Good oral health, including regular checkups, cleanings and oral cancer screenings, can help prevent gum disease, tooth decay and loss. Yet, traditional Medicare does not cover dental care, with very few and limited exceptions.

It seems counterintuitive, since oral health is such a key part of overall health, especially for older people who may have chronic health conditions like diabetes or heart problems.

Currently, regular care like cleanings and fillings, or services like dentures or extractions are the responsibility of beneficiaries. There are some narrow exceptions, like if dental services are closely related to other covered medical carefor example, a tooth extraction during surgery to repair a broken jaw, or in conjunction with treatment for oral cancer or tumor removal. Even then, Medicare wont cover any follow-up care after the underlying condition is treated, according to the Medicare Rights Center.

Essentially, its not going to cover anything that we think of as routine dental care that you get by just scheduling a visit to your dentist, says Louise Norris, a health policy analyst for medicareresources.org.

Your Medicare Supplement Plan (Medigap) wont cover dental care either. These plans are extensions of original Medicare benefits, so they only align with what Medicare pays for.

Lack of coverage leads many beneficiaries to just skip dental care altogether. Almost half (47%) of all Medicare recipients did not have a dental visit within the past year, according to a 2019 analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation. Black and Hispanic beneficiaries, those with lower incomes and those who rate their health as fair or poor received even less care. 

Paying for your own dental can be costlyaverage Medicare beneficiary dental spending in 2018 was $874; one in five spent more than $1,000 on dental care.

Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont has been pushing for dental coverage (as well as hearing and vision coverage) under Medicare for decades. Two bills in Congress, S.842 and H.R.33, were introduced in March to add these benefits to traditional Medicare. These bills are similar to legislation introduced in previous years without success. While expanding coverage is popular with Medicare recipients, the measures are strongly opposed by the American Dental Association and the AHIP, a trade organization of health insurance providers.

We could eventually see successful legislation to add dental benefits to Medicare, but it will be challenging to work out a deal that the ADA and AHIP can support, and that lawmakers will also support, Norris says.

What Medicare beneficiaries can do about dental care costs

People with traditional Medicare can get dental coverage from a current or former employer, or via a stand-alone dental plan. These stand-alone dental plans generally have fairly low benefit caps, but they can be really useful in covering routine/preventive care, getting people to stick to a regular schedule for check-ups and cleanings, and offsetting the cost of more significant dental work, according to Norris.

However, there are ways to obtain oral health care. If youre willing to switch to a Medicare Advantage plan, most do cover routine dental services, such as checkups or cleanings, although it can be challenging finding in-network providers. These plans often have high deductibles, ($1,000 or more), annual caps and high coinsurance for certain procedures.

Medicare recipients who also qualify for Medicaid, (known as dual-eligibles) can get dental benefits in nearly all states and in Washington D.C. It can be even harder to find dentists who accept Medicaid than those who accept Medicare Advantage plans, due to the limited reimbursement and restrictions on services.

According to the Medicare Rights Center, other options for dental care include:

  • Reduced-cost or free dental clinics: These clinics are available in many states. Type in your zip code to find a nearby location.
  • Local hospitals: Call the hospitals in your area to ask if they offer dental clinics, how you can become a patient there, which services they offer and at what cost, and if payment plans are available.
  • Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs): FQHCs are health care facilities located in medically underserved areas. People with Medicare are eligible to receive services from an FQHC. Some FQHCs may offer dental care.
  • Community Health Centers (CHCs): CHCs provide free or reduced-cost health services, including dental care. CHCs are funded by the Health Resources & Services Administration (HRSA).
  • Donated dental service programs: These programs operate in certain states. Dentists in these programs offer free dental services if you qualify.
  • Dental schools: Some dental schools provide low-cost dental care. Dental students work with patients under the supervision of experienced, licensed dentists.
  • Program of All-Inclusive Care for the Elderly (PACE): PACE is a program available in some states to people with Medicare and Medicaid who need a nursing home level of care.
  • Veterans Administration (VA): Veterans may qualify for VA dental care benefits and may be able to get some or all of their dental care through a local VA facility
  • The Association of State and Territorial Dental Directors (ASTDD) has information and links to all current state oral health programs.

