Human Services reported last month.
If the last sign-up period is any guide, those numbers could jump after Feb. 15. Forty-seven percent of the 8 million people who enrolled for 2014 coverage did so during the final month of the campaign. Enrollments for 2015 already surged shortly before Dec. 15, which was the final day to choose a plan that would be in place at the beginning of this year.
More than 1,400 enrollment events are scheduled for the final two weeks of the sign-up period, according to HHS. Officials, workers and volunteers are stressing the availability of both health coverage and financial assistance for low- and moderate-income families.
People wait at the Baltimore Convention Center to enroll in health coverage this past Saturday. (Photo: Jeffrey Young/The Huffington Post)
Enroll America and its partner organizations arranged 1,110 events in 109 cities across 11 states in the three weeks leading up to Feb. 15, Gilbert said. The group’s “Countdown to Get Covered” bus tour will hit Alabama, Florida, Georgia and North Carolina in the final days, he said.
Health insurance companies also are gearing up for the deadline. Health Care Service Corp. ramped up its TV advertising in the middle of January, said Kossen. The company’s on-the-ground outreach includes mobile assistance centers across its home territory, like the “Destination Blue” recreational vehicle visiting numerous towns in Texas.
“We’re just starting to see indications of increased activity starting to come in, especially at our community events over the weekend,” Kossen said. “We anticipate seeing increased activity throughout the remainder of the week.”
An enrollment event in Baltimore on Saturday attracted more than 300 people looking for help. Some waited hours at the city’s convention center for an opportunity to sit down with one of 40-some enrollment counselors from HealthCare Access Maryland, which ran the six-hour event.
“It’s been very quiet and it’s been steadily busy,” Kathleen Westcoat, president and CEO of HealthCare Access Maryland, said of this year’s sign-up campaign. “We are seeing more people towards the end of enrollment period trying to enroll.”
The turnaround in Maryland since the last time may be even more striking than the improvements to HealthCare.gov. The Maryland Health Connection website was worse than HealthCare.gov, leading the state to scrap its system and use technology from Access Health CT, Connecticut’s exchange. As of Feb. 4, almost 101,000 people had signed up for private insurance for 2015 on Maryland’s exchange, 20,000 more than the number who enrolled for 2014 coverage.
Baltimore resident Harold Waters, 56, joined those ranks Saturday, when he spent more than two hours at the convention center getting help in choosing a subsidized insurance policy from Kaiser Permanente. The policy will cost Waters $74 a month because of tax credits that reduced its price from $434.
Melinda Jones and Harold Waters attended a health insurance enrollment event at the Baltimore Convention Center on Saturday. (Photo: Jeffrey Young/The Huffington Post)
Waters has been unemployed and uninsured since he was laid off as a grocery store manager in July. He suffered a minor stroke after that and was fortunate that Kaiser Permanente offered him a deep discount on his medical treatments, charging him only $962 of the more than $3,000 he owed. “I’ll be able to go see a doctor now,” he said.
Without insurance, Waters was afraid to run up medical bills, said his partner, Melinda Jones, 59.
“I have to scream at him to get him to go to the doctor, because he won’t go. ‘I don’t have any insurance. I don’t have any insurance.’ I don’t want to hear it!” Jones said. “If he dies on me, I’m digging him up and killing him again.”
CEO Tim Cook said Tuesday that the company would power its new corporate headquarters with energy from a 2,900-acre solar farm being built by First Solar. Apple committed $848 million to the solar project, which was approved for construction last month.
“We know at Apple that climate change is real,” Cook said at the Goldman Sachs’ 2015 technology conference in San Francisco, according to 9to5Mac. “The time for talk is past and the time for action is now.”
Apple spokesman Chris Gaither confirmed Cook's comments.
Steve Krum, a spokesman for the solar panel maker, also confirmed the partnership, telling The Huffington Post that Apple is "contracted to buy electricity from a plant that we are developing and building to power their new headquarters and data center.”
The iPhone maker is currently building its new, doughnut-shaped home base in Cupertino, California. When construction wraps next year, the headquarters will draw electricity from First Solar's California Flats Solar Project, slated to be complete by the end of 2016. Apple agreed to a 25-year contract with the company, making it the solar industry’s largest-ever commercial power deal, according to First Solar.
A drone video of Apple's new headquarters, currently under construction.
“Apple is leading the way in addressing climate change by showing how large companies can serve their operations with 100 percent clean, renewable energy,” Joe Kishkill, the chief commercial officer at First Solar, said in a statement sent to HuffPost. “Apple’s commitment was instrumental in making this project possible and will significantly increase the supply of solar power in California.”
