Ex With Benefits (2015)

[Viola Mathenia]

Theaccident insurance provides a lump-sum benefit for injuries resulting from a covered accident. A benefit for AD&D is included as well. Covered accidents can include, but are not limited to, fractures, being admitted to the hospital, and visiting the emergency room.

MetLife offers SEIU Local 2015 members both a DHMO and a DPPO Dental Plan. With a DHMO plan you will be assigned to an in-network dentist. The DPPO plan allows members the freedom to choose their own dentist.

The MetLife Legal Plan allows for unlimited consultations. There are no deductibles or copays. The plan offers access to an attorney for a variety of personal legal needs such as immigration consultation, landlord/tenant negotiations, assistance with Medicare and Medi-Cal documents, and much more.

SEIU Green@Home is a union sponsored program to help our members and their families access clean energy benefits for transportation and home energy needs through a partnership with Access Clean California. Our goal in partnering with the ACC is to make access to environmentally-friendly transportation/technology easier for Union members and their families.

In fiscal year 2016, the government spent roughly $215 billion to compensate federal civilian employees. About two-thirds of that total was spent on civilian personnel working in the Department of Defense, the Department of Veterans Affairs, or the Department of Homeland Security. Federal employees typically receive periodic increases in their wages on the basis of performance, longevity, and changes in private-sector pay. However, lawmakers eliminated annual across-the-board increases for most federal civilian workers in calendar years 2011, 2012, and 2013.

Overall, the federal government would have reduced its spending on wages by 3 percent if it had decreased the pay of its less educated employees and increased the pay of its more educated employees to match the wages of their private-sector counterparts.

Those estimates do not show precisely what federal workers would earn if they were employed in a comparable position in the private sector. The difference between what federal employees earn and what they would earn in the private sector could be larger or smaller depending on characteristics that were not included in this analysis (because such traits are not easy to measure). In addition, the estimated differences depend on how well the observable characteristics were measured in the samples of employees used by CBO and on other factors that are inherent in any statistical analysis.

On average for workers at all levels of education, the cost of benefits was 47 percent higher for federal civilian employees than for private-sector employees with certain similar observable characteristics, CBO estimates.

Overall, the federal government paid 17 percent more in total compensation than it would have if average compensation had been comparable with that in the private sector, after accounting for certain observable characteristics of workers.

Second, lawmakers increased the share of wages that workers first hired after 2012 must contribute to the federal defined benefit retirement plan. That change will gradually reduce the cost to the federal government of defined benefit pensions beginning in 2017, but it does not factor into this analysis because workers hired after 2012 have not yet accumulated the five years of service needed to receive those benefits.

Whether some forms of yoga are better than others, whether yoga should be prescribed to people for various health conditions, and how yoga compares with other forms of exercise for a good many specific health outcomes. There's also no good evidence behind many of the supposed health benefits of yoga, like flushing out toxins and stimulating digestion.

It's not just me.

The most recent survey suggests more than 20 million Americans practice yoga, making it one of the most popular forms of exercise. Even Vladimir Putin, a devotee of "macho sports," added downward dog to his repertoire.

But is yoga really that great for health compared with other exercises? Does it really help improve our response to stress or correct bad posture, as often promised? Maybe our perceptions about yoga are biased. Or maybe, as some critics have pointed out, there are downsides to yoga. Who can forget the controversial New York Times story from 2012 suggesting that some people get seriously injured, or even die, on their yoga mats.

I wanted a more objective view on the health effects of yoga, so I turned to science, reading more than 50 studies and review articles and talking to seven of the world's leading yoga researchers. Almost immediately, I was struck by how weak the research on yoga is. Most studies were small and badly designed or plagued by self-selection bias. Making matters worse, there are so many varying styles of yoga that it's tough to say how meaningful evidence about one style is for others.

Still, what I learned is that there are a few things we can say about yoga, based on the available research. Yoga probably won't hurt you, despite what haters claim, and it appears to be just as good for your health as other similar forms of exercise.

