 removed from the picture. Taking away the middleman creates savings which can be used to pay for more coverage.
This new measure could insure Dirigo’s future and over 15,000 people who now are covered would breathe a sigh of relief.
“It’s peoples’ stories that make the importance of Dirigo real,” said Peter Robbins who stressed the need for Dirigo to continue last February. Robbins cofounded Steppingstones Home Builders with Jim Dinnan and invited the governor to visit his business in Blue Hill to talk about health care. Fifteen years ago Robbins, a graduate of Brown University, came to Maine for the quality of life, to start a business, and to raise his family.
Jim Dinnan, a satisfied DirigoChoice business owner greets the governor.
Health-care costs are forcing companies to relocate to Canada. Insurance costs have skyrocketed with their own “tax increases” on consumers. Too many people can only afford catastrophic coverage which has deductibles that are in the tens of thousands of dollars — which amounts to a legalized protection racket.
Baldacci took on the most important internal national issue facing all Americans with Dirigo Health. Maine is being viewed as a national leader in its attempt with Dirigo to cure the health-care crisis. Baldacci has been asked to speak at various forums, and most recently at the American Medical Association meeting, about the program. National publications and TV stations are reporting on Dirigo.
• Dirigo supports programs that are geared to making Maine the “Healthiest State.” By ensuring people have access to care and advice before they become ill, Maine is becoming healthier. Maine recently became the number one state to reduce teenage smoking because of Maine’s preventive measures.
• Dirigo covers hospital, physician and specialist visits, prescription drugs, and no-cost preventive care. It gives discounts based on household income that lower monthly costs and deductibles.
• Eighty percent of employees enrolled receive discounts.
• In addition, Dirigo benefits include: immediate coverage for preexisting conditions, Mental Health Parity, and the Healthy ME Rewards program. Discounts can be as much as 100 percent of the employee’s monthly payment, deductible and out-of-pocket expenses.
• Dirigo gives business owners a better chance to compete in the marketplace as they save funds — savings that can be put back into their enterprises.
Maine has a strong tradition of finding solutions to health-care problems, which helped to make the creation of Dirigo possible. Maine recently increased its ranking nationally to the eighth healthiest state in the nation, taking 8,000 people off the uninsured rolls. Dirigo played an important roll in achieving this ranking.
How Governor Baldacci created Dirigo is characteristic of his leadership style. He has an inbuilt ability to build coalitions. Working across party political lines, he brought together health insurance providers, health-care professionals, hospitals, the Legislature, and concerned citizens to work on solutions. He knew that there were enough resources within the health-care network to reduce overall health-care costs, while working towards making Maine the healthiest state. He reasoned that if hospitals streamlined their businesses, and if Dirigo could cover charity care and bad debt cases, savings would be made, which has happened.
However, Dirigo’s insurance provider, Anthem, does not want to play its role in this health-care collaborative effort by giving the savings back to Dirigo, despite the fact that they verbally agreed to when Dirigo Health began.
The governor said that Dirigo was always meant to grow and change, as any business would, to make its product better. Becoming self-insured is the next step.
For the first time, many of the 2,000 business with Dirigo can finally afford to insure their workers.
One such employee was looking forward to switching from his insurance that has a $15,000 deductible. “It’s highway robbery,” he said.
According to the census bureau there are 130,000 Maine residents that are still uninsured. That’s 10 percent of Maine’s population, which is below the national average of sixteen percent. The governor stated that the goal of Dirigo is to expand access to all the uninsured or underinsured, and he won’t be satisfied until the state reaches Dirigo’s goal.
In this gubernatorial election year many Republicans are claiming this health program isn’t working.
Baldacci said he wants Dirigo to move to a self-insured system as of Jan. 1st, 2007. Anthem’s contract runs out December 31st, 2006.
Changing to a self-insured system could extend Dirigo coverage to more people.Bands with only drums and one guitar?

