July 9, 2017

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Health July 9, 2017

Words You'll Hear: The Better Care Reconciliation Act

Republican senators are trying to revive their health care bill. While voters weren’t fond of the the original version, but they’re not always clear about what they want when it comes to health care.

LAKSHMI SINGH, HOST:

With Congress back in Washington this week, we wanted to take a look at a Word You’ll Hear. And in this case, the word is actually letters – BCRA. That’s the acronym for the Better Care Reconciliation Act. It’s the proposed Senate bill to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. So far, this GOP draft is very unpopular, with just 17 percent of Americans supporting it according to an NPR “PBS NewsHour” Marist Poll. With so many people unhappy with this proposal, we were curious what they do want to change about the Affordable Care Act. NPR political reporter Danielle Kurtzleben has been looking into that. Hi, Danielle.

DANIELLE KURTZLEBEN, BYLINE: Hello.

SINGH: So we know Republicans are working on different options for how to approach their repeal and replacement of the Affordable Care Act. What are some of the ways the system could change?

KURTZLEBEN: So Obamacare, of course, expanded Medicaid. What the Senate bill would do would be to rollback that Medicaid expansion. Plus, it would cap Medicaid spending further. Aside from that, it would provide less generous subsidies for people to buy insurance on those individual markets. And it would get rid of a lot of the taxes that Obamacare imposed to help pay for itself.

SINGH: What did you see when you looked more closely into what people might actually want to see in health care reform?

KURTZLEBEN: You know, it’s hard to say. For example, right now, a majority of Americans – about 60 percent according to the Pew Research Center – say it’s the government’s responsibility to make sure people have health care. OK, so that’s cut and dried, 60 percent. And that was true before Obama took office, as well. But while Obama was in office, there was no clear majority on either side of that. So clearly people’s opinions on this can vacillate one way or the other pretty quickly depending on what’s going on.

Likewise, a growing share of Americans – right now it’s 53 percent – they say that they want single-payer health care. Once again, that sounds cut and dried. But what the Kaiser Family Foundation found out is if you present people with an argument for or an argument against, you can swing public opinion in a massive way on single-payer. So it’s not really clear how much people do like that idea.

SINGH: So it can depend a lot on how this is actually framed.

KURTZLEBEN: Right. Absolutely. And one way to think of this is, you know, you can say, yeah, Americans are just squishy on this, but if you really think about it, health care is just a very personal, really kind of scary issue for people. It could be a life-or-death issue for many of us at some point. So the idea of massively overhauling, it you can understand how that would make people feel in conflicting ways about it.

SINGH: What about this current system? We’ve seen figures that indicate Obamacare is getting consistently more popular, right? So what does this mean? Are people generally satisfied to keep things the way they are?

KURTZLEBEN: Sort of. I mean, Gallup did find in late 2016 – I mean, even before the election – that around two-thirds of Americans say they’re satisfied with the health care system. And Gallup also found that right now, for the first time this year, Obamacare had majority approval. But certain parts of Obamacare are very popular in certain parts, namely the individual mandates are not popular at all.

The individual mandates, that provision that says you have to have insurance or pay a penalty, that’s the only one that a majority of Americans didn’t approve of. Only 30 percent of people like that. The irony, of course, is that you need the individual mandate to make the rest of Obamacare work.

SINGH: What might congressional leaders keep in mind then if they’re looking to please as many Americans as possible, if not all Americans?

KURTZLEBEN: Right. Well, I mean, of course, you can’t please all Americans. You know what? You might not even be able to please everyone in your own party fully. It’s a very unforgiving topic to try to create legislation on just because it is such a complicated topic. This is not repealing or imposing a tax. This is making a whole massive system for a whole bunch of Americans work correctly.

SINGH: That’s NPR’s Danielle Kurtzleben. Thanks, Danielle.

KURTZLEBEN: Thank you.

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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Sports July 9, 2017

Baseball Players On Track To Hit More Home Runs Than Ever This Year

Strikeouts and home runs are both up in Major League Baseball. Sports Illustrated‘s Tom Verducci joins host A Martinez to talk about what that means for fans and the pace of the game.

