The Role of Organic Solvents in the Clean Air Act

The Clean Air Act is a piece of legislation that promotes the reduction of smog and general air pollution to create a healthier natural and human environment. In the U.S., a number of clean air acts have been enacted since the 1950's, with the latest being the Clean Air Act Amendments in 1990, which focus on regulating emissions trading, addressing ozone depletion and preventing acid rain and toxic air pollution. As one might imagine, the Clean Air Act encourages both environmentally friendly industrial practices and environmentally friendly domestic practices, an example of which can be seen in its concern with the production and use of solvents.

Solvents are an essential component of a wide variety of commonly used products, including beauty products, perfumes, soaps, industrial and domestic cleaning solutions and adhesive products. In terms of the Clean Air Act, all solvents should ideally be organic to reduce air pollution as much as possible. However, the act requires companies to produce solvents that adhere to environmental safety standards that do not go as far as mandating organic products. Nonetheless, the ideals established establish by the Clean Air Act are best pursued by the production and use of organic solvents. Companies that produce "environmentally friendly" industrial degreasers, for example, would obviously increase their environmental friendliness if they instead produced organic industrial degreasers. The same applies for other industrial solvents.

Despite the growing popularity of environmental design principles and products, companies continue to produce non-organic solvents that could easily be produced as organic solvents for two main reasons: the transitional costs associated with switching from non-organic to organic and the possibly divided perception of customers toward the new organic products. When transitioning from a non-organic product to an organic product amounts to creating an entirely new product that accomplishes the same task. But the fact that the chemical structure of industrial organic degreasers differs from the chemical structure of traditional degreasers plays a role in consumer product perception.

While a solvent that has corrosive qualities would seem to be less desirable for this reason, consumers often interpret a solvent's "dangerousness" to be a sign of its power, particularly in the case of solvents that kill germs and cut dirt and grime. Moreover, for a company to successfully transition from producing non-organic solvents to producing organic solvents, consumers must be willing to invest in the new product, which means that consumers, not companies, ultimately play the most pivotal role in the furtherance of organic solvents.

As the Clean Air Act denotes, the price for favoring traditional solvents over non-toxic solvents can be costly. In addition to causing conditions that damage the natural environment, poor air quality ultimately compromises the health of humans. Critics of the Clean Air Act often claim that it reduces corporate profits. But maintaining corporate profits at the expense of the environment is what has led to any number of environmental situations that have resulted corporate regulations, such the production of safer solvents by companies who refuse to do it by choice.

What's the real difference between organic industrial degreasers and traditional industrial degreasers? According to the Clean Air Act, organic solvents such as industrial organic degreasers result in better air quality than non-organic industrial solvents. More and more businesses are doing what ever it takes by using environmentally safe products such as organic degreasers. One of the best places to start is EcoLink.com. EcoLink has helped a long list of leading manufacturers, aerospace companies, energy utilities, transportation providers, the military and government organizations navigate unpredictable industrial chemical bans and phase-outs by promoting Less Chemicals and Safer Chemicals. They are a leading authority on industrial solvents.

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How to Avoid a Bad Credit Home Equity Loan

Home equity loans are often an easy way to borrow money. Even persons with bad credit can often qualify for a bad credit home equity loan. The loan is secured by the equity in your home so even with bad credit the interest rates are often better than other sources of loans. You will still however pay more interest if you have a bad credit rating.

Persons having bad credit can often improve their credit score just by knowing a few tricks. These tricks begin by obtaining a copy of each credit report that you can order from the credit agency that has given you a poor rating.

The Fair Credit Reporting Act requires that each agency that collects credit information about you provide annually a credit report for you to review. Additionally, you qualify for another free report if you are turned down for a loan based on that report.

Once you obtain and review these records look closely for any inaccuracies being reported. In addition, a bad debt can only affect your report for seven years after it went delinquent. If any debts are beyond the seven year mark, you should ask that they be removed from your credit report. Make all requests by certified mail and to be on the safe side, pay for a return receipt on all correspondence. This procedure will cost about five dollars, but is a necessary part of the process.

Best you should know the statute of limitations for collecting debt in your state. If you are in the right state, a company only has four years to collect the debt. If any debts are out or your states statute of limitations, ask for an investigation by the credit reporting agency. Dispute the debt as not yours, since you are no longer legally responsible for the debt. Many collectors know that there is nothing they can do about such debts, so they will let them fall off your credit report rather than waste any more effort on trying to collect what are in effect uncollectable debts.

You will also need to send a letter to the company that reporting the bad debt. Their address is listed on the credit report. Ask them for proof that the debt is yours. If they cannot provide the proof they must stop reporting it on your credit report. They only have thirty days in which to investigate and answer your request. Your return receipt will have the date they got the mail so that's when the clock starts ticking.

As mentioned earlier, the cost of certified mail and the return receipt is small compared to the amount of money this may save you in interest charges on any loan you may take out.

Many times these two letters are all that are needed to change a bad credit report into a decent one. In a matter of just a few months you may qualify for a much better interest rate on your home equity loan than if you had only qualified for the bad credit home equity loan. It is certainly worth making the time to give it a try. The work can save you several hundred dollars over the life of your loan.