A friend and I have been working on some ideas for music for a while now and want to start writing, but we're struggling finding a bassist or second guitarist who would want to play anything close to doom or sludge and we're trying to figure out how to make that sound like a full band with just two of us.

Long winded story for me to just ask, are there any decent doom/sludge bands that are just one person on drums and one on guitar?I have just started with Switchboard. I am trying to download a photo but apparently it has to be converted to.jpeg and I don't know how to do that. I am hoping once I figure that out then i can verify the size requirements. I just want a pillow size graph and I am really hoping someone can help me with converting from RTF to.jpeg. Thank you.
If you're trying to create a graph from an.rtf file (which is basically a word processing file), your best bet is to find a way to save it as a.gif or.png. The.jpg format is not recommended, as your image can turn out blurry, because the.jpg format can smudge your colors.
As for sizes, my best suggestion is to resize your image in one of those programs if it's very large. But as for how to get it to pillow size, that depends on what you're doing. Are you crocheting? Cross stitching? Knitting? If you're crocheting or knitting, you'll have to make a gauge swatch using the needles or hook and yarn that you'll be using for the pattern, so you can know exactly how large it will work up. If it's cross stitching, you'll need to know what kind and size of cloth you'll be using...14 count Aida or linen, 18 count Aida or linen, Congress cloth, 28 or 32 count linen stitched over one...all of these variables will affect your pattern's finished size. There's no one exact answer for using the freePatternWizard; it depends on you, what you're making, the size of what you're making, the craft you're choosing and finally, your cloth count or swatch information to determine how large or small your finished product will be.Early care and education: Self-sufficiency implications for parents and children
Katherine Magnuson
Dec 06, 2012
Dr. Magnuson provided an overview of government-funded early education initiatives and discussed empirical evidence about the effectiveness of programs in promoting family economic self-sufficiency as well as school readiness. Policy and research recommendations for parents and children were also discussed. Click here to learn more about Dr. Magnuson and view more resources from this Webinar.The video industry is expanding rapidly every day and bringing new concepts of video interaction for one-to-one or mass communication. These days, we see a lot of dynamic visual outputs, including webinars, video conferences, live streaming, etc. Data breaches, unauthorized sharing and data theft are risks for every doing business today. To survive in this competitive world, you need to rely on content security to ensure that your company’s information is secure and reliable.
Encrypted video is one way to protect your company’s information. Once your video content is encrypted, you can securely share information with your employees, customers, partners and prospects.
What is video encryption?
Encryption involves masking or manipulating data. Protecting means protecting files by codecs, passwords, container formats, etc. so that no one else can access the data within.
However, to increase security, you can apply both encryption and protection, which is the best option for protecting your content. When you use the word encryption in casual conversation, it may mean encryption, protection, encoding, or all of these in different proportions. So, in this case, encryption means protecting your data in every possible way – which, of course, includes encryption and protection.
The following is a detailed list of some of the most common video encryption techniques.
The Advanced Encryption Standard using 128-bit block sizes (abbreviated as AES-128) is a powerful encryption standard for protecting premium content. AES-128 is the only publicly available encryption algorithm recommended by the NSA. Content encrypted using the 128-bit cipher block size Advanced Encryption Standard algorithm cannot practically be decrypted by brute force attacks alone.
HLS Streaming (HTTP Live Streaming) is an open source video playback protocol developed by Apple. Although it was initiated by Apple, HLS is now widely supported across devices and browsers. HLS Streaming works differently because it provides chunked data transfers (rather than individual video streams). Adding AES 128 encryption to these video chunks enables an encrypted playback called HLS encryption or HLS E.
In the case of desktop playback, Google has some security control/access to the browser (Chrome works with Firefox and Edge through its ownership) and in the case of the Android ecosystem to the operating system. Thus, it can help to hide the cryptographic key exchange mechanism at the browser/OS level. Thus, Google Wide