Apple will use the majority of the Cholame, California, farm's electrical output, and the remaining energy will be sold to the power company Pacific Gas & Electric.
Environmental group Greenpeace praised Apple's move.
"Apple still has a lot of work to do to reduce its environmental footprint, but other Fortune 500 CEOs would be well served to make a study of Tim Cook, whose actions show that he intends to take Apple full-speed ahead toward renewable energy with the urgency that our climate crisis demands," Gary Cook, the group's senior IT sector analyst, said in a statement.
Apple's stock price closed at $122.02 on Tuesday, giving the company a market value of more than $700 billion -- making it the first U.S. company in history to reach that mark.
Keith McCullough is nothing if not committed. “For better or worse, I’ll die here,” he says in reference to Hedgeye Risk Management, the independent investment research firm he founded in 2008. "Sink or swim, that’s what we have."
McCullough sees himself as fighting for the little guy over entrenched interests. He tends to describe his Stamford, Connecticut-based firm, which sells investment advice to institutions and individuals, in antagonistic terms: against traditional Wall Street research, against financial media, against pretty much every market pundit.
In turn, McCullough attracts antagonism. A former hedge fund manager, he is largely known in certain segments of the financial media for his social media feuds with certain segments of the financial media: CNBC’s Jim Cramer and Steve Liesman, their former colleague Ron Insana, blog ZeroHedge, Bloomberg’s Joe Weisenthal, hedge fund manager Doug Kass and prospective-customer-turned-critic Carmine Pirone, to name a few. (The fight with Pirone escalated to the point where McCullough sued him for defamation.)
Through it all, McCullough has been called a self-promoter, a fraud, a charlatan and the P.T. Barnum of finance. But he's convinced that he's right, and that his critics are some combination of dead wrong and jealous.
It's that conviction -- along with McCullough’s frustration with CNBC, where he used to be a frequent guest -- that led him to focus on building his own ways to “tell the truth first in the most efficient formats.”
Hedgeye now has an online video channel aimed at individual investors, and has hired producers away from CNBC to run it. An outgrowth of work the company has been doing since 2010, the videos' combination of mass-audience appeal and high-level sources, McCullough says, “is our ESPN’ing of finance.”
The Hedgeye CEO likens the company's approach to that of Fox football commentator and former Dallas Cowboys quarterback Troy Aikman, who explains strategy on camera for a mass audience, then in the privacy of the locker room assumes the role of confidant and mentor to current players.
“I think what I have is more that pro-to-pro, buy it or sell it” dialogue with institutional clients, McCullough told The Huffington Post.
One of Hedgeye's daily videos.
Polemics are part of the furniture at Hedgeye. Though much of the office looks like standard-issue Connecticut finance -- where young men in dress shirts and Vineyard Vines fleece vests sit at white desks and stare at multiple monitors -- the space also includes a Republican-themed conference room complete with club chairs, a cowhide ottoman, an antler chandelier, a silver-plated AK-47 table lamp and portraits of GOP leaders from Lincoln to Nixon. (There's a Democrat room as well.)
The tone of the firm's analysis is brash and conversational. The morning research note is probably alone in the industry in combining Bayesian analysis, hashtags like #globalslowing and #deflation and image macro memes. And Hedgeye is likely the only research firm that employs its own cartoonist.
A Hedgeye cartoon on falling U.S. government bond yields.
A Hedgeye chart showing U.S. utilities' performance against the S&P 500 in 2014.
Those who watch Hedgeye's video channel or pay to subscribe to its research won't hear the advice most retail investors need. They won't get someone calmly and cheaply telling them to trade less, ignore pretty much all short-term investing advice and just buy low-cost index funds. Instead, McCullough thinks it's his job to tell retail investors who trade frequently how to do it better, and to help institutions boost investment returns.
“We’ve branded ourselves as being Mac versus PC,” McCullough says. The PC in his analogy stands for both traditional Wall Street research, which he calls “conflicted, compromised and constrained,” and the financial media. Hedgeye is the Mac.
The main thing that attracts people to Hedgeye, though, is McCullough himself.
Jim, I am formally warning u - unblock or everything u say will be audited by Hedgeye Risk Mgt police @jimcramer
— Keith McCullough (@KeithMcCullough) June 14, 2013
@rinsana @CGasparino yeah, u were in the room - when I walked out, I said to the guys, Ronnie better have inside info b/c he's f'n clueless
— Keith McCullough (@KeithMcCullough) November 7, 2014
Talking with McCullough, it’s clear he enjoys being a Twitter pugilist.
