June 18, 2017

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Sports June 18, 2017

Pakistan Triumps Over India To Win The Champions Trophy

Osman Samiuddin, senior editor of ESPNCricinfo, describes what this win means for Pakistan, in one of the great rivalries of cricket.

MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:

Funny thing – Father’s Day today coincides with some big sporting events. It’s the fourth round of the U.S. Open in golf. There’s plenty of baseball being played around the country. Lots of people will be watching and cheering. But for sheer numbers, not to mention drama, none of this compares to this morning’s cricket match between arch rivals India and Pakistan in the finals of the ICC Champions Trophy. Just ask Osman Samiuddin, senior editor of ESPNCricinfo.

OSMAN SAMIUDDIN: It’s difficult to describe the kind of emotions.

MARTIN: The countries hardly ever play against each other because of political tensions, and when they do, emotions run high. And the numbers are mind boggling. For instance, about 110 million people watched the Super Bowl this year. This morning’s match played in London?

SAMIUDDIN: Four-hundred-and-fifty to 500 million people watching it around the world on TV – that is kind of legally watching it. It’s not just a sport. It’s not just a religion. I think it’s become a compulsion. In Urdu, we say, you know, it’s a majboori, something that you can’t avoid. You have to cricket.

MARTIN: Indian cricket players are the superstars of the game, as famous as Bollywood stars back home, commercial mainstays around the world and, oh, yeah, they win – a lot. Pakistani fans are used to watching their team on TV but for different reasons.

SAMIUDDIN: They haven’t played any cricket at home in Pakistan since 2009. It’s been over eight years now. And that was when a terrorist attack on a visiting team from Sri Lanka, they hurt some players there. And that kind of ended international cricket being played in Pakistan.

MARTIN: Coming into the tournament, Pakistan was the lowest-ranked team in the field. To make things worse, they got hammered by their old rivals, India, in the first game of the event. But then Pakistan started winning and winning and winning. They beat world number one South Africa to stay alive and England, the hosts and tournament favorite, in the semifinals. And then, this morning, Pakistan finished the Cinderella story with a blowout victory against, yes, India.

SAMIUDDIN: For it to happen in the way that it did in this tournament, it is one of the most important achievements in all of cricket.

MARTIN: And now they party.

SAMIUDDIN: Been watching reports from Pakistan about people celebrating on the streets. There will be celebrations that will go on for a fair few days yet. There’s Eid, which is the end of Ramadan this week. And I think people will just celebrate all the way through now.

Copyright © 2017 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

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Health June 18, 2017

When Medical Bills Stack Up, Many Turn To Crowdsourcing Sites

NPR’s Lulu Garcia-Navarro speaks with Lauren Carmen, who used crowdsourcing to help pay medical expenses from breast cancer and delivering premature twins.

LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:

Medical bills are the leading cause of U.S. bankruptcies. Even people with health insurance can take a huge financial hit if they get seriously ill in America today, leaving them financially ruined. So an increasing number of people are using crowdsourcing to get help. It’s a sign of the scale of the problem that over half of the campaigns on sites like GoFundMe or YouCaring involve an appeal for donations for surgery or complicated births or serious illnesses.

To understand why people end up turning to crowdsourcing, we’re joined now by Lauren Carman. In 2016, she gave birth to twins prematurely, who ended up in the ICU for many months at a hospital in San Francisco, hundreds of miles from her home. Then last August, Lauren was diagnosed with stage 3 breast cancer, which has involved chemo and radiation treatments. And she’s on the line now from member station KQED.

Welcome to the program.

LAUREN CARMAN: Thank you.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: Oh – I must ask you at first, how are you doing?

CARMAN: Today is a really good day. It’s been two weeks since my last chemo treatment, and I’m starting to feel better. And it’s really nice to be looking forward.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: If you can talk to us a little bit about the financial burden of what happened to your twins and also to you – you have health insurance. Right?

CARMAN: I do. I actually have excellent health insurance through my employer. But even with health insurance, you have co-pays that you don’t expect. You have transportation costs. You have childcare, too. All these things – you know, there are certain things that are only covered to 80 percent. And 20 percent of lab work really can add up when you have Type 1 diabetes and breast cancer.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: You have Type 1 diabetes as well?

CARMAN: I do, for 26 years.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: So when you started feeling like this was going to be difficult financially, how did it happen that you turned to crowdsourcing?

CARMAN: A really good friend of our family, Dixie Hall – she knew that we were going to be in trouble. I’m an elementary teacher. I teach at a Montessori school, and my husband’s a full-time student. And so I think she just kind of identified that this was going to be an issue, and so she began the campaign for us.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: So what was the response?

CARMAN: It was overwhelming. I just – I get emotional when I talk about it because it’s – we just had so many people that – friends and family and people from the different educational communities that I’ve been part of over the last decade. People we don’t even know came and saw what our story was and donated money. And we’ve just been overwhelmed. It’s just – it’s replaced a significant part of my salary, and it’s really allowed me to focus on healing and taking care of these babies and allowed us to be together as a family during this really difficult period.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: So many Americans find themselves in a similar position. Do you reflect on that? Do you think it’s an important tool to help people? Or should there be other mechanisms to help people in your situation?

