We used to say the two biggest lies are “The check is in the mail” and “It won’t hurt a bit.” Now, there is a third biggest lie, which is, “We have the best health care system in the world,” as Bill Clinton and George Bush uttered repeatedly during their respective terms. On the other hand, all of the standard measures of health care quality points to ours as being “the best substandard price-gouging health care system in the world”. One such measure is a comparison of cost and longevity. For example, Americans live an average of 77 years at a cost of $4,800 per person per year, while Spain, Canada and Japan respectively have life span-to-cost ratios of 79 years at $1,100, 81.5 years at $2,100, and 81 years at $2,000.Another measure is the infant death rate per one thousand live births and the U.S. has a rate comparable to third world countries at 6.9 compared to 5.3 in Denmark, 4.6 in France, 3.4 in Sweden and 3.2 in Japan. Additionally, the World Health Organization ranks the United States as 37th in the world, which puts us just behind Costa Rica.Therefore, we can see that the people of other countries get better outcomes for much less cost, suggesting that we Americans are paying more for inferior quality products and services. Although President Obama and other politicians acknowledge that health care is too expensive, they seem to be downplaying the fact that organized medicine has been giving the public a royal hosing for decades.Some of the problems with U.S. health care delivery as many other experts have also pointed out are as follows:Hospitals, nursing homes and clinics are unsafe with medical and nursing negligence being the fifth largest cause of death in the United States.Lack of access with 76 million uninsured (adding illegal aliens) and 106 million underinsured;Out of control cost with health care being 16% of gross domestic product (GDP) at $1 trillion which is a 250% increase over the last 25 years;Price gouging, with hospitals and doctors charging uninsured patients 1000% more than they accept from third party payers;HMO premium price gouging with high deductibles charging 300% more for individuals who purchase directly rather than through a group;Health care corporations are guilty of bilking billions of dollars from tax payers with fraudulent billing practices;Doctors perform unnecessary surgery with bogus diagnoses;H.M.O. members have to call for approval before going to emergency rooms with call centers outsourced to non-professional personnel in India and other countries;Administrative cost of DRG’s and CPT codes is $375 billion per year – 25% of total health care expenditures;Pharmaceutical companies obtain FDA approval for toxic drugs by paying large research grants to medical research facilities to achieve favorable results;Pharmaceutical companies pay bribes to physicians to prescribe their over-priced toxic drugs with tens of thousands falling prey to side effects.This short list of scams and rackets is really the largest, most harmful and costly criminal conspiracy in history. The perpetrators include HMO’s, pharmaceutical companies, hospital and physician groups and politicians. Additionally, with the political corruption achieved through expensive lobbying to defeat all attempts to impose regulatory standards, we can see why we pay such exorbitant prices for such shabby health care.To explain further, medical care has always been a business whereby the seller decides what the consumer will purchase and how much. Couple that control with fear of death, and the buyer will pay any price for care on any terms. Moreover, the people of our generation and the previous one grew up trusting our doctors and listening for the most part, to what they recommended. Then medicine evolved moving from cottage industry to commercial empires.However, to our disadvantage, we still had this mindset of “doctor knows best” for decades while the entire paradigm of ethics changed to acceptance of greedy commercialism with corporate executives capturing financial control of health care operations and finding ways to deny coverage for expensive services and equipment rentals with the pre-approval requirement fraud. Once a well-meaning physician prescribes a treatment, a non-professional decides whether it is medically necessary. Physicians, who became financially dependent upon their corporate “bosses”, would have to capitulate. Then Congress stepped in and gave legislative immunity to HMO’s from lawsuits for wrongful death and damages caused by withholding approval for life-sustaining treatment, thus leaving the doctors and hospitals holding the proverbial bag with malpractice lawsuits. The whole scenario was like putting a hungry shark in a pond to take care of the fish. The shark, knowing that if he swallows everyone in one gulp he won’t last long, says to each of his group members, “There is something wrong with the way your tail is functioning so I’m going to have to bite part of it off for your own good,” and the tasty fish replies, “You’re the doctor.”In conclusion, there have been some suggested health care reform models coming from various think tanks such as “public good”, which is government provided or contracted care, versus the “public utility model”, being privately owned health care with quality standards and pricing controlled by a government agency like public utilities. Although we get a lot of pundits and politicians arguing the pros and cons for both but we are lacking a viable solution.On the other hand, to come up with a workable infrastructure, we first need to abandon those policies that have ended in disaster, such as using financial incentives to control physician behavior, defining health care as providing diagnostics, drugs and surgery and autocratic corporate control of treatment plans. Furthermore, we have to stop believing in this myth called “freedom of choice” as if there was any free choice in health care to begin with. This term has become a way to placate us into accepting a crappy plan charging us more for less by saying, “We have preserved your freedom to choose.” So what if I don’t like the pond that I’m swimming in? I can look for another one with a different shark.On the other hand, there is another fiddle that came from Washington, D.C. called “health care reform”. We now have a new president and his political hacks in Congress who say they have revolutionized the health care industry by making it cheaper, better, more accessible and safer. The problem is that this administration and its pork barrel Congress has no clue as to what preventable errors cause the killing of 200,000 people annually in hospitals across the country, and even if they wanted to stop the carnage they wouldn’t be able to figure out how.As we listen to the political rhetoric about the current state of health care and how to improve it, we get a sense that health care is not so bad and we can make it better. On the contrary, when we go to a hospital as a patient or to visit and we see that people have to wait thirty minutes for a bed pan to avoid soiling themselves, we wake up to a different reality in the world of chaos. Therefore, as we examine the new health care reform schemes, we can quickly ascertain that our elected officials are planning to put more fish in the ponds and tell the sharks to take smaller bites.