Study after study confirm the importance of regular oral health care for older adultsand not just to avoid more serious problems down the road. Good dental care can also mean more social interaction, improve quality of life, nutritional status and mental health, say researchers. As the older population continues to grow, so will pressure on Congress to include dental care coverage under traditional Medicare.

Snapping your own photos for Instagram may soon be a thing of the past, thanks to a new A.I. tool Google Research is developing. It can create realistic selfies of a user trained off real images of that person.

The technology could eliminate the need for people to tediously pose and snap pictures of themselves in real lifeor generate endless selfies, as Robert Wong, vice president of Google Creative Lab, put it. It could also have a huge impact on social media influencers, many of whom spend their days taking selfies of themselves in chic clothes and in trendy restaurants. 

James Manyika, Googles senior vice president of research, technology, and society, said during a presentation at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity on Wednesday, that A.I. would have a huge impact on the creative sector. A.I. would be an enabler and even liberator of human art in the years to come, he said, likening it to the invention of the camera. 

When photography first arrived, many worried it signaled the end of art because it threatened to disrupt significant areas of work, like landscape painting and portraiture, Manyika said. However, in many ways the opposite turned out to be true. Freed from the need to accurately reproduce reality, painters went to new places leading to the rise of impressionism, modernism, and so much more.

With Googles tool DreamBooth, photographys own reckoning may be coming. DreamBooth is a text-to-image generation tool developed by Google Research and Boston University in 2022 into which people can feed images and then prompt to produce more that are somewhat similar. 

Wong said his team has been feeding images of themselves into the technology in order to generate an infinite amount of personal content. With the rise of social media influencing as a career or side hustle, this use of DreamBooth could allow creators to increase the amount of content they produce and post online for others to gawk at.

Other companies offer similar image-creating services, such as Lensa AI, which uses Stable Diffusion (a text-to-image model) to create selfies of users in different dress, such as a Spartan or an astronaut. But Google is the biggest company to start toying with its own selfie-manufacturing tool. Also, most A.I. selfie tools, including Lensa, are far from photorealistic and look more like animated avatars than real people. DreamBooth produces more realistic images that may pass for actual pictures.  

Wong said that his team has also been using StyleDrop, a Google A.I. tool that generates new corporate-style logos and icons. Google Creative Lab is also testing a tool called AI-Reply, which generates drafts of replies to YouTube comments. 

A human community manager evaluates, selects and edits the best optionsall of which are generated in the friendly voice of the campaign, Wong said of the AI-Reply model. 

Both AI-Reply and DreamBooths selfie generation function could transform social media influencing work, making it so creators content and interaction with their followers could be automated. Combined with StyleDrops ability to create logos, Google seems to be building an A.I. suite for personal branding.

The status quo rarely captures our imaginations, Manyika said at Cannes. Instead, were inspired by someone trying something new: a different medium, method, subject, or something else altogether. And sometimes technology acts as the muse to open up untapped sources of creativity.

After falling roughly 65% in 2022, shares of Tesla have caught fire this year, gaining support from Wall Street during the markets recent A.I. induced rally. The EV giants stock is now up more than 140% year to date and some 40% in the past month alone after gaining traction from multiple charging station deals that CEO Elon Musk signed with legacy automakers to boost revenues this quarter.

But Barclays senior autos analyst Dan Levy downgraded Tesla stock from a buy-equivalent rating to a hold-equivalent rating this week, citing near-term margin issues and an aggressive valuation. Levy, a perennial Tesla bull, still believes in the companys long-term future, and he increased his 12-month price target for the stock to $260 from $220 to reflect the recent run-up in its price. Tesla traded at just over $260 per share on Wednesday. But hes got a message for investors out there.

