December 16, 2017

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Health December 16, 2017

Weighing The Impact Of Repealing The Health Insurance Mandate

The tax bill being considered by Congress includes a repeal of the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate. Julie Rovner of Kaiser Health News talks to guest host Ray Suarez about how that could affect the health insurance market.

RAY SUAREZ, HOST:

We’re going to continue our conversation about the Republican tax bill and focus on specific provisions in the bill affecting health care. As we just heard, the bill will repeal what’s called the individual mandate, a key part of the Affordable Care Act that requires people to buy health insurance or face a tax penalty. To understand what effect this could have on the insurance market, we’re joined now by Julie Rovner, Washington correspondent for Kaiser Health News. Good to have you with us, Julie.

JULIE ROVNER: Nice to be here.

SUAREZ: So what would be the most immediate effect of the repeal?

ROVNER: Well, the most immediate effect is that people will be confused because they’re actually repealing the penalties but not until 2019. So for next year, people will still be required to either have health insurance or pay a penalty. And, of course, yesterday was the end of open enrollment for most people in most states.

SUAREZ: Now, when people leave the insurance market, it must have some effect on the numbers that are very, very carefully balanced for this law to work.

ROVNER: That’s right. That’s the biggest concern that insurers have. Insurance – said when the Affordable Care Act was passed, that if you’re going to require us to accept sick people and not to charge them more, you’re going to have to have some way to get more healthy people into the pool. That’s what this mandate penalty was about. Insurers said at the beginning it wasn’t big enough. And, in fact, it hasn’t really driven that many healthy people to sign up. But there is a concern that if you take it away and don’t replace it with anything – and at the moment there is no replacement in this bill – that literally only sick people will buy insurance. The only response for insurers at that point is either to raise premiums dramatically or to drop out altogether.

SUAREZ: One senator for whom the repeal of the mandate had been a sticking point was Republican Susan Collins of Maine. Originally, she noted that repealing the mandate would have consequences for the future stability of the individual market. Now, she says she’ll back the tax bill if Congress acts on other health measures. What are they?

ROVNER: Well, there’s two. And one of them would restore these payments that the president cut off last fall that go to insurers to reimburse them for discounts they have to give to their lowest-income enrollees on the exchanges. They’re called cost-sharing reduction payments. But basically, the insurers have already figured out how to get that money back. They’ve raised premiums strategically, and that made premium subsidies higher. So basically, the federal government is giving them back the money in other ways. So most analysts think that it’s probably too late for that to help.

The other thing that Susan Collins asked for was a reinsurance pool. That would help insurers pay for their sickest customers. Most analysts think that would help but that the money that’s being talked about is probably not enough. Also, it’s not entirely clear that they could get this through the House even if they can get it through the Senate.

SUAREZ: The tax bill, it’s understood widely, will increase the deficit. The argument is about how much, but that means entitlement programs may be under some pressure. Do we know how the bill could affect Medicare?

ROVNER: Yes, we do. Medicare could be cut by billions of dollars. That can be waived by Congress but it takes 60 votes. The Republicans assume the Democrats will come along because they don’t want cuts to Medicare, which the Democrats don’t. But Democrats are warning that they may play hardball on this and that Republicans should not assume that they’re going to vote to waive these cuts which are automatic if the deficit is raised to the extent it would be by this tax bill.

SUAREZ: Julie Rovner is Washington correspondent for Kaiser Health News. Julie, thanks for joining us.

ROVNER: You’re most welcome.

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 December 16, 2017

Remembering Bruce Brown, Whose 'Endless Summer' Documentary Boosted Surfing As A Sport

With his 1966 documentary The Endless Summer, surfer-filmmaker Bruce Brown created one of the most iconic expressions of the joy of surfing. Brown died this week at the age of 80.

RAY SUAREZ, HOST:

We’re going to take a moment now to remember a titan among the waves, and we’re not talking about Poseidon. We’re talking about documentary filmmaker Bruce Brown, who died last week at the age of 80. As NPR’s Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi reports, Brown’s 1966 surfing documentary “The Endless Summer” sealed his status as one of the sport’s greatest evangelists.

ALEXI HOROWITZ-GHAZI, BYLINE: Bergman of the boards and Follini (ph) of the foam – That’s how Time magazine and The New York Times respectively described surfer-turned-documentary-filmmaker Bruce Brown in 1966, the year “The Endless Summer” hit film screens across the country.

(SOUNDBITE OF DOCUMENTARY, “THE ENDLESS SUMMER”)

BRUCE BROWN: Many surfers ride summer and winter, but the ultimate thing for most of us would be to have an endless summer – the warm water and waves without the summer crowds of California.

HOROWITZ-GHAZI: That’s Bruce Brown himself narrating the film. On its face, “The Endless Summer” is the story of two young surfers on a search for the world’s tastiest waves. But as Matt Warshaw, author of “The Encyclopedia Of Surfing,” sees it, it was really more of a love letter to surfing itself.

MATT WARSHAW: Bruce Brown will be remembered in the world of surfing as the guy that essentially introduced what real surfing is to the rest of the world, the guy that kind of let everybody else in on our great secret.

HOROWITZ-GHAZI: Warshaw says that, in the early 1960s, popular depictions of surfing in movies like “Gidget” and “Beach Blanket Bingo” didn’t do the sport justice. Surfers were mostly depicted as goofball teenagers or juvenile delinquents. And many surfers felt the story of the sport deserved to be told by one of their own.

WARSHAW: Bruce Brown, first and foremost, was a surfer from Southern California.

HOROWITZ-GHAZI: Brown got his break in his early 20s, when he convinced a California surfboard manufacturer to fund his first feature-length documentary. He spent the next several years cutting his teeth as a filmmaker before his big hit, “The Endless Summer.”