CARMAN: Well, especially with the political climate the way that it is now, I think we’re going to see more of this. I think we’re going to see more people with less help from insurance, and that’s extremely concerning to me. I think that it is an option. It’s really hard to ask for help. That was something that was hard for me to do, and it’s hard to accept help sometimes. And this is what got us through, and I would encourage people to consider it in their situation. But I think we are going to, unfortunately, see more of this – more need because people are going to be uninsured or underinsured.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: May I ask also how your twins are doing?

CARMAN: Oh, my gosh. They’re amazing. They’re – I’m just so in love. And they’re just an absolute joy. And (laughter) right now we’re in a throwing-food-on-the-floor phase and putting it in their ears and their belly buttons. And it’s just a really fun age.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: That’s elementary school teacher Lauren Carman. Thanks so much for speaking with us.

CARMAN: You’re so welcome. Thanks for inviting me.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: And best of luck.

CARMAN: Thanks.

(SOUNDBITE OF KAKI KING SONG, “YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE AFRAID”)

Copyright © 2017 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

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Business June 18, 2017

Wal-Mart To Buy Bonobos In Challenge To Amazon

Wal-Mart is purchasing men’s clothing seller Bonobos as the giant retailer looks to stay competitive with Amazon.

LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:

There’s a head-to-head going on right now between Wal-Mart and Amazon for the future of retail. This week, online giant Amazon announced it’s buying Whole Foods the same day Wal-Mart announced it’s spending $310 million to buy Bonobos, a small upscale e-commerce retailer. NPR’s Sam Sanders looks at what the Bonobos deal says about where this big retail battle could be headed.

SAM SANDERS, BYLINE: Forty-five-year-old Chris Marino has been a loyal Bonobos customer for a while.

CHRIS MARINO: I have been wearing pretty much exclusively Bonobos for the last five years.

SANDERS: And when you’re shopping Bonobos, it’s not cheap.

MARINO: Five pairs of their, you know, $185 wool dress pants. And I probably have a dozen or so dress shirts.

SANDERS: For instance, right now on Bonobos’ website, a pair of their upscale men’s sweatpants cost $118. So when the first rumors came out a few weeks ago that Wal-Mart was going to buy Bonobos, it raised some eyebrows. Marino even tweeted about it. You said, @walmart most disappointing news all year, exclamation point. Time to find another brand. #ImNotYourClientele #downstream #bonobos.

Talk about what made you want to write that tweet.

MARINO: Yeah, so actually it came…

SANDERS: Marino had a pretty long answer, but he ended up saying this.

MARINO: The initial comment was a knee-jerk reaction to Wal-Mart socks.

SANDERS: He and other customers think the company will tarnish Bonobos’ high-quality brand. So why did Bonobos say yes to this? Shelly Banjo is a columnist at Bloomberg. She covers retail and consumer goods. She has two guesses.

SHELLY BANJO: For Bonobos, they’re looking for some financial muscle. When it comes to Wal-Mart, they’ve been buying up a number of these smaller brands that they hope will help them kind of gain a better foothold to fight against Amazon.

SANDERS: For some time now, Amazon has been leading a retail revolution. People are shopping online more than ever before. And that’s hurting big brick-and-mortar retailers like Wal-Mart, which is all making for a big fight. Wal-Mart is the country’s biggest grocer. But now Amazon is stepping in that lane by buying Whole Foods. And Amazon is the country’s biggest online retailer. Wal-Mart is trying to get in that market by buying web-first companies like Bonobos.

BANJO: Bonobos has been super creative when it comes to pushing the boundaries on how people shop.

SANDERS: Bonobos began in 2007 online only. Years later, they began to open brick-and-mortar stores. You can try things on in the stores, but you still got to order online. They’re flipping retail on its head. Wal-Mart could use that expertise. The question for these more upscale brands being bought up is how much they’ll be forced to change. Andy Dunn is the CEO of Bonobos, and he says the company will remain autonomous.

ANDY DUNN: We’ve got no plans to sell Bonobos at Wal-Mart or on walmart.com

SANDERS: But he did say Bonobos will be sold on jet.com very soon. That’s another online retailer that Wal-Mart recently acquired. I also asked Dunn about customers who were mad about the Wal-Mart deal.

DUNN: I saw that tweet. And…

SANDERS: Really?

DUNN: …I saw you tweet back at him. I would’ve tweeted back and said let’s get lunch. I totally empathize with his perspective.

SANDERS: Dunn says he couldn’t tweet anything until the deal was public. And he says he also had his own doubts about Wal-Mart. But as a deal came together, the company pleasantly surprised him. And, Dunn says, even after weeks of rumors about the Wal-Mart deal, Bonobos sales – they haven’t dropped yet. Sam Sanders, NPR News.

(SOUNDBITE OF JOHN SCOFIELD’S “THE LOW ROAD”)

Copyright © 2017 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

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