“Yeah, I led Yale in points. But I also led Yale in penalty minutes,” he says, referencing the days when he was the captain of his college hockey team. “That’s who I am.” He’s energetic and direct, occasionally laughing boisterously at his own jokes and insights.
An equity hedge fund manager who has a very small ownership stake in Hedgeye described McCullough slightly differently.
“He’s bombastic, but it’s tactical. He’s doing it to get attention for Hedgeye, and hopefully that leads to more subscriptions,” said the investor, who asked to remain anonymous. Two other hedge funds and the seed fund 500 Startups also have small stakes in the company.
McCullough thinks Hedgeye's critics in the financial media overlook his ability to attract subscribers and talk to big players. That's because the critics usually come across Hedgeye through "our main marketing channel," Twitter, where they encounter McCullough at his most antagonistic.
"Sometimes when I’m on the ice punching you, I look a little more like the person that they want me to be, which is just another lying Wall Street scumbag, which is false,” he says, adding that investors who get to know him find out he's "self-effacing to a fault.”
Even if that's true, McCullough certainly isn't shy when he thinks he's right.
“Investigative research and investigative journalism, what’s the difference? We’re trying to get to the same point,” he says, comparing Hedgeye’s aggressive short calls against energy companies Kinder Morgan and Linn Energy to Ida Tarbell’s crusade against Standard Oil. Though Kinder Morgan stock is up about 16 percent since Hedgeye’s bearish call in September 2013, the bet against Linn has worked out better for McCullough. Linn is down about 70 percent since Hedgeye’s March 2013 short call on the back of an SEC investigation into the company’s accounting practices.
McCullough is also proud of his prescient call earlier in 2014 that bond yields would fall, a prediction that was out of the mainstream at the time.
He has had big misses too. In 2010, he predicted that the Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing program could, over an undefined period of time, lead to the collapse of the U.S. economy. So far, of course, it has not. A close analysis of his 2013 recommendations showed that if you’d traded only on Hedgeye’s suggestions, you would have made just 0.3382 percent. In contrast, the S&P 500 was up 31 percent that year.
But McCullough says his buy and sell signals shouldn’t be used to create a portfolio.
The portfolio he currently recommends is 52 percent in cash and just 6 percent stocks, an asset allocation that goes beyond conservative and into territory a financial doomsday prepper would appreciate. But even that's not McCullough at his most extreme: In 2012, he recommended a 100 percent cash portfolio.
The Hedgeye CEO is unperturbed by criticism about the quality of his product or how he presents it. He believes he has always accurately represented Hedgeye. “We have never said we are a hedge fund,” he says in response to allegations that language in his real-time alert product implied he was making trades, rather than recommending them. “I’m basically the journalist of the buy-side,” he adds.
Independent research is a business which has always seemed almost on the verge of being about to break through, but it's never really been able to stick. McCullough thinks Hedgeye’s mix of single-stock research, macroeconomic analysis and daily alerts can be different. “There’s no top to this, in terms of our ability to grow content,” he says.
Hedgeye currently has 23 analysts and 57 employees in total. The company says revenues grew about 25 percent to more than $12 million last year. McCullough sees those dollars as a vindication of his views.
Hedgeye has hired an executive recruiting firm to help attract new hires, and McCullough says his company has no problem luring in talent. Perhaps, he says, that’s because “we’re in Stamford, so we’re kind of the only game in town.”
Though Stamford is teeming with hedge funds, McCullough doesn’t seem to think he has much competition in building the ESPN of finance -- a point he makes with a reference to hedge fund giant Citadel and college hockey.
“If the captain of Cornell, who’s elected by his teammates, was running money at Citadel and decided to open up Hedgeye II, that would be my first very relevant competition.”
The Rochester, New York-based grocer has unseated Amazon as the firm with the best corporate reputation among a list of 100 highly visible companies, according to an annual Nielsen poll released this week.
“To be recognized in this way is just incredible,” Danny Wegman, the company’s chief executive, said in a statement. “It always starts with our people, who thrill our customers every day and extend a family feeling in our stores across six states.”
In an age where social media anthropomorphizes products -- from toilet paper to body wash -- branding matters. And although Wegmans has only 85 stores, the company has built a cult following online. Fans applaud the supermarket's decent wages, wide selection of prepared foods and reasonable prices.
Amazon ranked second in the Nielsen poll, followed by Samsung, Costco, Johnson & Johnson and Kraft Foods. The company with the worst reputation on the list was Goldman Sachs.