WARSHAW: What people didn’t realize is that he’d been practicing to make that movie. He’d been doing essentially drafts of that movie for almost five years.

HOROWITZ-GHAZI: Warshaw says “The Endless Summer” captured something essential about the joy of surfing that made it both appeal to surfers and non-surfers alike, and that made it a genre-defining film.

(SOUNDBITE OF DOCUMENTARY, “THE ENDLESS SUMMER”)

BROWN: The ultimate thing to do in surfing is to be actually covered up by the wave. And here goes Wayne (doing) doing the ultimate thing.

WARSHAW: You know, if you were ever going to turn to someone who’s never surfed and say, this is why I surf and this is what it’s like, that intro to “Endless Summer,” I think, is still the finest thing you could give to somebody as an introduction.

(SOUNDBITE OF DOCUMENTARY, “THE ENDLESS SUMMER”)

BROWN: The thing you can’t show is the fantastic speed and that feeling you get in the pit of your stomach. I couldn’t help but think of the hundreds of years these waves must have been breaking here. But until this day, no one had ever ridden one.

HOROWITZ-GHAZI: Bruce Brown eventually stepped away from filmmaking after garnering an Oscar nomination for a later documentary about motorcycling. He spent the following decades pursuing his other passions – swordfishing, golfing and rally-car racing – chasing a different kind of “Endless Summer.” In many ways, he succeeded. And with his films, Bruce Brown brought countless others along for the ride. Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi, NPR News.

(SOUNDBITE OF THE SANDALS’ “THEME FROM THE ENDLESS SUMMER”)

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 December 16, 2017

Brexit Is One Step Closer As EU Agrees To Talk About U.K. Trade

European Union leaders have agreed to discuss the process by which the U.K. will leave the EU. The talks focus on the trade relationship Britain will have with the EU in the future. Guest host Ray Suarez speaks with NPR’s Frank Langfitt about whether Brexit has entered a point of no return.

RAY SUAREZ, HOST:

Last year, the United Kingdom kicked off an era of uncertainty in the Western world when it voted to leave the European Union. Yesterday, the U.K. took a major step forward on the road to Brexit when European leaders agreed to talks with the U.K. on a new trading relationship with the EU. To make sense of yesterday’s decision and how it fits with the turbulent last year and a half, we turn to NPR’s Frank Langfitt, who’s just returned to his post in London from Brussels, the headquarters city of the European Union. Hi, Frank.

FRANK LANGFITT, BYLINE: Hey, Ray.

SUAREZ: Why does the agreement to have trade talks matter so much?

LANGFITT: Well, one thing, it sort of tells the U.K. is continuing to move forward towards leaving the EU. This is continuing to go ahead. But, you know, if you look at the – kind of the big picture, it’s symbolic of changes that really started in the summer of 2016. And a big change has happened since then. You remember that Brexit vote? It was a big shock. Stocks dropped around the world. And one reason was seeing the U.K. actually walk away from something that it had helped build – this sort of Western post-World-War-II architecture for peace and prosperity in Europe. And seeing it walk away, really, and saying basically, you know, we’re better off on our own, that really rattled people here and elsewhere.

And then you had these right-wing populists in France and the Netherlands, they were pushing to leave the EU. And there was this fear in Brussels that, you know, this 28-nation trading bloc was actually going to fall apart and risk a lot more instability in this part of the world.

SUAREZ: I’ve been in Britain a couple of times since the vote and talked to people at each time who felt that there was still a chance that it might not happen. How does the decision look today and has it entered a sort of point of no return?

LANGFITT: Well, that’s a great question. I mean, first, it’s not going well at all. You know, U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May is much weaker than she was. So Brexit has ended up really kind of tearing up politics here. In terms of a point of no return, that’s an excellent question. There is a sense here that if they tried to do it, people would be so upset because this came out of a referendum, and they would feel that this was denying the democratic will of the people here in the United Kingdom.

On the other hand, you talk to people in the EU, they might welcome them back if they changed their mind. But they only have so much time. You know, this is all going to run out. They have to leave in March of 2019. But everybody’s going to be watching it very closely. And I think key to it also will be the economics of the United Kingdom, which has been suffering since the Brexit decision.

SUAREZ: Now to state the obvious, but it’s never a bad idea. The U.S. is not a member of the EU. Why should Americans be paying attention to Brexit? Does it mean anything on this side of the Atlantic?

LANGFITT: I think it does in a way that people wouldn’t necessarily imagine, and that’s that Brexit is weakening America’s closest ally abroad. You remember, you know, we fought a war with the Brits. We speak the same language, have these shared values. And with President Trump looking inward himself, you know, the U.S. influence is declining worldwide as well as this very important power of ours. Then if you look more broadly, you’ve got a more aggressive China, a more assertive Russia. And there is a sense that one thing the West doesn’t need right now is fragmentation.

SUAREZ: Once the British have managed to extricate themselves from the EU, will they be looking to make a deal with the United States?

LANGFITT: They do. And, you know, it’s really interesting. Theresa May keeps saying, oh, this is going to bail us out. We’re going to do really well with a deal with the U.S. The fact of the matter is trade barriers are already very low with the U.S. And you’re – she’s also going to be dealing with Donald Trump who’s not known for giving, you know, sweetheart deals to people. He crafts himself as a very, very tough negotiator. So the idea that the U.S. economy is going to really help out Britain, I think most people here – certainly, economists think that’s not very likely.

SUAREZ: That’s NPR’s Frank Langfitt in London. Thanks a lot, Frank.

LANGFITT: Happy to do it, Ray.

(SOUNDBITE OF ADAM BEN EZRA’S “CAN’T STOP RUNNING”)

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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