Weve been bullish on Tesla. We see them as a long-term winner in the industrys transition to an EV world. We acknowledge that there is more to Tesla than just the automotive story, he told CNBC Wednesday. But I think the view on the stock is that theres still a more challenging near-term fundamental setup.

Are more price cuts ahead?

Levy noted that Tesla is expanding its production capacity at multiple facilities around the world at a time when there is elevated inventory of its vehicles on the market, particularly for the entry level model 3 sedan. He argued that this elevated inventory could force Tesla into further price cuts as it seeks to offload vehicles, which, in turn, could lower margins moving forward. Tesla slashed prices on multiple models a total of five times in the first quarter of this year, hoping to boost demand, but some analysts have warned they could be sacrificing profitability over the long term.

Levy also noted that Tesla stock has seen its valuation increase dramatically this year, as measured by the key ratio of enterprise value (EV) to EBITDA (earning before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization). Teslas EV to EBITDA ratio is now roughly 50x, compared to an average of 23x last year, data from Morningstar shows. For reference, the EV to EBITDA ratio for the wider tech sector in January was just 16x, according to Siblis Researchs latest data.

Levy said Teslas rapidly increasing valuation shows that much of its stock price increase this year has been caused by sentiment, with little changing in the way of fundamentals. In other words, investors are getting excited but not much has changed under the hood.

With the run in the stock, we thought that the stock was dismissing some of those fundamentals, hence the move to the sidelines, he added. Shares of Tesla traded down as much as 5.9% on Wednesday after Levys downgrade. 

Still, like many Wall Street analysts, Levy remains bullish on Teslas long-term prospects, noting that the release of the Model 2 next year should help boost sales and the rollout of full self-driving, while far from guaranteed to be an outright success, could help to lift margins after that. 

Its a sentiment shared by Teslas biggest supporter on the Street, Wedbushs tech analyst Dan Ives. In a June 14 note, Ives highlighted the potential for Teslas Cybertruck and Model 2 to increase sales over the next few years and argued that the firms charging station deals with other automakers could add $3 billion in top line revenue over the next few years.

In a nutshell, Tesla is in a massive position of strength after building its EV castle and now is set to further monetize its success, he wrote, tagging the firm with a buy-equivalent rating and a $300 price target.

For psychologist Dr. Jean Twenge, its undeniable that the adolescent mental health crisis began long before the pandemic. 

Twenge, who wrote the recent book Generations: The Real Differences between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers and Silents and What they Mean for Americas Future, has analyzed federally funded data conducted by the University of Michigan to examine trends in the prevalence of depressive symptoms for young adults. 

This data set was one of the first indicators to me that we have a problem, she tells Fortune. 

Depressive symptoms, including feelings of I cant do anything right, My life is not useful, and I do not enjoy life among 8th, 10th, and 12th graders, have been increasing for years, according to Twenges analysis of the data beginning in the 1990s of over 50,000 young adults. 

This graph does definitively show that the adolescent mental health crisis did not begin with the pandemic, she tells Fortune. It began around 2012a good eight years before COVID was on the scene.  

While the pandemic brought to the forefront the unique struggles of Gen Z, it was not the sole catalyst of the increase in depressive symptoms.  

Why 2012? The data seemed misaligned with economic trends, Twenge says, but other major indicators stood out in her research. 

The year 2012 marked a time when most Americans began owning smartphones and caring about their social media presence. Meanwhile, iPhones began to monetize on the selfie with the newfound forward facing camera, influencing the trend that has long marked the importance of appearance, Twenge adds. 

Changes in technology lead to generational differencesso things like more individualism [and] more focus on the self and less on others. 

Social media is associated with an increase in depression and anxiety symptoms, particularly in young girls. The U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy has been vocal about social medias harmful effect on teen brain development, urging for age-appropriate health and safety standards for technology platforms and to require a higher standard of data privacy for children and adolescents, according to his advisory released last month. 

