🐄 Healthy Again: Obamacare premiums spike

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Health insurance premiums in the Obamacare marketplaces will rise an average of 13 percent next year, according to KFF, the health research group. That's the second year in a row of double-digit increases. Last year, premiums rose 26 percent after Congress let temporary federal subsidies expire, and enrollment has fallen by nearly five million people since.

Most Obamacare customers earn less than $64,000 a year and qualify for income-based subsidies, so taxpayers will cover the extra cost. But about 10 percent of enrollees, mostly self-employed workers and early retirees, earn too much to qualify for help. For them, the average cost of the cheapest bronze plan now runs about $700 a month for a single 50-year-old.

Gut health has moved beyond just eating extra fiber. People are now booking week-long wellness retreats, complete with custom meal plans, meditation, movement classes, and microbiome testing. The price tag can hit $20,000. For someone dealing with ongoing digestive pain, the idea of a clean slate sounds worth it.

Research shows that your gut microbiome can shift fast. One study followed 24 people on a nine-day meditation retreat with a vegetarian diet and found a quick change in gut bacteria. Other work backs that up. The catch is those changes don't usually stick, and there's no real agreement on what a "healthy" microbiome even looks like.

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Methadone is one of the most effective tools for getting off opioids. It cuts your risk of fatal overdose roughly in half. And over the past decade, private equity firms have quietly bought up methadone clinics until they control about 35 percent of them nationwide.

The pitch from investors was that their money would expand treatment and build new facilities, but new research from Brown University found that's not what happened. Within two years of a private equity firm entering a county, it typically controlled 67 percent of the local methadone market. In more than a quarter of counties, a single firm owned every clinic.

But methadone shipments and overdose deaths stayed flat, while some prospective investors have even recommended shutting down unprofitable rural clinics entirely.

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