Are you a millennial? Have you always considered buying a Smart Home, where you can operate gadgets with a touch of button or your voice? If you have already bought a Smart Home, then Congratulations! Now, the next step is buying the Smart Blinds, which can give a “RICH LOOK” to your home. Who will not enjoy the instant of waking every day – when the blinds open as per the schedule? Yet, many feel that this new technology can burn a hole in their wallets and only the rich can afford this “LUXURY.” Well, did this topic generate interest and you are willing to opt for Smart Home Window Blinds? You have come to the right place. This article can give the best information on Smart Blinds – which in other words, is High Tech Automation at a Budget Friendly Price.Has your family has decided to decorate the home with recent gadgets? Then please note, there are various types of smart home window blinds. They are -A. MOTORIZED BLINDSThis type is considered as one among the modern window blinds in a Smart Home. This type comes with attractive features such as remote control option, the best option for hard-to-reach windows. You can buy them within your scheduled budget. There are four types of motorized blinds. They are -

Motorized Vinyl Blinds

Motorized Wood Blinds

Motorized Composite Blinds

Motorized Aluminum Blinds
B. MOTORIZED SHADESAre you searching for a device that can come across as the next generation gadget for your Smart Home? Then go for Motorized Shades. The most surprising of all, you can control for either one window or for the entire home.There are many types of Motorized Shades, the information of which are given below -

Exterior Motorized Solar Shades

Skylight Motorized Shades

Sheer Horizontal Shades

Pleated Shades

Roller Solar Shades

Cellular Shades

Roman Shades

Natural Shades
C. SMART MOTORIZED SHADESYou have decided to install the Smart Window Blinds at your home. You are on the lookout for a shade that can fit into your requirements. Do you want a blind that can work with every Smart Gadget such as Google Home, Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant or Amazon Echo Control or any other company device? Then, go for Smart Motorized Shades. There are eight versions of this type and they are as follows:

Cellular Honeycomb Shades

Smart Dual Shades

Smart Roller Solar Shades

Smart Blackout Shades

Smart Pleated Shades
There are also other types of Smart Blinds. But we have mentioned only the important types in this article. And yes, you can select the best as per your budget.How Can You Make These Smart Home Window Blinds/Shades work?You can use either a Google Home or Cortana (from Microsoft) or Google Home Kit or Amazon Alexa for the task. Of course, there are few which get controlled by the app or even battery-based devices. The most important features, are these blinds resemble your normal blinds and window coverings. They come in attractive styles and designs.Benefits of Smart Blinds:The most important benefit, without a mention, is convenience. Who will not want to have the convenience of controlling a window blind from anywhere (any place) in the home via a device or a Smart Phone?1. SafetyWhen you have pets and tiny tots in the home, then safety should be your Prime Concern. Many a time, tiny tots can get tangled when playing with the cord of windows. In Smart Window Blinds, there is no chord and so, you need not worry.2. Saves MoneyYour home will become hot or cold as per the weather fluctuations. Yet, the sensor in the smart blind can open or close as per the weather forecast. This facility reduces the consumption of electricity and helps save your money.ConclusionHave you read the article on Smart Home Window Blinds products? Hope you have gained valuable information on this new type of “luxury.” So, what are you waiting for? Select your choice among the various attractive types of Blinds. Give your Smart Home the best feature and a wonderful appearance.