Nearly every teenager in America uses social media, and yet, we do not have enough evidence to conclude that it is sufficiently safe for them, especially at such a vulnerable stage of brain, emotional, and social development, he wrote in a tweet announcing the advisory. Our children have become unknowing participants in a decades-long experiment. 

While Twenge says she cannot predict the future, the rate at which depressive symptoms have been increasing in youth is alarming. She is currently advocating for safety regulations on social media platforms, including a minimum age requirement and an age verification process. Encouraging parents to see the benefits of combating loneliness for their kids and prioritizing sleep are also ways to combat social medias harmful effects. 

We have to have a reckoning around teens and how they are socializing in particular, Twenge says. Parents need to change their thinking around teens hanging out with each other.

Heads of state, finance leaders and activists from around the world will converge in Paris this week to seek ways to overhaul the worlds development banks like the International Monetary Fund and World Bank  and help them weather a warmer and stormier world.

While restructuring debt and reducing poverty will be part of the summit Thursday and Friday, climate will be the main driver, with representatives from developing nations in Africa, Asia and elsewhere having a prominent seat at the table.

The World Bank and IMF have been criticized for not factoring climate change into lending decisions and being dominated by wealthy countries like the U.S., with the neediest nations most at risk of global warming left out of calling the shots.

While those are the primary problems to solve, some doubt the splashy summit led by French President Emmanuel Macron will be able to take major strides to correct those challenges.

Still, the Summit for a New Global Financing Pact will draw roughly 50 heads of state and government from Germany, Brazil, Senegal, Zambia and more with more than 100 countries represented.

Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley will play a major role as a leader of the Bridgetown Initiative, a plan to reform development lending by freeing up money after climate disasters and targeting the higher borrowing costs and debt that developing nations face.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, Chinese Premier Li Qiang, new World Bank President Ajay Banga, IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva, and climate activists Greta Thunberg and Vanessa Nakate also are set to attend.

Masood Ahmed, president of the Center for Global Development think tank in Washington, isnt expecting much concrete action from the gathering but a broad agreement that weve got to think much bigger, much bolder. We need to be willing to change.

Its been hard, however, to summon the political will to spend taxpayer money to combat climate change, said Ahmed, a former senior official in both the IMF and World Bank.

For example, in the United States, we dont have in Congress today the kind of the support that you would want to have for a major global initiative on climate, he said. That makes it harder for people to translate what is a sensible strategy, a necessary strategy, a critical set of actions into legislative action that puts money on the table.

French organizers want to show they can keep fighting poverty and meet the challenges of climate change at the same time, said a top French official said, who was not authorized to be publicly named according to the countrys presidential policy.

Organizers say the summit will end with a summary of commitments, including a roadmap for what to expect from this years meeting of the Group of 20 major economies and U.N. climate conference.

But climate advocates say they want to see more meaningful commitments like new money to help climate-vulnerable nations build sustainable infrastructure or reallocating existing funds to new climate-related projects.

Andrew Nazdin, director of the activist group Glasgow Actions Team, said the development banks need to expand their lending and fast if were going to avoid the worst impacts of the climate crisis.

A U.S. Treasury official told The Associated Press that big new monetary pledges should not be expected from the summit rather its viewed as a chance to push the case for an evolution of the development banks. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity to preview planning for the gathering.

Earlier this year, the World Bank announced that it would increase its lending by $50 billion over the next 10 years to combat extreme poverty and mitigate and adapt to climate change.

The World Bank is trying to bounce back from comments by former President David Malpass seeming to doubt the science that burning fossil fuels causes global warming. He stepped down this year amid criticism and has been replaced by Banga who is attending his first big international meeting since taking the helm.

The World Bank and IMF did not immediately offer comment.

Yellen, for her part, has called for climate to be factored into finance since at least 1997, when she chaired the White House Council of Economic Advisers. Shes been vocal about the need to reform the multilateral banks and bringing lower-income countries into the conversation.

She has described climate change as an existential crisis that no one country could fight alone.

