By Shefali Luthra, Kaiser Health News.

Promoting her much-discussed plan to create a single-payer “Medicare for All” health system, Sen. Elizabeth Warren emphasized a striking figure.

“If we make no changes over the next 10 years, Americans will reach into their pockets and pay out about $11 trillion on insurance premiums, copays, deductibles and uncovered medical expenses,” the Democratic presidential candidate said in an Instagram video posted Monday.

Though activists oppose Golden Rice, essentially a vitamin-fortified food staple, on ideological and economic grounds, Vitamin A deficiency affects hundreds of thousands of kids each year, and a progressive tool that feeds people and prevents disease is welcome. 

We all know people who have suffered by trusting too much: scammed customers, jilted lovers, shunned friends. Indeed, most of us have been burned by misplaced trust. These personal and vicarious experiences lead us to believe that people are too trusting, often verging on gullibility.

In fact, we don’t trust enough.

Scholars analyzing the performance at a large technology firm examined the productivity in a 25-foot radius around their best performers and found that these workers did inspire better performance in coworkers - by 15 percent.

Poor workers impacted their neighbors also, and even more. While “positive spillover” translated into an estimated $1 million in additional annual profits, "negative spillover" from so-called toxic workers was even more pronounced—sometimes having twice the magnitude of impact on profits as positive spillover.

And toxic spillover happens fast. The good news for your team as that its effect dissipates almost immediately once that worker is either fired or relegated to the far physical reaches of the company.

In the novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886), Leo Tolstoy presents a man who is shocked by suddenly realising that his death is inevitable. While we can easily appreciate that the diagnosis of a terminal illness came as an unpleasant surprise, how could he only then discover the fact of his mortality? But that is Ivan’s situation. Not only is it news to him, but he can’t fully take it in:

There are 15 million people living with cancer in just the United States and it is painful. The huge downside to CDC claiming that recreational fentanyl use is an opioid epidemic is that they have stigmatized legitimate pain patients and their care - and so cancer patients end up in Emergency Rooms suffering from pain, nausea, and shortness of breath.