Snoqualmie Valley Hospital District in recent months has been offering area residents full-menu primary medical care for just $30 a month at its clinics in Snoqualmie, North Bend and Fall City. Patients also pay a $45 set-up fee, along with $5 for each doctor visit.

Snoqualmie Valley is now the second local hospital, after Swedish Medical Center, to adopt the low-cost "direct care" model, which has patients paying doctors directly for medical care rather than paying indirectly through third-party insurance.

Direct care is seen as a source of inexpensive basic medical care for people who are uninsured or who have high-deductible insurance. Its adopters see direct care as an efficient way of delivering primary care as the cost of health insurance continues to climb.

Qliance Medical Management Inc., with clinics in Seattle and Kent unattached to a hospital, pioneered the low-cost version of this model in 2006, and now has nearly 3,000 patients. It charges between $39 and $79 a month, depending on age.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/11/30/washington.police.shooting/index.html

My favorite part:

Clemmons is a convicted criminal with a long rap sheet who had a 95-year prison sentence commuted in 2000 by then-Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, said Pierce County sheriff's spokesman Ed Troyer.

Huckabee, a Republican presidential candidate in 2008, is considering a run for president in 2012.

"Should [Clemmons] be found responsible for this horrible tragedy, it will be the result of a series of failures in the criminal justice system in both Arkansas and Washington state," Huckabee's office said in a statement Sunday night.

Amazing to watch conservatives turn themselves inside and out on this.

"If the conditions were met, he would be in Gstaad," a Swiss Justice spokesman told the Associated Press

Players have dirty 'gay' sex in hit game
Trendy Christmas gift features characters naked, kissing in homosexual embrace

Most college students expect to receive their diplomas on the basis of grades, but at a Pennsylvania school, physical fitness matters too.

Students at Lincoln University with a body mass index of 30 or above, reflective of obesity, must take a fitness course that meets three hours per week. Those who are assigned to the class but do not complete it cannot graduate.

Calculate your body mass index

Now that the first class to have this requirement imposed is nearing graduation day -- students who entered in the fall of 2006 -- the school faces criticism from both students and outsiders about the fitness class policy.

One of those students is Tiana Lawson, 21, whose recent editorial in the student paper has drawn national attention to the issue. Lawson wrote in The Lincolnian that she would be more understanding if the requirement applied to everyone. She thinks all students, not just those with a high BMI, should have to take the class.

Serena Williams was fined a record $82,500 for her U.S. Open tirade and could be suspended from that tournament if she has another "major offense" at any Grand Slam in the next two years.

Grand Slam administrator Bill Babcock's ruling was released Monday, and he said Williams faces a "probationary period" at tennis' four major championships in 2010 and 2011. If she has another "major offense" at a Grand Slam tournament in that time, the fine would increase to $175,000 and she would be barred from the following U.S. Open.

"But if she does not have another offense in the next two years, the suspension is lifted," Babcock said in a telephone interview from London.