To determine the rankings in the Harris Poll Reputation Quotient study, evaluated annually for the last 16 years, Nielsen conducted an online survey in English of 27,278 U.S. respondents between Oct. 20 and Dec. 18.
America's skyrocketing student loan debt may be keeping young people from moving out of their parents' homes.
There's "a clear positive correlation between a state’s student debt growth and the rate at which its twenty-five-year-olds live with their parents," according to a new report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which analyzed what factors are to blame for keeping millennials living at home. While housing costs and a tough job market may also be fueling the trend, the dramatic rise in student debt being shouldered by college graduates was most closely associated with the rise of young people living with their parents.
The report compared parental co-residence rates for 25-year-olds from 2002-2003 to 2012-2013. Here's a GIF that shows rates rising over the last decade across the 48 contiguous states (darker shades of blue indicate a higher rate of 25-year-olds living at home):
As you can see, the situation has become a lot more common over the last 10 years.
"In 2003, between 20 and 30 percent of twenty-five-year-olds lived with their parents (using our measure) in twenty-five of the forty-eight states," according to the New York Fed. "By 2013, all forty-eight states had parental co-residence rates of more than 30 percent."
In Maine, Minnesota, New Hampshire and Vermont, the share of 25-year-olds living at home had grown by 20 percentage points over the 10 years.
One caveat of the data is that the New York Fed considered a person to be living with parents if he or she was "living with any individual who is at least fifteen years older." This older individual in some cases could be a grandparent, an aunt or uncle or some other older housemate, the report said.
The Fed compared three economic trends -- student debt, county unemployment rate and zip code housing price index -- to the overall growth in the percentage of 25-year-olds living with parents. As you can see in the following graphs, the nearly straight line showing the growth in student debt is most closely correlated with the line showing the share of young people living at home.
Looking more closely at the relationship between student debt and parental co-residence, the Fed researchers found that a $10,000 increase in student debt per graduate correlates with an increase of 2.9 percentage points in the rate of co-residence for 25-year-olds.
Forty million Americans now have student debt with an average balance of $29,000. And these numbers have climbed rapidly in recent years. Americans carry a total of $1.2 trillion in student debt -- up 84 percent since the recession.
(Reuters) - Troubled electronics retailer RadioShack Corp is preparing to shut down the chain in a bankruptcy deal that would see half the stores taken over by Sprint Corp, Bloomberg News reported, citing people with knowledge of the discussions.
The rest of the stores would close down, Bloomberg said. (http://bloom.bg/16aNrZw)
Sprint and RadioShack have also had talks about co-branding the stores, Bloomberg reported, citing two anonymous sources.
Another bidder could yet emerge to buy RadioShack and continue operating the 94-year-old chain, Bloomberg said.
The Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday that Standard General, a hedge fund and the largest investor in RadioShack, was in talks to serve as the lead bidder at a bankruptcy auction.
RadioShack declined to comment on the Bloomberg report and said it had not confirmed any of the information.
Sprint declined to comment.
RadioShack warned last September it faced bankruptcy if talks with lenders and stakeholders about a sale or a restructuring failed. It was also threatened with delisting from the New York Stock Exchange last week.
The electronics retailer, once the operator of go-to shops for innovators and engineers for products ranging from vacuum tube speakers to the first mass-produced PC.
But the company has failed to transform itself into a destination for mobile phone buyers, losing out to rivals such Amazon.com Inc and Wal-Mart Stores Inc.
RadioShack said in October that it would seek to convert a loan of $120 million, given by investors including Standard General and Litespeed Management LLC, into equity "in the coming months".
RadioShack shares were down 15.2 percent at $0.24.
(Reporting by Ramkumar Iyer and Yashaswini Swamynathan in Bengaluru and Malathi Nayak in San Francisco; Editing by Joyjeet Das)
Alibaba stock plunged nearly 10 percent after the Chinese e-commerce giant reported sales that disappointed Wall Street and dealt with a regulatory spat in its home country.
Alibaba, which made history last September with the largest initial public offering ever, on Thursday reported results for its fiscal third quarter, which ended Dec. 31. The company racked up sales of $4.2 billion, up 40 percent from the same period a year earlier. But the results disappointed analysts polled by Thomson Reuters, who expected sales of $4.45 billion.
Alibaba's stock price dropped nearly 10 percent on Thursday morning.
Investors also reacted to a Chinese regulatory probe, disclosed in a white paper posted on the website of China's State Administration for Industry and Commerce on Wednesday. The paper said the agency was investigating Alibaba for failing to crack down on counterfeit goods sold on its Taobao online marketplace.