A MARTINEZ, HOST:

This summer, the bats are hot in ballparks around the country.

(SOUNDBITE OF BASEBALL COMMENTARY MONTAGE)

UNIDENTIFIED COMMENTATOR #1: Deep right centerfield – gone to souvenir city.

UNIDENTIFIED COMMENTATOR #2: Oh, my – put into orbit.

GARY THORNE: That thing went over the popcorn wagon in the concourse, I think.

UNIDENTIFIED COMMENTATOR #3: Way back and goodbye, home run.

UNIDENTIFIED COMMENTATOR #4: And that baby’s gone – even further than the last two.

MARTINEZ: That is happening a lot this season. Major League Baseball players are on track to hit more home runs than ever – more than 6,000 if the numbers hold up. But as exciting as homers can be, they’re actually part of the problem with the sport. This week on Out Of Bounds – long shots, strikeouts and the slowing pace of baseball.

Tom Verducci is senior baseball writer for Sports Illustrated, and he joins me now from Princeton, N.J. Tom, welcome.

TOM VERDUCCI: Thanks for having me.

MARTINEZ: All right, so let’s start with those home runs. People are hitting more and more of them, and the ball is going further. Why?

VERDUCCI: (Laughter) Well, let’s look at it from two perspectives. First, from the hitters’ perspectives – there is more of an emphasis on power, so they don’t mind striking out at the risk of just swinging for the fences because a lot of guys now get paid on not how much they get on base, how often they get on base, but how much damage that they do. And that comes with the home run ball.

Now when you talk to the pitchers, they go directly to the favorite conspiracy theory, that it must be about the baseball itself – that the baseball is actually tighter than in previous years and the seams are lower. Lower seams mean less drag on a baseball. Less drag means more carry. And of course, more carry means more home runs.

MARTINEZ: What about drug testing? I know that Major League Baseball is trying to test a lot more.

VERDUCCI: Well, absolutely. They are. And especially this year, their incidents of tests, off-season and in-season, have gone way up. But listen, with the amount of money that’s in the game, there are certainly incentives still for someone to try to beat tests and get that extra edge. But baseball will tell you that it’s much more difficult to circumvent these tests than they were, say, even five years ago because they are much more sophisticated.

MARTINEZ: Tom, I’m a big baseball fan. I’ve been a baseball fan my whole life. It’s like pizza for me. I will eat it and consume it however it’s served up. So I don’t mind the home runs and the strikeouts, but I can see how a fan might think this is boring. What’s going on that got us here if maybe fans aren’t so in tune to the in-between?

VERDUCCI: Yeah. Well, certainly love home runs – they literally bring people to their feet. And even the home run – the game literally stops so someone can take a jog around the bases. So when you factor in the fact that strikeouts now are for the 12th consecutive year going up to a record level, it’s the yawning gaps in between the excitement in the game that have people concerned.

MARTINEZ: Which fans suffer the most with this? Is it the ones that are watching on TV or the ones that are at the ballpark?

VERDUCCI: I think it’s the viewer experience at home that is the one that concerns baseball because we have so many distractions available to us. And I think when we get these gaps in between pitches or the ball being put in play, it’s very easy for someone to get disengaged from the game that they’re watching on television or a phone, however. But it really is about – how do we as baseball attract and keep viewers, especially the younger ones?

MARTINEZ: Are they struggling getting these younger viewers? Or – how are baseball ratings in general?

VERDUCCI: The ratings last year for the World Series were the highest in 25 years, a quarter of a century. That was primarily due to the Cubs. And even if you weren’t a Cubs fan, you wanted to see if they could break a 108-year drought. As far as the regional sports network goes, their ratings are actually very strong. I think the concern, based on polling that MLB has done, is that the audience does tend to skew a little older. So they’re looking at the polling and saying, hm, you know, where are our next generation of fans? And that’s what they’re seeing, some erosion in the younger demographic.

MARTINEZ: Tom Verducci, senior baseball writer for Sports Illustrated. Tom, thanks a lot.

VERDUCCI: Thanks for having me.

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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