The U.S. Dept. of Health & Human Services is giving a sneak peek today on how the new Health Insurance Benefits and Coverage forms are going to look.

As part of the new healthcare ruling, all paperwork pertaining to insurance plans were re-designed with a new format. According to the new law, “private insurers are now required to provide you with a Summary of Benefits and Coverage — a simple explanation of what a policy covers, written in plain language.”

Here’s the link to a pre-filled out form of the Summary and Benefits Coverage that everyone will be seeing fairly soon, regardless of what insurance company you are with. [NOTE : PDF download link]

If you’re in the healthcare field, there’s even a blank template available for you to preview to roll into your company’s forms database. [NOTE : PDF download link]

A standard form is going to go a loooong way in comparing insurance policy benefits on a direct paper-next-to-paper basis. After looking at the 6-8 page form, why something like this “nutrition label” format wasn’t mandated earlier is beyond me.

Here are some news stories from this week that I think the mainstream media completely missed out on. All links are from legitimate news sources and not the fringe / wacko sites.

* Did you hear a giant collective “AAAAAAAAAAA!” from the Haaaaaarvard crowd this last week? It might have been because of a front page story in Bloomberg that said Haaaaaarvard graduates are now “earning less than those from the South Dakota School of Mines & Technology”! The starting pay for a graduate of the South Dakota School of Mines & Technology is $56,700, but the starting graduation-job pay for Haaaaaarvard graduates was $54,100. Considering Haaaaaarvard is four times more expensive than the South Dakota School of Mines & Technology, I think this is a pretty big win (and a great sign) for blue collar workers! Story at [BLOOMBERG]

* Crack open the AH-DERRRR file. Those itty bitty economy cars, despite their super dooper cuteness, don’t take a hit too well! A recent insurance industry study shows that itty bitty cars cause serious “personal injury” to their occupants “28.5 times for every 1,000”. That’s one serious personal injury for every 35 accidents! To add insult to injury, the safest car to drive (out of all cars) is a Porche 911, with just “4.5 injury claims for every 1,000“. Somebody better switch those dancing hamsters for crash test dummies! Story at the [DAILY MAIL]

* Did anybody else notice that one of the Muslim protesters who took over a US foreign embassy last week was wearing a “Let It Be” t-shirt? (Dude with the yellow shirt on the left in the photo below.) Let it be? Seriously?! The Beatles “Let It Be”? After torching a foreign embassy, burning the flag, and taking over the roof to fly your own flag? I’m not sure if that t-shirt is intended as biting sarcasm or if it’s just 24-karat solid gold irony in progress. Photo below…

Let it be, you say?

* Billa, a major european supermarket chain with stores “in nine European countries”, are now selling pre-peeled bananas in plastic trays covered in plastic wrap. Apparently, they’re trying to get Captain Planet to just flat out have a heart attack, because I really can’t think of another reason for this. Did someone in Europe complain to Billa upper management that bananas were just too hard to peel? I mean, once you know which end of the banana is “up”, the rest is pretty straightforward, right? Story at [HUFFINGTON POST]

* This next story has my spider sense going all sorts of bonkers. The CDC issued a press release about “Rabies Immune Globulin”, saying “Sanofi Pasteur is currently directing requests for human rabies immune globulin to Grifols/Talecris Biotherapeutics, supplier of HyperRAB” and that “Sanofi Pasteur will be able to fulfill orders for Imogam (human rabies immune globulin) when additional lots are expected to be released by late November”. Sooooo the “usual” provider of human anti-rabies med is OUT of their flagship product and they’re referring everyone to their competition until November until they can catch up and “additional lots” are made available. Right. Soooo my question is WHAT HAPPENED THAT THEY RAN OUT OF HUMAN ANTI-RABIES MEDS?  WHY IS THE CDC MAKING THIS PRESS RELEASE IF IT’S NO BIG DEAL? WHERE IS MY CAPS LOCK… ah, there it is. Maybe it’s nothing, but I got a baaaaad feeling about this. Story at [CDC]

* Since Bill Gates, the former head of Microsoft, has been devoting his time and stupid-amounts of money to charity, not a single citizen in India has contracted polio. Gates also dropped a $750 million dollar bomb of a donation to “fight Aids, malaria and TB” in Africa, and he’s stated that his goal in life is “to see unnecessary deaths drop to zero”. This dude has done more for charity and humanity than anyone else has in this century, but what does this article headline with? How Bill Gates wrote a letter to Steve Jobs. Can I get a “sad trombone” sound, here? Wah-wah-waaaahhhhhh. Story at [TELEGRAPH.CO.UK]