There are many options for buying a group of securities in one product. The most popular ones are mutual funds, segregated funds and exchange traded funds. What they have in common is that these products are an easy way to buy a group of securities at once instead of buying each security individually. The fund can also proportion the securities so that you the individual investor does not have to. There are two main classifications for what type of fund you can purchase in terms of costs. It is important to know how these costs work so you can avoid paying too much for this convenience. These products differ in terms of how they are administered, access to the products and their costs.Active Versus Passive InvestingBefore getting into which of the products are suitable for you, there are some aspects that need to be considered so that you understand what the variations are among the products.Active investing is when someone (a portfolio manager) picks the stocks that are in the fund and decides how much of each one to hold (the weighting). This portfolio manager would also monitor the portfolio and decide when a security should be sold off, added to or have its weighting decreased. Since there is ongoing research, meetings and analysis that must be done to build and monitor this portfolio, this fund manager would have research analysts and administrative personnel to help run the fund.Passive investing has the same setup as active investing, but rather than someone deciding what securities to buy or how much of each one to buy, the portfolio manager would copy a benchmark. A benchmark is a collection of securities which the fund is compared against to see how well it is doing. Since everything in investing is about how much money you can make and how much risk it takes to make that money, every fund out there is trying to compare to all of the other funds of the same type to see who can make the most money. The basis for the comparisons is the benchmark, which can also become comparing between peers or funds managed the same way. Comparisons are general in done only for returns. The risk aspect of the equation is handled by looking at what type of securities the fund holds or how specialized the fund is.How Do I Know By the Fund Name If it is Active or Passive?The short answer is that you have to get to know how the fund manager operates the fund. Some clues to know more quickly if the fund is active or passive are given next. If they are intentionally trying to pick securities according to some beliefs that they have about the market, this is active management. If the fund description talks about “beating the benchmark” or “manager skill” then it is actively managed. Looking at the return history, if the returns vary versus the index by different amounts each year, then the fund is actively managed. Lastly, the fees may be expensive and have sales loads.If the name of the fund says “Index” or “Index fund” there is a good chance that the fund is passively managed. If the name of the fund says “ETF” or “Exchange Traded Fund” this could be a passive fund, but you need to make sure of this because some ETFs are actually active funds, but they are managed in a certain way. Most of the passively managed ETFs are provided by BMO, iShares, Claymore, Vanguard and Horizons in Canada and Powershares, Vanguard and SPDR (or Standard and Poors) and others if the holdings are from the U.S. Most of the other companies would have actively managed funds only. If the fund description states that the fund is trying to “imitate” the performance of an index or benchmark, then this implies that it is copying the index and this is passively managed. From the return perspective, passively managed funds will be very close to the index that they claim to imitate, but slightly less due to fees each year. The amount that the returns are under the index will be close to identical each year unless there are currency conversions or variances in cost which may come from currency fluctuations or hedging that the fund may do. Passive funds typically do not have sales loads as they are geared toward people who invest for themselves.There are some funds that try to mix active and passive management. These products can be assumed to be actively managed, although their results will be closer to the benchmark than most of the other funds, so this is something to consider if the variation from the index is a factor.Types of CostsWhatever product you buy, there will be a cost associated with buying it, keeping it and selling it. This will be true whether you have an advisor versus doing it yourself, and whichever institution you go to. Even buying your own individual stocks will have trading fees which you must account for. How much you are paying for each product as well as the advice will make a large difference in what return you will receive at the end of the day.There are many types of costs to be aware of when you are deciding which products to invest in. This article will focus on the active funds that make up most of the selection for retail investors.The Management Expense Ratio (MER)This is the largest cost for most funds and represents the cost of managing the fund. “Managing the fund” means running the investment company, researching the investments, advertising, overhead and the cost for the advisor or sales person when it applies. Administrative costs like GST within the fund and accounting for trades and record keeping are also part of the expense. The MER covers all of these costs in an actively managed fund. The MER is given as a percentage, which is the percentage of the assets that the fund manages or invests over a year of time. If you have $100,000 invest in a fund, and the MER is 2% per year, you are paying $2000 per year to keep this fund. The cost is subtracted from the return and what you see in your investment statement is your return net of fees, or after fees. There are exceptions to this rule if you have a high net worth account or a special arrangement with the fund company, but for the typical investor, this would be true. The Management Expense Ratio is the management fee plus the administrative costs. The administrative costs are usually between 0.05% and 0.1% of the assets of the fund. If the information you obtain states a “Management Fee” instead of a “Management Expense Ratio” you would have to add on the administrative costs to get the true fee. Seek out the prospectus and look up fund operating costs to find exactly how much the number is. In some cases, an advisory fee is also added to the management fee and administrative fee which can be substantial. If your advisor does not disclose this, the prospectus is the next best place to find out what the costs are.For American funds, the MER would be called the “Expense Ratio” or “ER” which is the same thing as the Canadian MER, but advisory fees are not included in the ER and would be included in Canada for the MER if the product is actively managed. If the product is passively managed in Canada or the U.S., the same names apply, but no advice would be part of the cost since these products are used by people who invest for themselves and would pay for advice separately if they retain it.MER Will Depend on ClassThere are products that have various classes of the same product, the same way there are different models of the same car or the same cell phone. For investment products, the classes indicate how you came across the product, or what restrictions you have on access to the product. For example, Class A is usually a retail class where anyone can buy the product with any amount of money. There is Class I, which can be obtained through an employer or another institution. An example might be buying this product through your company pension plan. There is a Class O which typically has no fees embedded in the return and is reserved for non-profit institutions of high net worth clients that buy direct from the company. There are also classes that are part of different portfolios that