Runner's high

THE runner’s high: Every athlete has heard of it, most seem to believe in it and many say they have experienced it. But for years scientists have reserved judgment because no rigorous test confirmed its existence.

Yes, some people reported that they felt so good when they exercised that it was as if they had taken mood-altering drugs. But was that feeling real or just a delusion? And even if it was real, what was the feeling supposed to be, and what caused it?

Some who said they had experienced a runner’s high said it was uncommon. They might feel relaxed or at peace after exercising, but only occasionally did they feel euphoric. Was the calmness itself a runner’s high?

Often, those who said they experienced an intense euphoria reported that it came after an endurance event.

The runner’s-high hypothesis proposed that there were real biochemical effects of exercise on the brain. Chemicals were released that could change an athlete’s mood, and those chemicals were endorphins, the brain’s naturally occurring opiates. Running was not the only way to get the feeling; it could also occur with most intense or endurance exercise.

The problem with the hypothesis was that it was not feasible to do a spinal tap before and after someone exercised to look for a flood of endorphins in the brain. Researchers could detect endorphins in people’s blood after a run, but those endorphins were part of the body’s stress response and could not travel from the blood to the brain. They were not responsible for elevating one’s mood. So for more than 30 years, the runner’s high remained an unproved hypothesis.

But now medical technology has caught up with exercise lore. Researchers in Germany, using advances in neuroscience, report in the current issue of the journal Cerebral Cortex that the folk belief is true: Running does elicit a flood of endorphins in the brain. The endorphins are associated with mood changes, and the more endorphins a runner’s body pumps out, the greater the effect.

For athletes and nonathletes alike, the results are opening a new chapter in exercise science. They show that it is possible to define and measure the runner’s high and that it should be possible to figure out what brings it on. They even offer hope for those who do not enjoy exercise but do it anyway. These exercisers might learn techniques to elicit a feeling that makes working out positively addictive.

The lead researcher for the new study, Dr. Henning Boecker of the University of Bonn, said he got the idea of testing the endorphin hypothesis when he realized that methods he and others were using to study pain were directly applicable.

The idea was to use PET scans combined with recently available chemicals that reveal endorphins in the brain, to compare runners’ brains before and after a long run. If the scans showed that endorphins were being produced and were attaching themselves to areas of the brain involved with mood, that would be direct evidence for the endorphin hypothesis. And if the runners, who were not told what the study was looking for, also reported mood changes whose intensity correlated with the amount of endorphins produced, that would be another clincher for the argument.

Dr. Boecker and colleagues recruited 10 distance runners and told them they were studying opioid receptors in the brain. But the runners did not realize that the investigators were studying the release of endorphins and the runner’s high. The athletes had a PET scan before and after a two-hour run. They also took a standard psychological test that indicated their mood before and after running.

The data showed that, indeed, endorphins were produced during running and were attaching themselves to areas of the brain associated with emotions, in particular the limbic and prefrontal areas.

Why umbrella insurance?

An umbrella policy was created to provide additional coverage when a lawsuit brought over injuries and/or property damage that you cause exceeds the liability limits on your car insurance, home insurance, boat insurance, etc.

An umbrella policy has three advantages. It provides additional lawsuit coverage of $1 million or more. It provides added coverage for defense costs, which can easily amount to $100,000 or more. And finally, it provides liability coverage for some lawsuits not covered by your underlying auto or home insurance. Examples include if you're sued over an incident involving a boat you rented on vacation, a car you rented in Europe, or even your work on a nonprofit board of directors.
Everyone concerned about losing income or assets in one large lawsuit needs an umbrella policy. An umbrella insurance policy is the absolute best buy in the insurance business. It costs only about $150 to $200 for the first $1 million of coverage, then about $100 for each additional $1 million.

You can't control whom you might injure. If you injure, for example, the CEO of a large corporation, a professional baseball player or a doctor, you would owe for lost wages, medical bills, and pain and suffering. The lost wages alone for those types of people, if they can't work for 10 years, could start anywhere from $2 million to $3 million and run up to as much as 10 times that amount. Medical bills might be about $500,000. And then, there is compensation for pain and suffering.

The point I'm making here is that you can't be overinsured for lawsuits.

When buying an umbrella insurance policy, buy $1 million more than you think you will need. You can't go back and buy more later, if and when you need to use it.

Google automatic cars and car insurance

Driverless cars could help obliterate $200 billion in personal and commercial insurance premiums.

According to some top insurance companies, it would be 20 years before Google’s cars cleared all the potholes, resistance, and necessary legislation and actually hit the road.
Insurance companies believe that if  80% of accidents are eliminated, they will save big on the  time and expense on the claims which will be a big boon to them.

Being a competitive market, these savings associated with reduced costs of investigating claims/ paperwork would quickly translate across the industry, in the form of lower premiums.

Even with a a 20% adoption rate of incremental driver-assist technology might result in significant enough reductions in accidents to trigger material reductions in premiums. In other words, insurers will feel the effects of driverless technology long before fully autonomous cars become ubiquitous.

Car manufacturers already have assisted parking, and all sorts of sensors to help avoid accidents. Even if Google’s technology isn’t implemented quickly enough to be the silver bullet to the car insurance as the mp3 was to the CD, the trend towards a fully computerized car will undoubtedly quicken.

There is no doubt that far more friction remains for Google to put the driverless car on the road than existed for the mp3 to replace the CD, or for digital photography to replace film.

Obstacles include regulatory hurdles, the cost of insuring cars switching from drivers to manufacturers -- something car makers would be loath to do, in large part to due to the uncertainty and chaos of no previous existing model for it, to getting the average person to accept a computer driving them around, and those fuming that they paid 30k for a new car just a couple years earlier, and damned if their going to lose out on their investment.