* While everybody is all paranoid out about a computerized military killer like SKYNET coming online, a new “immortal chemist” computer network called “Chematica” has been created, and it is already online and thinking of how to synthesize “drug molecules and other important compounds, combine long (and expensive) syntheses of compounds into shorter and more economical routes and identify suspicious chemical recipes that could lead to chemical weapons” and ways to prevent a “potential terrorist” from making “a nerve gas, an explosive or another toxic agent”. All that, plus its’ main objective to tie all this knowledge into providing “building blocks for nanotechnology”. SKYNET? Pfffft! Five bucks says Chematica takes SKYNET down by the 2nd round. Story at [FORESIGHT]

* Finally, a brilliant video that uses mixing paint colors to explain how computer cryptography works. Highly educational and entertaining at the same time!

That’s all I got this week. Off to find a cigar to light up!

Here are some news stories from this week that I think the mainstream media completely missed out on. All links are from legitimate news sources and not the fringe / wacko sites.

* In keeping with their philosophy of  “accelerate into the brick wall to survive”, Kodak recently decided “…to sell [their] traditional film businesses to become a fully commercial-focused businesses, with printers at center stage.” Printers? PRINTERS? Kodak didn’t want to hold on to the groundbreaking camera-and-film products they invented, but decided to jump into an over-crowded arena to take on HP, Canon, Xerox, Epson, Lexmark, Brother, and OKI? Seriously? This is like Ken “mad-dog” Chong announcing he’s going into the octagon to kick Brock Lesnar, Chuck Liddell, Randy Couture and Anderson Silva’s collective asses. By himself. Unless there’s a secret weapon or a surprise partner involved, this isn’t going to end well. [TECHCRUNCH]

* Speaking of extinct, Sony announced they will stop making CD and DVD drives in a few months. Sony was the 500-pound gorilla in this game, and if they’re pulling out, you can bet everyone else will too. So what does this mean for the consumer? The next generation of desktops and laptops won’t have CD or DVD drives. Since flash drives and streaming media are faster and hold more data, CDs and DVDs just outlived their usefulness. It’s the end of another tech era, and nobody really noticed. [NEOWIN]

* Everyone knows the Terminator. The half-man, half-governor that protects the future by beating up other budgets? I think it goes something like that. Anyhow, Harvard scientists have taken us one step closer toward awesomeness by creating real “Cyborg Flesh”. “Neurons, muscle cells, and blood vessels (taken from rats) were spliced with nanowires and transistors that monitor bioelectric impulses, and researchers predict subtle variations in the technology will let them control cellular behavior.” Ooooo goody! I can’t wait for ticklish machines! I mean, that’s the only reason something like this would be invented. Right? Right? [IGN]

* We’ve all heard that always-baked dude’s notion that “maaaaan…. our universe is just, like, an atom. And all atoms, are like…. universes! Maaaann!” Well NOT SO FAST says NASA. Apparently the universe is more like an ice cube! Except not frozen. Or solid. Or wet. But aside from that, the metaphor works! See, the latest theory making the scientific rounds is that the universe was formed as the result of a phase-change, like ice turning into water. But in our case, the water of “before” the universe “cooled and suddenly crystallized to form four-dimensional space-time, analogous to ice.” There was nothing before the universe because it was in a different state. Ice to water. Water to ice. Maaaann! [SPACE]

* If congress tells you to come up with a way to get kids out a closed refrigerator if they get stuck inside, what would you do? Well, if it was 1958, you could just grab some kids off the street, huck them in a locked refrigerator, and see what happened! Apparently, “behavior of young children in a situation simulating entrapment in refrigerators was studied in order to develop standards for inside releasing devices, in accordance with Public Law 930 of the 84th Congress.” Several followup studies had to be performed after this “experiment” to see if the kids had mental issues, and none of the parents of these kids were “involved in the incident”. Eesh! Clinically scary article (and potential horror movie idea) over at [PEDIATRICS.ORG]

* Everybody knows “you are what you eat”. Here comes the “you have to be kidding me” part… scientists on two different and independent studies have confirmed you are not only what you eat, you are, genetically, what “what your mother, father, grandparents and great-grandparents ate, too.” The extra-special-with-sprinkles part is that is doesn’t matter how well you eat now because the generations of damage is already burned into your DNA. I’m surprised the current health-conscious administration hasn’t run with this. We can’t change what has come before, but now we must start eating well and taking care of ourselves for our great-grandchildren, too. As for everyone who doesn’t plan on having kids, triple whopper, extra cheese, bacon sundae and large coke away! Science at [CBS]

That’s all I got this week! Time for a Saturday-night cigar!