As medical costs continue to rise, the annual health expenses for a family of four now exceed the typical of cost of their groceries during the same time period, according to a new report from consulting firm Milliman, Inc.

The firm estimates that a typical family of four with an employer-sponsored health plan will end up incurring about $22,030 for all of their medical costs in 2013. That represents a 6.3 increase from last year, when the typical family racked up $20,728.

Some of that total sum ends up being covered by the family’s health insurance plan — the firm’s analysts found that employers paid about 58 percent of the total health care costs — but a big chunk of it falls onto the family itself. The average family pays more than $9,000 in payroll deductions and out-of-pocket bills for their health care, which is more than they typically spend on groceries and gas for an entire year:

“It is a huge expense,” Chris Girod, principal and consulting actuary at Milliman Inc. said in an interview. “Although the trends are slowing down, the total dollar amount has risen $1,300 per year each of the last four years.”

Meanwhile, the share a family and employees pay continues to rise as employers push more costs onto their workers. Therefore, the total share of the overall costs continues to mount, surpassing other household milestones like food and a year’s worth of gas.

“The total share of this cost borne directly by the family — $9,144 in payroll deductions and out-of-pocket costs — now exceeds the cost of groceries for the (Milliman Medical Index’s) typical family of four,” the study says. “The out-of-pocket cost alone — $3,600 for co-pays, coinsurance and other cost sharing, is more than the average U.S. household spends on gas in a year.”

That’s been a consistent trend over the past several years. As the cost of health care increases, Americans’ contributions to their health plans have risen at a much faster rate than their employers’ share. Since 2003, workers in every single state have had to increase their contributions to their family health plans by nearly 75 percent. At the same time, workers’ wages have stagnated. As struggling Americans aren’t able to afford the treatment they need, they’re putting off doctor’s visits and skipping out on their medication.

And, if the regular health costs that a typical American family incurs over the course of the year already represent such a big expense, it’s easy to see how just one catastrophic medical event could plunge Americans into serious debt. The average trip to an emergency room costs 40 percent more than what most Americans spend on monthly rent. It’s even worse for those with ongoing conditions that need expensive treatment — for instance, the Americans who are battling cancer are twice as likely to go bankrupt, even if they have health insurance.

A coalition of sexual violence prevention and women’s equality organizations are joining forces to pressure Facebook to take a stand against any messages that “trivialize or glorify” violence against women, which they say the company should recognize as gender-based hate speech. The activist groups — led by Women, Action & the Media, the Everyday Sexism Project, and author Soraya Chemaly — are asking Facebook to commit to removing this type of content from its platform. And until it does, they’re telling companies to pull their advertising from the site.

In an open letter to the organization, the groups point out that Facebook’s content moderators already police some images of women. In fact, images of mastectomies, breastfeeding mothers, and other non-sexualized depictions of women’s bodies are often removed from the site after being incorrectly labeled as pornographic. On the other hand, however, images and forums that make light of abusing and raping women are allowed to remain on the social media platform under the “humor” section of their content guidelines.

“It appears that Facebook considers violence against women to be less offensive than non-violent images of women’s bodies, and that the only acceptable representation of women’s nudity are those in which women appear as sex objects or the victims of abuse,” the groups’ open letter reads. “Your common practice of allowing this content by appending a [humor] disclaimer to said content literally treats violence targeting women as a joke.”

Facebook currently allows pages on its site called “Fly Kicking Sluts in the Uterus,” “Violently Raping Your Friend Just for Laughs,” “This is why Indian girls are raped,” and “Punching your girlfriend in the face cuz you’re Chris Brown.” The social media site also permits pictures of battered women who are bleeding, bruised, tied up, or drugged alongside captions like “This bitch didn’t know when to shut up.” Women, Action & the Media has collected several additional graphic examples here (trigger warning).

Facebook has previously cracked down on other types of hate speech, like Islamophobic and homophobic content. Considering the fact that intimate partner violence is one of the leading causes of death for women around the world, the coalition of women’s activists want the company to treat gender-based hate speech with the same seriousness. “Your refusal to similarly address gender-based hate speech marginalizes girls and women, sidelines our experiences and concerns, and contributes to violence against them,” the open letter explains.

Read more

Over 60 percent of the Americans living in the Deep South support Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion, according to the results from a new poll that surveyed a broad sample of people in Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina.

The poll, conducted between March and April by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, found that support for Medicaid expansion is somewhat divided along partisan lines. Nevertheless, a solid majority of residents in each of the five Deep South states favor expanding the public insurance program to extend coverage to additional uninsured Americans:

That public support stands in sharp contrast to the five states’ political leaders, who have resisted cooperating with health care reform at any cost. The GOP governors in each of those Southern states — Govs. Robert Bentley (R-AL), Nathan Deal (R-GA), Bobby Jindal (R-LA), Phil Bryant (R-MS), and Nikki Haley (R-SC) — have refused to expand their Medicaid programs.

“This survey clearly shows that governors and state legislators in the South who are resisting the Medicaid expansion are out-of-step with their constituents,” Brian D. Smedley, the director of the Joint Center’s Health Policy Institute, pointed out.

The broad public support for Medicaid expansion in this region makes sense. Low-income Americans in the South who don’t currently qualify for their state’s Medicaid program are being forced to simply skip out on medical care, and expanding Medicaid’s eligibility levels would ensure that they can access the health treatment they need. Deeply red Southern states also tend to have worse health outcomes compared to Democratic-controlled states on the coasts, and expanding Medicaid could help lessen some of those disparities.

But political resistance to Obamacare, even in the states that stand to benefit the most from it, remains strong. The governors in highly uninsured states are still refusing to consider cooperating with the Medicaid provision of the health reform law. And even when Republican governors reluctantly agree that Medicaid expansion is the right decision for their constituents, GOP-controlled legislatures in their states continue to block it.

People assume they can eat larger portion sizes of foods labeled “healthy,” even when those foods actually have the same amount of calories as the “non-healthy” versions, according to the results from a new study. The research project was an attempt to assess whether food companies’ marketing efforts to brand their products as healthier have an impact on consumer choices.

Researchers asked 186 adults to determine the appropriate portion sizes of both “healthy” and regular brands of different foods. The participants tended to serve themselves larger portions of the “healthy” food, and they also tended to underestimate the amount of calories that were actually in it. The study’s researchers attribute these behaviors to the effective marketing strategies that the food industry uses to convince people that even processed foods aren’t so bad if they’re being touted as healthier options:

“People think (healthier food) is lower in calories,” said Pierre Chandon, a marketing professor at the INSEAD Social Science Research Center in France, and they “tend to consume more of it.”

That misconception can lead to people eating larger portion sizes of so-called healthy foods, and therefore more calories.

“Foods are marketed as being healthier for a reason, because food producers believe, and they correctly believe, that those labels will influence us to eat their products and perhaps eat more of their products,” said Dr. Cliodhna Foley Nolan, the director of Human Health and Nutrition at Safefood, a government agency in Ireland.

The new study builds upon previous research that found that green labeling is “coded” as healthier — so when a product is marketed in green packaging, Americans tend to assume it has fewer calories, even if it’s a product like a candy bar.

As Americans continue to grapple with an ongoing obesity epidemic, fast food companies in the United States have attempted to use these type of marketing tactics in order to rebrand themselves as healthier choices Popular chains like McDonald’s, Panda Express, Taco Bell, and Coca-Cola have all attempted to improve their national image by offering up “healthy” options — even though they haven’t actually changed much about the actual nutritional content of their products.