are set up by the issuer, like Class F which would be available depending on who your investment dealer is. There are also classes that vary depending on what type of advisor you have and what relationship they have with the fund company. The best thing to do here is ask what class you are being offered and get material form the issuer on how much it would cost. In some cases, you can get the same product in a different class and pay less for it. Some companies may have “Series” instead of classes or some variation thereof. The key thing to note is that different versions of the same fund would different fees, and the differences can be substantial.Sales LoadsWhenever you see the word “load” on a fund it refers to a sales load. This fee is paid to a sales person for advising you and recommending the product to you for the company. There are “front end loads” which are paid as a percentage of the amount you initially invest. If a front end load is 4% and you invest $100,000, you will pay $4,000 up front just to buy this fund. These funds may have the code “FE” in the fund name on your statement. Note that sales loads are not related to MER fees – they are separate fees. There is also a “back end load” or “Rear end load” which is a percentage charged to you when you sell the fund. These are marked with the code “DSC” or “Deferred Sales Charge”. If a back end load is 5%, and you sell $120,000 worth of this fund, you would pay $6,000 in fees to exit the fund. These funds tend to have a DSC redemption schedule which means the sales load will decrease the longer you stay in the fund. Most companies stop charging the rear end sales load after 6 years of holding the product. Since each company varies, you should obtain the details of this schedule up front and understand how the numbers apply to your holdings. There are also “no load” funds which do not charge sales loads at any time. You may also come across “Low Load Funds” and “Level Load Funds”. Low load is similar to the fees discussed above, but they are discounted or lower than average. The level load idea means that the same percentage of sales load is charged over time.Some companies charge an early redemption fee if you sell their fund within a short period of time. How short the period is will depend on the institution. In some cases, it is 30 days, but it can be 90 days, 6 months, 1 year or some other time period. This fee is designed to discourage quick redemptions or short term trading of the product.The best thing to do to clarify which load you have is to ask up front and have it explained to you. If the information is not forthcoming, it may be time to find another place to invest your money or do the research on your own. Note that sales loads only apply to a fund that is sold through a sales person. You may be able to get the same fund without the sales person in some cases. Passive investing generally does not have sales loads – but the exception would be if an advisor recommends these funds and charges you some type of referral fee. This would be another question to ask if you are being advised to buy a passive fund and are not seeing any direct cost to buying the product.Currency Hedging CostsThis type of fee will occur in funds that trade in non-Canadian currencies and hedge them so that the price you receive would be in Canadian dollars. The cost of transacting the hedge itself is the fee being described here, and it can range from 0.5% to 1% per year. If the fee is not disclosed, assuming 0.5% is the cheapest that it will likely be. If you are investing in emerging market currencies or non-developed market currencies, the hedges are much more expensive to put in place and go higher than 1% per year. This is a cost embedded in the return of the fund, but should be examined to flesh out exactly what you are paying to have this hedged. Both active and passive funds pay the same fee for this type of activity.The alternative would be to keep the securities in their home currencies and whatever changes happen to the foreign exchange rates would be reflected in the price of the product. The fact that currency exchange rates can change is a risk of your investment, but it is not considered a fee like the other fees discussed in this article. This fee does not apply if the fund price is in your home currency. You may have a U.S. dollar account, buy a fund that trades in U.S. dollars and then redeem this fund for U.S. dollars. Until you convert the money on your own to Canadian dollars, there is no currency charge. You would only have a conversion charge to change the final dollar amount to Canadian dollars.Referral Fees or Trailer ChargesThese can sometimes be called Service Fees. This type of charge is paid to a third party who sells the product to you on their behalf. It can be thought of as a referral fee or trailer fee. This fee tends to be captured by the MER, but this should be investigated with the company you are dealing with as this may vary. This type of fee tends to arise with active management as passive management products usually do not have any referrals attached to them.Performance FeeThis fee is based on whether a fund achieves a return over a required benchmark – a reward for good performance. This type of fee is common with hedge funds or exotic types of products, but it is sometimes embedded in funds sold to retail investors. Like with most of the fees, ask questions and do your research because this type of fee will be different for every institution and product. This fee is optional in that it usually will not apply if the return on the fund is negative or positive but not that high, but the question should still be asked to minimize surprises.Fees of Holding One Fund Inside of Another oneIf a fund that you are investing in has other funds within it as part of its holding list, then you will pay the MER fee for the fund you are buying as well as the fund that the fund holds. The best way to check if this is happening is to look at the holdings list. If a fund holds another fund, it will be a large holding so a fact sheet with a top 10 holdings summary should provide good information. The actual numbers for each of these items will differ depending on specifically what the fund is and how it is managed. Some of the other fees like Sales Loads and Referral Fees would not apply to a fund held inside of another fund. If the fee is necessary to operate the fund, like currency hedging, then this would be included. Whether a fund holds stocks or another fund can also impact withholding taxes if the fund is investing outside of Canada – particularly for U.S. products. This topic can get complex, so it will not be discussed here. Some funds will have other funds to get access to illiquid markets, or parts of the world that have hundreds of securities. Buying a fund in these cases would actually save on time and trading costs, so it can be justified depending on the market being invested in.Intangible CostsThe key takeway is that you need to do a cradle to grave analysis of what you have and see the costs from beginning to end of your investment period to get an idea of what is really happening. Ideally, the costs should factor in time spent, effort spent on research, and costs of discipline and assurance which would be available when dealing with an advisor that may not be there when you are doing it yourself.Where to Find These Costs?The most comprehensive place that will contain the most detail regarding fund costs is the prospectus. This can be found be searching for the product name and the word “prospectus”. If you do not know the exact product name, you can search the internet by the company name only, find their web site and then search for the product name there. The fund companies will have these documents with the regulator as well as their own web sites and they will be typically in PDF format which can be read and downloaded from your computer. A simplified prospectus would also have the same data that you would be looking for regarding fees.