We must also help developing countries transition their economies away from carbon-intensive energy sources and expand access to clean energy, she said last October.

Justin Mankin, a Dartmouth climate scientist, hopes those at the summit take into account the inequities that climate-vulnerable nations face and avoid reinforcing them.

I would argue that to pursue development in a world where global warming has already occurred has to take on those inequities, Mankin said, and reckon with the fact that developing economies are in a foot race against richer countries, which have been massive polluters and also hold the purse strings.

Because the global development banks favor larger industrialized nations, the conditions attached to climate aid should not be unnecessarily stringent, he said.

What sets of conditions these banks impose on countries is one way of knowing whether these inequities can be reinforced, Mankin said.

More specific reform proposals are likely to come in the next few weeks from a G20 panel created to recommend changes at the IMF, the World Bank and other global development agencies, said Ahmed, the former IMF and World Bank official.

One of the biggest challenges will be bringing together nations with diverging interests and growing geopolitical tensions, including between the U.S. and China.

The combination of these geopolitical tensions, suspicion of globalization and of institutions, and only a partial recognition that solving these global problems is going to cost taxpayers makes it harder to follow through with actions, Ahmed said.

___

Associated Press reporters Seth Borenstein in Washington and Sylvie Corbet in Paris contributed.

McKinsey is beefing up its ethics department after a series of high-profile controversies, including helping Purdue Pharma turbocharge opioid sales.

The management consulting giant is hiring for a newly created position with its global ethics allegations management team. The specialist will be responsible for intake and triage of matters that could present a risk to the firm. McKinsey is also looking to replace its ethics director, a position that helps ensure we uphold a distinctive culture of integrity and ethical behavior across our firm, according to the job description, with a salary that ranges from $235,000 to $314,000. 

We are continually improving these processes and capabilities, which includes these ethics roles, said Neil Grace, a McKinsey spokesperson. The company has more than more than quintupled internal risk, legal, ethics and compliance staff over the last eight years, he said. 

A lack of oversight at McKinsey has previously resulted in some well-publicized unsavory entanglements. The consulting firm has paid out $641 million to resolve ongoing lawsuits over its opioid work. Its South African branch has been ensnared in a corruption scandal and the company received sharp criticism for moving too slowly to cut ties with Russia after its invasion of Ukraine.

In 2019, the firm adopted  more rigorous client selection policies, which required analyzing whether its work would hurt people, particularly vulnerable populations. The company says it has invested nearly $700 million over five years to bolster its risk-management teams and processes.

When Nick Lovegrove worked at McKinsey as a managing partner about a decade ago, the ethics and compliance department barely existed, he said.

Nowadays McKinsey gets a lot more allegations made against it, said Lovegrove, whos now a professor at Georgetown Universitys McDonough School of Business. Thats not necessarily because its doing more bad things, but because the recent highly-publicized cases have both raised its profile and made it seem more vulnerable.

The ethics group, which reports up to chief compliance officer Daniel Trujillo, also handles conflict-of-interest cases. In 2019 McKinsey agreed to pay $15 million to end a federal probe into whether it violated disclosure rules designed to prevent conflicts of interest in corporate bankruptcies. Its still facing a lawsuit from restructuring expert Jay Alix for allegedly concealing such conflicts. 

The ethics specialist will team up with investigators and subject-matter experts, according to the job description, and present information for key audiences. The ethics director, meanwhile, will oversee internal probes of  any alleged violation of policies or regulations.

Many companies have ethics and compliance czars  McKinseys Trujillo previously served in a similar role at Walmart Inc. Most of them joined the c-suite in the wake of the 2000s-era scandals at Enron, WorldCom and Tyco, or following the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act. More recently, theyre tasked with evaluating the potential dangers of the boom in artificial intelligence.

Using artificial intelligence was always part of the plan for media giant Axel Springer. CEO Mathias Döpfner has been trying to transform the company, which owns German news publications Bild and Welt, plus U.S. news sites Politico and much of Insider, into a digital powerhouse. 

