"If you continue to do what you've always done, you will always get what you've always gotten"...and in the case the HIV epidemic is rising in the South. The gaps in care, testing, linkage to care, and retention services must be addressed to reduce the rising new rates of infection.

Teachers state-wide are struggling financially as a result of education funding cuts despite surpluses in the school aid fund in the hundereds of millions of dollars. All state employees had a 3% tax to pay for retirement healthcare imposed on them in 2010, which was refunded to everyone except public school employees. Many teachers from districts such as Buena Vista, Ypsilanti, Willow Run, and Inkster are now without jobs and need this refund to help pay for basic living expenses. The state appeals court ruled almost one year ago that imposing this tax was unconstitutional. The state supreme court needs to make this hearing case a priority and refund and our money.

"Our lyme doctor in Destin is being forced to quit by the FL Board of Medicine. It's a state issue but similar situations have occurred in the north east, Virginia, Kansas, and North Carolina. We need a national law protecting lyme doctors" Dr Lentz has assisted us part of the last 4 years with our son's devastating lyme disease. Because he treated two people with negative western blots, he has two weeks to either pay $20k and practice with probationary supervision OR give up his license. This is totally ludicrous. 1) The VA legislature and governor passed, Feb 2013, a law that all doctors must inform patients of inaccurate Western Blots and Elisa lab tests for lyme. They are not the first state to do so. 2) The CDC has stated for lyme disease to IGNORE testing and diagnose clinically. But because evidencuary medicine is so prevalent, physicians ignore the CDC instructions. 3) The CDC announced last week that over 300,000 were contracting lyme every year and their previous estimates were 10 times to low (30,000). What they didn't say was, they were too low basically because lab testing is so poor and should not be trusted. Our son has consumed over $1,000,000 in health care in the last 4.5 years, with over $300,000 of that coming out of our pockets. Dr Lentz's portion has been very, very, little of that, and yet he has helped us tremendously. Please help him for the sake of all the other lyme patients in Florida and the US Jimmy and Alice Branch [email protected] (director of FL medical board)

If the federal health care law is not changed to require coverage of an employee's spouse and family it will encourage other companies to eliminate this benefit. Already 70% of American are struggling everyday to make it and salaries have not kept up with inflation since 1973. Fewer companies then ever offer healthcare benefits or find a loophole around it by only hiring part time employees. Companies need to start paying their employees better and preserve the healthcare benefits provided to employees, spouses, children and retirees. We need to change the federal law to make companies do what is right because otherwise they will just do what is in their financial best interest their employees be damned. This is a loophole that needs to be closed. Let's close it. Please sign this petition to change the Federal healthcare law to require employers to cover the spouses of employees along with their children.

Medicaid expansion in Michigan has been half-passed. It only narrowly passed in the Senate thanks to reckless opposition from right-wing conservatives. But without immediate effect, Michigan stands to lose $7 million a day in federal funding until Medicaid expansion is implemented in April 2014. Senate Republicans not only delayed the Medicaid vote for months, they’ve put Michigan in a position where we’ll lose out on millions of dollars by half-passing Medicaid expansion. The time for immediate effect is now! If you want to save Michigan millions of dollars and help immediately improve the lives of hundreds of thousands of fellow Michiganders, sign the petition and tell Senate Republicans to stop half-passing their jobs and give Medicaid expansion immediate effect.

Rape survivors in Ecuador deserve access to safe and legal abortion services. Despite a president who has demonstrated a commitment to other aspects of women's health, Ecuador's current criminal code allows abortion only for victims of rape with mental disabilities, significantly excluding millions of women in a country where one in four women has been the victim of sexual violence. This policy puts the health and lives of rape victims in danger, and represents an unacceptable departure from international court rulings, as detailed in a new Human Rights Watch report. Rape survivors and all women in Ecuador and around the world deserve access to comprehensive health services including abortion if requested. A woman or girl who has suffered the trauma of rape shouldn't have to face the prospect of going to jail if she chooses to get an abortion. It is unacceptable for this or any government to continue to ignore the rights of women.

If the state of Georgia turns down the Medicaid expansion, while millions of uninsured Americans will finally be able to receive affordable health insurance in the states that join the expansion, the poorest citizens of Georgia and of all the other states opting out (including my son and myself) will be left without any affordable options for health care. This expansion of Medicaid is heavily subsidized at federal level and is a critical opportunity to raise the fundamental quality of life in America. I am a single mother of a college student and we are both uninsured. Like millions of other poor working-class citizens, I work full time, do not receive health benefits through my job or from my employer and cannot afford health insurance for my son or for myself. Please join me in asking Governor Deal of Georgia to take this opportunity to give millions of families the basic necessity of health care so that we may all be enabled to have a quality of life that every human being deserves.

People should be concerned about this issue because it affects entire families. To give birth to a child with disabilities due to a medication taken during the pregnancy; carries a particular guilt on the mother's behalf, while forcing the child to undergo numerous surgical procedures to correct the wrongs of the medication Zofran, which has been and continues to be prescribed to pregnant women. If we cannot eradicate the use of this drug, can we all work together to warn mother's of the potential side effects? My daughter is 13 and has had 12 surgeries thus far, won't you help us to prevent this in the future?

I am a minor who is being treated for cancer right now, and it is a shame that the American cancer society does nothing to fund research of childhood cancer.

Many men have committed suicide due to the severe symptoms of Post-Finasteride Syndrome. Countless others have lost their romantic partners and careers. Thousands of men who take Finasteride are at risk of developing this life-altering condition. The maker of Propecia, Merck, has an ethical responsibility to fund research into the Post Finasteride Syndrome.

Allow individuals the right to choose whether they participate in the Affordable Care Act without without penalty so particiaption in the Affordable Care Act is completely voluntary.

Huge layoffs due to outsourcing by medical transcription companies have left hundreds if not thousands jobless. Professional medical transcriptionists were terminated without warning. Consider the cost of unemployment and retraining of these individuals, many of whom were at the height of their careers. Not only is this a question of jobs going overseas, but more importantly it is an invasion of the privacy of the medical record. There are no regulations in place to protect patient privacy such as the HIPAA regulations under which all U.S. medical transcriptions trained and complied. Was the constitution written to protect corporate greed or the individual? I encourage each and every state (since the MTs affected by this outsourcing come from every state in the union),to ban the outsourcing of medical records and bring these jobs back to America at once!