Karen Cyphers - page 41

Andrea Saul, former press secretary to presidential candidate Mitt Romney and communications director to Florida Gov. Charlie Crist, is setting on a new course as leadership with Facebook’s COO Sheryl Sandberg in the role of communications director for Sandberg’s  Lean In project. “Andrea is joining us to run Communications and help reach women – and men – so that we can all work together towards a more equal world,” Sandberg posted on her Facebook page. This is not the first…

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Count the more than 7,000 members of the Florida Retail Federation among those pleased with the US Senate’s passage of the Marketplace Fairness Act on Monday.  The bill, which passed 69-27, allows states to enforce the same tax collection requirements on internet sales as they do those that take place at brick-and-mortar businesses. Federation members include small family-owned businesses as well as some of the state’s largest employers.  Price disparities may especially impact small merchants who lose sales to remote…

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A study on drug pricing in Florida suggests that contraceptives cost more to consumers in low-income neighborhoods than in wealthier ones, but may create as many questions as it seeks to answer. The study was released Monday at the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists’ annual meeting and reported at Huffington Post. It compared the pricing of seven commonly-used contraceptives and cross-referenced these costs across various counties with median household incomes from the 2010 census. Data from MyFloridaRx.com, a website…

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Here’s a big number: 150 trillion calculations per second, or in human terms, what Florida’s most powerful supercomputer is capable of.  HiPerGator, the Unviersity of Florida’s most recent innovation, will be unveiled Tuesday, May 7. HiPerGator is housed in a $14 million, 25,000-square-foot building on UF’s Eastside Campus, and has been in planning and development since 2004 when UF started a task force to determine high-performance computing needs for research. The installation makes UF one of the nation’s top public…

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Actor Gary Sinise and his Lt. Dan Band, named after his role in “Forrest Gump” are performing a benefit concert in Tampa on Friday, May 10, to benefit hero Sgt. Michael Nicholson who lost both legs, part of an arm, and suffered brain injuries while serving in Afghanistan. Tampa Tribune columnist Steve Otto wrote about Nicholson, sharing his story: Nicholson is a wounded warrior, and the Tampa Plant High grad is one of our own. You have probably heard the…

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Not what we want to think about just following sine die; but a perfect storm approaches in 2014: the deadline is near for when Americans will be required to have qualified health coverage or else face penalties, the clock is ticking under which Florida could draw down $1 billion in federal funds for that year to expand health care coverage for the uninsured, and Florida’s gubernatorial election will in no small part hinge on how this is all handled. For good…

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A bill that revamps the state’s method of billing counties for Medicaid care passed Friday, attempting to resolve problems between counties and the state and ensure that back payments to the state can be recouped in future years.   According to the News Service of Florida, SB 1520 provides that counties will be billed based on their number of Medicaid enrollees — a measure which may serve to equalize responsibility for care provided in certain hospitals and nursing homes.  Under…

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