However, the trend to me seems clear. The pace of innovation and disruption is only increasing. Film went the way of the dodo when the digital camera arrived. Travel agents, newspapers, and high-commission stock trades were done in by the Internet. PC’s are rapidly being replaced by tablets and mobile phones. And few people in those industries were prepared for the massive shifts.

It’s my belief that car insurance in its current form will disappear, and at minimum, the vastly cheaper rates of insuring a fleet of driverless taxis will take away a substantial amount of the float insurance companies use to generate their profits.

If nothing else, I’ll certainly miss those funny GEICO commercials.

Rising US Healthcare Costs!!

Over the past decade, healthcare costs have risen much faster than salaries.

In the time period, 1999 to 2009 average salaries has risen 38% whereas the health care premium have risen 131 %.

A close examination of the data indicates that this blame is misplaced. Something else is revealed by digging deeper into the key components in healthcare spending: Technology, administrative expenses, hospital costs, lifestyle choice and chronic disease conditions have all had greater impacts on rising overall healthcare costs than physicians.

Some critics have suggested that physicians’ incomes and the fact that physicians direct most healthcare spending (80 percent is a frequently used number) are the real culprits in soaring healthcare costs. Yet despite this, physicians are not necessarily the principal beneficiaries of healthcare spending. The bulk of medical procedure payments go to hospitals and device manufactures.  For example, in California, Medicare pays on average$18,000 for a total hip replacement – $16,336 to the hospital and $1,446 to the surgeon. This reimbursement disparity is certainly not limited to California, and is representative of a broader trend on a national level. Moreover, doctors’ net take-home pay amounts to only about 10 percent of overall healthcare spending.

Once the physician impact on healthcare costs is placed in proper perspective, the true role of other key factors can be examined more clearly.

The first area is technology.  There is consensus among experts that technology is the most important driver of healthcare spending increases over time. Installing and implementing electronic health records is costly – often as much as $25,000 per doctor for a system and a monthly subscription fee on top of that – and requires significant resources.

Admin expenses and hospital costs represent two additional areas of significant concern.  Physicians are continually frustrated as they see increasing administrative regulations as significant burdens that take away from patient care, and they are deeply pessimistic as they struggle to sustain their practices. Seventy-seven percent of physicians feel negatively about the future of medicine, according to the Foundation’s survey of more than 13,500 physicians. Many independent practicing physicians are seeking employment at larger hospital systems to avoid administrative burdens.  Forty percent of primary care physicians today who see patients at hospitals are employed by the hospital, which has doubled since 2000.

Hospital costs during 2010 in the U.S. constituted $814 billion or 31.4 percent of all healthcare expenditures. Furthermore, the cost of care will only continue to rise as we shift into a consolidated healthcare system and programs like Medicare allow higher payments for services performed in hospitals as opposed to independent private practices. One widely reported example found a Nevada patient whose echo cardiogram bill came to $373 before the physicians’ practice had been purchased by a hospital system and then increased to $1,605 after the merger.

Finally, another vital factor to consider is that of life style and chronic conditions. Chronic diseases are the most common and costly of all health problems, but they are also the most preventable. According to the CDC’s National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, our common, health-damaging but modifiable behaviors – tobacco use, insufficient physical activity, poor eating habits, and excessive alcohol use –are responsible for much of the illness, disability and premature death related to chronic disease. And people with three or more chronic disease conditions generally fall into the costliest one percent of patients who account for 20 percent of all healthcare spending in the U.S.

Moreover, there is a real issue of health disparities that exists in this country leading to higher healthcare costs. Between 2003 and 2006, the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies estimated the total direct and indirect costs of health inequities affecting racial and ethnic minority populations, including lost wages and productivity – exceeded $1.2 trillion.

Clearly, to achieve true cost savings in our healthcare system, experts must look at all of these factors that are driving healthcare costs above the gross domestic product, population growth and inflation – and recognize that the literature and data simply do not point to physicians as a primary or even secondary cause of rising healthcare costs. Physicians have been a target of blame for many years, but the facts about what drives healthcare costs indicate otherwise.

Tesla Battery Swapping Stations

Recently Tesla motors demonstrated how a robot could swap a depleted battery in an electric Model S sedan for a fully charged one in about 90 seconds, less than half the time it takes to fill up a car with gasoline.
Nissan North America also announced its own battery replacement program for the plug-in Leaf.

Both car makers are working hard to make the consumer's life easier.
Tesla said it will charge $60-$80 for the pack swap, the same as about 15 gallons of gas. The service will be available at Tesla’s new super-charging stations in California starting later this year, followed by the Northeast and other markets where it is expanding its new super-charger network. The superchargers — which can restore much of a depleted battery’s charge in about half an hour — will continue to be available for free, Musk said. If you want your original battery back after it’s recharged, that will cost another $60. If you want to keep the new one, Tesla will bill you for it, though it can’t say yet how much that will be. The good news is that once-high battery costs are coming down rapidly.

One question is how many miles would you need to drive the all electric Tesla model S in order to justify spending the additional money when compared to a different luxury sedan like the Audi quattro. Studies say in Massachusetts, you would need to drive 70,000 miles before you save $10,000 price differential with the Audi A7 quattro. 

Fuel costs comparisons per mile:

Tesla Model S  Fuel cost per mile = (9.5 kWh ×14.04¢ per kWh) / 25 miles = 5.33¢ per mile.
Audi A7  Fuel cost per mile = (1.2 gal ×$4.031/gal) / 25 miles = 19.35¢ per mile.
Savings per mile = 14.01¢ per mile

Over those 70,000 miles, you would save over 40,000 pounds of CO2 emissions with Tesla.

Go green!!