In a statement on its website, the SAIC said it discussed the paper with the company last July, but kept the meeting a secret, in “order not to impede Alibaba’s preparations for its initial public offering.”
Alibaba denied knowledge of the paper on Wednesday, amid accusations from bankers that the company misled investors by hiding the information.
"The first time we saw the white paper was when it was posted on the SAIC web site yesterday," Joe Tsai, Alibaba Group's executive vice chairman, said in a statement on Thursday. "I want to make it absolutely clear that Alibaba has never requested the SAIC to delay the publication of any report."
Paperwork the company filed in the U.S. before its IPO acknowledged investigations by the Chinese government and others into alleged trademark infringement, particularly by third-party sellers who use Taobao. But it did not specifically mention the SAIC report.
Alibaba's stock has been volatile since it went public at $68 a share. It jumped more than 40 percent on its first day of trading. But it has been tumbling from a peak of about $119 in November.
Nationwide had everyone feeling good with its first Super Bowl commercial featuring Mindy Kaling, and then took it all away.
The second commercial got off to a good start, with a cute little kid talking about how he'd never get cooties or get married, and then there was the big reveal: He's dead.
And the entire Internet said, "Whaaaaatttt?!" Here are some of the best reactions:
Overheard in Nationwide advertising meeting: "Yeah, these are okay, but do you have anything where we can kill a kid?"
— Eric Stangel (@EricStangel) February 2, 2015
#Nationwide: "We killed an actual kid for this commercial just so you could understand we mean business."
— Elon James White (@elonjames) February 2, 2015
Nice #Nationwide In case your kid dies, have insurance so you can go on vacation afterwards #SuperBowI
— David Brody (@David_Brody) February 2, 2015
Nationwide says "Enjoy the Halftime Show!" pic.twitter.com/VGesJZBWlN
— Dan O'Donnell (@DanODradio) February 2, 2015
So everyone hated the Nationwide commercial. Which means everyone will be taking about Nationwide. Which means Nationwide wins.
— Seth Davis (@SethDavisHoops) February 2, 2015
Hey, what's the Super Bowl for if not being reminded of how fragile life truly is?
NEW YORK (AP) — Drivers, bring your vehicles back to the shop for more work on faulty air bags.
The government says more than 2 million Toyota, Chrysler and Honda vehicles need a second fix for air bags that may inadvertently inflate while the car is running.
The recall includes some Acura MDX, Dodge Viper, Jeep Grand Cherokee, Honda Odyssey, Pontiac Vibe, Toyota Corolla and Toyota Avalon models made from 2002 to 2004.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says all of the vehicles covered in Saturday's announcement had already been under a recall for the faulty air bags. Carmakers originally tried to fix the defects by partially replacing the electronic control unit, made by TRW Automotive Holdings Corp. of Livonia, Mich., but that fix didn't always work. The new remedy — full replacement of the unit — will be available to all affected vehicles by the end of the year.
However, the NHTSA is urging consumers with cars under the first recall to have the partial unit installed despite the fix's failure rate, even if they have to return to the dealer under the second recall.
"Even though it's a temporary solution until the new remedy is available," NHTSA Administrator Mark Rosekind said, consumers "and their families will be safer if they take the time to learn if their vehicle is covered and follow their manufacturers' instructions."
About 39 air bags, or 15 percent, that had been replaced under the previous recall have deployed inadvertently again.
The agency says about 1 million Toyota and Honda vehicles involved in the new recalls are also subject to a separate recall related to defective air bags made by Takata Corp. of Japan. Those air bags can deploy and rupture with enough force to cause injury or death.
In nine cases, cars had problems that included both the inadvertent deployment and the Takata rupture. Three of those cases resulted in injuries, including eye injuries, scratches and burns.
No death or injuries related to non-Takata air bag failures have been reported.
The announcement comes days after the family of Carlos Solis filed a lawsuit against Takata. Solis, 35, died on Jan. 18 in a minor crash in a Houston suburb. The lawsuit alleges that as an air bag in his 2002 Honda Accord inflated, it sent a piece of metal into his neck. Solis died at the scene. His death has not officially been linked to the air bag.
Takata is under fire for air bag inflators that can explode, shooting out metal and plastic pieces. At least five deaths and dozens of injuries have been linked to the problem worldwide. Ten automakers have recalled about 12 million vehicles in the U.S. and about 19 million globally for problems with the air bags. The company is still trying to determine the cause of the problem.
