Tuesday, July 28, 1998

11:07:57 AM

For a bi-monthly wrap up of NOLA news and information, be sure to check out NOLA Notes!
To receive The Desktop News in your email, go here.
(You must be using Netscape, Internet Explorer or an HTML-based email program to use this service)

Desktop Categories

For Every Season. . .

The Literary Traveler is a neat site with an interesting concept. They visit a different locale every season and act as a literary guide. The latest issue; entitled "Home in the South." takes a look at writers based in the southern states, from Thomas Wolfe to William Faulkner, in order to explore the theme of home. This includes visits to Wolfe's Old Kentucky Home and Robert Frost's Dismal Swamp.

Imagineers Never Sleep

Those folks at Disney never seem to rest. Now it is an educational site dubbed the Edu-Station. Educational links, cyber-activities and lesson plans all round out to a decent site for the classroom. Primarily aimed at teachers, the site has a ton of info to help in curriculum planning for lower grades. Of course, you get a healthy dose of Disney's marketable properties such as The Mulan Poem.

Modern Library

Random House is featuring it's 100 best English-language novels of the twentieth century at the Modern Library website. Also included is a Reader's top 100. My personal opinion; readers are smarter. They placed "Atlas Shrugged", Ayn Rand's classic at number 1. The board's choice; Ulysses.

Items submitted by:
Kenneth S. Bell - Email
NOLA Regional Library System

Health-Care Updates

Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield now has a web site. With in this web-site is the Provider Directory. Refer to your I.D. card for the name of the network and then select it by scrolling through the list. You also have the ability to search by city, county, zip, hospital  or physician.

Ted Biskind of Biskind Financial Services sent an article to my attention from the Associated Press. Here are some of the highlights.

Cut-rate prices aren't likely next year, health-care industry watchers say.  Insurers are coping with expensive mergers.  Consumers are pressuring companies to cover costly new drugs such as the $10-a-pill impotence-treatment tablet, Viagra. 

With only 49 percent of plans making money last year, according to researcher InterStudy Publications, managed-care insurers are looking to recoup their losses.

Kaiser Permanente, is making up for small increases in recent years, spokeswoman Beverly Hayon said.  As the nation ages and consumers demand more lifestyle drugs, pharmaceutical costs are rising, leaving company mangers to debate whether Kaiser can afford to start paying for Viagra.

"It's clear that demand for that pill alone could exceed what we spend on all the antibiotics put together, which would be well over $50 million a year,"  Hayon said.  "I don't think lifestyle drugs have been as much a factor in the past." 

Rates industrywide began to edge up in 1998 after increases only 3 percent to 5 percent from 1994-1996.

Items submitted by:
Melissa Lattanzi - Email
NOLA Regional Library System

To Unsubscribe, send email to [email protected]