The first randomized trial (or high-quality experiment) on yoga was published in 1975 in The Lancet. It showed that yoga was more effective than relaxation for reducing high blood pressure. But that trial only involved 34 participants, and all of them already had high blood pressure, so it is difficult to know whether the effect of the yoga would bear out in a larger trial of healthy people.

What studies do exist are often short term. There are no long-term studies on mortality or serious disease incidence. There are few long-term studies on the potential harms yoga can wreak on the body. "For most conditions," says Holger Cramer, director of yoga research at the University of Duisburg-Essen in Essen, Germany, "the main problem is we don't have enough evidence yet."

Studying yoga is also tricky. Researchers generally believe blinded studies are the highest quality of research, because participants involved don't know what intervention (such as a drug) they are receiving and their biases and perceptions don't color the outcomes. But you can't blind people to the fact that they're doing yoga.

Then there's the biggest question at the center of yoga research: How do you define yoga? "Yoga is many things to many people," said Karen Sherman, a researcher affiliated with the Group Health Research Institute. "What you put into a yoga intervention probably impacts what you get out."

Yoga usually involves some combination of the following: postures and poses (asanas), regulated breathing (pranayama), and meditation and relaxation (samyana). But many classes mix in other elements, from chanting to heating to music. There's also a lot of variation in teaching quality and style. Hatha and Iyengar yoga are mostly made up of stretches and restorative poses, while ashtanga and vinyasa tend to be more vigorous and athletic. Yin yoga probably won't make you sweat: You mostly hold postures for long periods of time for very deep stretches. In Bikram, which consists of 26 postures repeated twice in a room that's heated at 105 degrees, you can be sure you'll drench your yoga clothes in perspiration.

Lorenzo Cohen, chief of the integrative medicine section at MD Anderson Cancer Center, told me: "Many papers [on yoga] don't have enough of an in-depth description of what they mean by 'yoga.' What was the level of training of yoga therapists? How did they choose different postures or breathing exercises?"

What's more, there are so many components in a yoga class, it's tough to know what might be having an affect on health: If people report feeling better after a class, was that due to the experience of being part of a larger group? Was it the teacher's style? Was it the breathing exercises? The heat? These factors are difficult to isolate, and some of the ways yoga helps people might be hard for scientists to measure.

Cramer has studied published reports of injuries and other harms from yoga for several review and told me this: "We found yoga is as safe as any other activity. It's not more dangerous than any other form of exercise." He added: "Yoga is not 100 percent safe, but nothing is 100 percent safe."

In a 2013 review of case studies, Cramer identified 76 unique incidents of adverse events from yoga. "Most adverse events affected the musculoskeletal, nervous, or visual system," he concluded. "More than half of the cases for which clinical outcomes were reported reached full recovery, 1 case did not recover at all, and 1 case died."

Most often, people got into trouble with the headstand pose, followed by shoulder stand, postures that required putting one or both feet behind the head, the lotus position, and forceful breathing. Pranayama-, hatha-, and Bikram-style yoga practices had the most adverse events associated with them.

Based on these cases, Cramer and his co-author had this practical advice for how to stay safe in yoga: Beginners should avoid advanced postures (such as headstands), and people with chronic health conditions (such as glaucoma) should consult their doctors before diving in. "Yoga," they added, "should not be practiced while under the influence of psychoactive drugs."

As for long-term yoga harms, Cramer pointed to two studies on joint and cervical disc degeneration in people who have been doing yoga for a while. But the studies had contradictory results, "so long-term health consequences cannot be clearly derived from the available evidence," Cramer said.

I asked MD Anderson's Cohen for his take. "There can, of course, be negative consequences if done incorrectly, like any body manipulation," he said, "but if you have the right teacher this will not happen." Even if a lot of yoga over a lifetime leads to injury, it's not clear those harms outweigh the benefits, or that people would have been better off running or weightlifting all the time.

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