There are advantages and disadvantages of getting a home equity loan refinancing that those seeking a fast home equity loan may not be aware of. Avoid the home equity loan pitfalls by checking out our website now.

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Medical Waiting Rooms Are No Joke

Emailing your doctor may not be as bad as you think. Which scenario causes a patient less stress? The awkwardness of the waiting room verses sending a question to your doctor over email, the latter choice may be much easier to your psyche. Take for example the joke below I've been getting in my email inbox for ages:

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An 86-year-old man walked into a crowded doctor's waiting room. As he approached the desk, the receptionist said, "Yes sir, what are you seeing the doctor for today?"

"There's something wrong with my dick," he replied. The receptionist became irritated and said, "You shouldn't come into a crowded doctor's waiting room and say things like that."

"Why not, you asked me what was wrong and I told you," he said.

The receptionist replied, "You've obviously caused some embarrassment in this room full of people. You should have said there is something wrong with your ear or something and then discussed the problem further with the doctor in private."

The man replied, "You shouldn't ask people things in a room full of others, if the answer could embarrass anyone." The man walked out, waited several minutes and then re-entered.

The receptionist smiled smugly and asked, "Yes?"

"There's something wrong with my ear," he stated.

The receptionist nodded approvingly and smiled, knowing he had taken her advice. "And what is wrong with your ear, Sir?"

"I can't piss out of it," the man replied. The waiting room erupted in laughter.


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Funny as this email joke about the elderly man's "ear-ache," may be, it mirrors the uncomfortable reality of most medical waiting rooms, pharmacies, and treatment clinics. Accessibility to one's healthcare provider online can be less stressful and a more practical means of contact for many patients. "People are often more comfortable talking to a computer than they are to a doctor," says Dr. Delbanco, a professor of medicine at the Harvard Medical School and the lead author of an article on doctors and e-mail in the current New England Journal of Medicine.(1) However, the convenience of emailing your doctor or clinic to ask your provider questions brings up a myriad of risks. As medicine and the internet have converged, concerns about protecting a patient's PHI (personal heath information) and EMRs (electronic medical records) have come to the fold.

HIPAA, the Health Insurance Portability & Accountability Act requires health care institutions to protect patient information. The Act outlines how this should happen, but does not make any firm recommendations about how to go about it. At the same time, strides are being made to make the electronic medical office a reality. "Office visits between patients and their doctors increasingly will take place not in person but over the Internet, through e-mail or even a video conference," Dr. Thomas Delbanco and Dr. Daniel Sands of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center stated in the April 2004 New England Journal of Medicine.(2) This means that seeking information online is now as common as dialing 411 a decade ago. From Drugstore.com to WebMD, the internet is where patients seek information on maladies to drug and herbal supplement information.

Patients aren't the only ones flocking to the net. Online use shows many within the medical field want to take accessing medical information a step further. Medical providers and patients alike wish to use the internet as a tool in their personal healthcare communications. According to Dr. Daniel Z. Sands, a primary care internist and Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, "The internet will increasingly change patients' expectations of the clinicians, so that physicians will routinely need to offer services like e-messaging, instant messaging, video conferencing and other online services."(3)

Now is the opportune time for both patient and doctor to lay the ground work and find a balance in both patient's concerns over PHI and the immediacy of emailing their doctor. Looking towards the future of online healthcare means measures need to be put into place to protect a patient's privacy in order to securely implement the digital medical office.

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End Notes:

1.) Anahad O'Connor, "Take Two Aspirin, E-Mail Me Tomorrow," The New York Times, Section F; Column 5; Health & Fitness; LexisNexis 30 September 2005. 7.

2.) Liz Kowlaczyk, "Is Email The Future of Doctor-Patient Relations?," D2, The Boston Globe, LexisNexis, 27 April 2004.

3.) Dr. Daniel Z. Sands quoted in: Susannah Fox, Janna Quinney, Lee Rainie, "The Future of the Internet," Pew Internet and American Life Project, Published 4 January, 2005. 4.

Marilee Veniegas is an alumni of the University of Washington she joined the Marketing team at Essential Security Software, Inc. in 2005.

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Deficit Reduction Act Requires Proof of Citizenship for Medicaid

In the midst of numerous proposals before the Senate regarding legislation concerning the legalization of illegal aliens has arisen a little known provision of the recently signed 2005 Deficit Reduction Act. On February 8, 2006, President George Bush executed a bill into law which now requires recipients of Medicaid benefits to provide either an original birth certificate or passport in order to apply for or to continue to receive their health care benefits, commencing July 1, 2006.

The Medicaid program, available to American citizens who fall into a specified low income bracket, provides health care to adults and children, as well as the elderly and those in nursing homes. While much hand wringing and spin continues in the U.S. Congress regarding how to best deal with the status of illegal aliens, which directly impacts costs of U.S. government entitlement programs, this new requirement has yet to be discussed. As the result of the newly passed Massachusetts universal health care plan, which will include the Medicaid program, the new provision was just publicly revealed.