Now, he is taking his ambition forward by ushering in a digital-only phase. Bild, which is among the most widely-sold newspapers in Europe, plans to cut several hundred jobs and downsize its businessdue, in part, to A.I. 

In a Tuesday email, Axel Springer told staff that it would unfortunately be parting ways with colleagues who have tasks that in the digital world are performed by A.I. and/or automated processes, according to German newspaper rival Frankfurter Allgemeine (FAZ). The layoffs are part of $110 million in cost-cutting by the publishing behemoth, which also said in the memo that several roles like those of editors and proofreaders will no longer exist as they do today.

The culling will impact around 200 of the total 1,000 employees at Bild, according to CNN. 

Axel Springer and Bild did not immediately return Fortunes request for comment.

These moves come just months after Döpfner told employees that significant job cuts were coming across the newsroom, warning journalists that their jobs may be at risk. He told staff in the memo that its digital only approach would mean an aggressive A.I. strategy, CNN reported, that could uproot print media. 

Artificial intelligence has the potential to make independent journalism better than it ever wasor simply replace it, Döpfner wrote, The Guardian reported in February. He added that the tech had the potential to do tasks like compiling breaking news stories more quickly. 

The music journalist-turned-CEO did say that he didnt expect the entire journalism world to be replaced because creating quality content will still be important for publishers. Döpfner also indicated at the time that editorial staff wouldnt be impacted by his mission to revamp the company for the digital era.

Understanding this change is essential to a publishing houses future viability, Döpfner wrote. Only those who create the best original content will survive.

A Bild spokesperson told CNN that the job cuts werent related to A.I., but added that A.I. would be a time-saving and useful tool for editors and reporters.

Döpfners digital ambitions in recent times have even extended to social media platforms, when he offered to help Elon Musk with running Twitter before Musk bought the social media service. 

We [can] run it for you. And establish a true platform of free speech. Would be a real contribution to democracy, he told Musk via text. Musk didnt accept Döpfners offer. 

Dear newsrooms, meet A.I.

Döpfner has embraced A.I. at a time when newsrooms worldwide are grappling with how to use the tech in day-to-day operations. BuzzFeed is now using it to customize quizzes and personalize some of its content. And Insider, which is owned by Axel Springer, also said in April that it will start experimenting with A.I. 

But not everyone is as bullish about the use of A.I. in news media. For instance, Barry Diller, the media billionaire who cofounded Fox TV Networks and currently holds an executive role at media holding company IAC, warned last month that the use of the tech could be destructive to journalism unless publishers can figure out how to make sure copyright laws apply to A.I. He echoed those sentiments  in April at the Semafor Media Summit. 

What you have to do is get the [media] industry to say, you cannot scrape our content until you work out systems where the publisher gets some avenue towards payment, Diller said. If you take those systems and you do not connect them to a process where you cannot do this untilthe path toward some way of getting compensated for it, all will be lost.

Dillers fear isnt unfounded. A.I. has earned a notorious reputation in newsrooms after tech news site CNET used A.I. to write articlessome of which were riddled with errors. In April, a German tabloid Die Aktuelle published an A.I.-generated interview that was deceptively real with former Formula 1 car driver Michael Schumacher, who hasnt made a public appearance in a decade after a major skiing accident.

More Articles ...

  1. Top Democrat Chuck Schumer calls AI a 'moment of revolution' while admitting Congress is clueless: 'In many ways, were starting from scratch'
  2. Amazon referred to its Prime entrapment scheme internally as 'Iliad,' a reference to the Trojan Horse from Homer's epic, FTC claims
  3. America's kids just suffered the biggest plunge in math scores ever recorded
  4. 5 reasons why top economist Mark Zandi says this time is different and hes betting against a U.S. recession
Page 16 of 1160

Newspapers

Spinning loader

Breaking News, data & opinions in business, sports, entertainment, travel, lifestyle, plus much more. IdigNews.com is the leading news source for the internet  users...

           

Business

Entertainment

POST GALLERY