However, the present requirements for Medicaid require no such documents, relying only upon a signature of the applicant to certify whether or not they are American citizens. And as a result of the unaccountability for Medicaid fraud abuse over the past several decades, the U.S. government may be penalizing the vast majority of law abiding citizens, according to numerous patient advocates. But the issue is more about the continuing lack of enforcement of U.S. immigration law rather than an attempt to cut down on Medicaid fraud.

According to Families USA, a consumer advocacy organization, the disabled, the mentally ill, the homeless, the elderly and the chronically ill will unfairly suffer as the result of this new proviso, as they would have difficulty accessing copies of birth certificates, and would be far less likely to own a U.S. passport. Therefore, they will be unfairly denied necessary health care beginning as early as July 1st. Meanwhile, hospital emergency rooms may still not turn away any person of any status nor may they ask the legal status of any patient, according to the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act of 1985.

While patient advocates may be correct regarding the most vulnerable being put at risk, on balance it would seem that without addressing social services' access requirements across the board, with respect to illegal aliens, it does seem quite unfair to put this burden only upon Medicaid recipients at this late date in 2006. Furthermore, there are no set mechanisms yet in place nor systems between federal and state governments for enforcement of the law. Such a sweeping change should require administrative oversight by the Center for Medicaid and Medicare and require necessary outreach to patients for this purpose well ahead of such changes.

But perhaps for those desperately trying to get copies of their birth certificates at this time, there could be some breathing room as another debate brews relative to the validity of the law itself, based upon the U.S. Constitution. When President Bush signed S. 1932 on February 8th, according to House Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Dennis Hastert, the President actually signed a different version of the bill than the House of Representatives actually passed.

Representative Henry Waxman (D-CA) on March 30, 2006 stated, "I have learned that the Speaker of the House advised the White House of the differences between the House-passed bill and the bill presented to the President before the President signed the legislation." Representative Waxman is now calling for a Resolution of Inquiry which requests all documents relative to the 2005 Deficit Reduction Act which the President signed on February 8th. So far the White House has failed to respond.

Whether or not Representative Waxman truly cares about the Constitution or is doing that which is politically expedient for himself, is of concern. Firstly, the discrepancy in the Senate Bill signed was different in substance from the House Bill. It impacts some $2 billion in spending for "durable medical equipment" such as wheelchairs and oxygen for those in the Medicare program, which provides health care to the elderly and the disabled. At issue, is the length of leases for durable medical equipment which was 36 months in the House version and 13 months in the Senate version.

During transmission of the final bill to the President, the Senate Clerk made a change to the legislation. It no longer contained the Senate amendment which provided for 36 months for oxygen equipment. The Senate Clerk upon learning of the mistake advised House Republican leaders in January 2006, well before the date of February 8, 2006, the date the President signed the bill. The error failed to be corrected. But according to Article I, Section 7 of the U.S. Constitution, both the House and the Senate must include the same substance and version of a bill which is required for presentation for signature by the President.

So the entirety of the law has been put in jeopardy and could eventually wind up in the Supreme Court, as there exists precedent. In the case of Field v. Clark, 143 US 649 (1892) the Court wrote that the burden would be to prove that the House Speaker and President were deliberate and purposely signing the wrong bill. That in fact is what Waxman contends, when on March 15, 2006 he wrote a letter to then White House Chief of Staff, Andrew Card, "seeking information on the President's knowledge of the bill's constitutional infirmity."

While Waxman's inquiry provides interesting fare for a Constitutional Law class, the scope of the 2005 Deficit Reduction Act is perhaps getting lost. The new Medicaid documents requirement being served up as a tightening of immigration law enforcement is almost laughable. And those patients in wheel chairs and those patients requiring oxygen will most likely not be notified of a cap on their benefits until after that period of 13 months expires. Previous to the 2005 law, wheelchairs and oxygen and durable medical equipment were provided patients indefinitely.

If indeed the President made an error, it should be addressed if anything, to give clarity to the Medicaid and Medicare patients it impacts. And furthermore, should Representative Waxman pursue the legality of the new law, that he would take the approach that it was a procedural oversight which should be either amended appropriately or pursued in the present session of Congress. But it will require the cooperation of both the Congress and the Executive branch of government, keeping in mind the most vulnerable of U.S. citizens. For there must be some measures of government which transcend politics.

Diane M. Grassi is a freelance columnist, reporting and writing commentary on current events of the day providing honest and often politically incorrect assessments. From U.S. public policy to Major League Baseball, she is an eclectic thinker, and demanding of her readers to reflect on their own thinking patterns from an alternative perspective. Whether you agree with her or not, Diane M. Grassi will have you coming back to note her opinions, and if at best she wakes you up, then her goal will have been accomplished.

Ms. Grassi is featured with the online publications: New Media Journal.us; American Chronicle; Mich News.com; the Federal Observer; Opinions Editorials; the Conservative Voice; the Las Vegas Penny Press; the Sierra Times as well as many others. She also writes regular columns on Major League Baseball where she is a featured online columnist with The Diamond Angle Baseball Ezine and Sports-Central.org. Ms. Grassi may contacted at: dgrassi@cox.net