May 3, 2019

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Sports May 3, 2019

Kentucky Derby Jockeys Look For New Ways To Shave Off Time

The Kentucky Derby is fast. Really fast. The famed horse race is often won by fractions of a second. This has owners, trainers and jockeys looking for any way they can cut time.



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Tomorrow marks the 145th Run for the Roses, better known as the Kentucky Derby and often referred to as the fastest two minutes in sports. In past years, the race has been won by less than a second. While there’s plenty of debate over the impact of performance-enhancing drugs, Ashlie Stevens of member station WFPL in Louisville wondered – what are some other ways jockeys, owners and trainers shave seconds off race time?

ASHLIE STEVENS, BYLINE: In the days leading up to the Kentucky Derby, horses and their trainers parade through the paddock on their way to and from the track for practice runs.

(SOUNDBITE OF HORSE TROTTING)

A. STEVENS: For now, the horses are moving at a pretty slow pace.

(SOUNDBITE OF HORSE WHINNYING)

A. STEVENS: But on Saturday, that won’t be the case. These horses are 1,000-pound elite athletes. And this race is just as competitive as any marathon or Olympic swim. Since its start in 1875, there are numerous examples of the derby being won by a fraction of a second. Which made me wonder – has anyone ever shaved their racehorse to get a better time, like how some human endurance athletes shave excess body hair to eliminate drag?

CHRIS GOODLETT: To my knowledge, there’s never been hair shaved off a horse to save seconds.

A. STEVENS: That’s Chris Goodlett, the chief curator at the Kentucky Derby Museum.

GOODLETT: I don’t know if it’s written rule – maybe because of the absurdity – but my guess would be it would be frowned upon.

A. STEVENS: Goodlett says, ultimately, the Jockey Club, the governing body of professional horse racing, probably wouldn’t approve of a bald horse. They can get sunburns, and owners are prevented from making any major alterations to a horse’s appearance – though there are plenty of other modifications trainers and jockeys have made for faster runs, such as using lighter horseshoes. Gary Stevens is a retired three-time Kentucky Derby-winning jockey.

GARY STEVENS: They’re not steel shoes. They are aluminum. And they are very, very lightweight. And they have toe grips on the front and grips on the rear end as well.

A. STEVENS: Stevens also says jockeys’ colorful shirts have undergone some aerodynamic updates since the 1980s. The silks now fit much tighter, like what bicyclists wear.

TERESA ESTES: The aero fits tighter to the body, so you don’t have it flapping in the wind when the horse is running.

A. STEVENS: That’s Teresa Estes. She and her business partner run Triple Crown Silks in Winchester, Ky. They are designing silks for three Derby hopefuls this year. Estes says many racehorse owners now want something more tailored to the jockeys’ bodies to reduce drag.

ESTES: In the satins, you can’t do that because there’s no stretch to it.

A. STEVENS: More of their clients are shifting away from those traditional race day materials to more aerodynamic fabrics.

Even with all the improvements, jockey Gary Stevens says a large part of the Kentucky Derby is still the luck of the draw, specifically the draw for post positions, or which gate the horses get to start out of. The worst one is closest to the inside rail.

G. STEVENS: And the one hole is dreaded in the Kentucky Derby because if you don’t break well – if you don’t get a good start, it’s like a giant wave of 19 other horses trying to get over close to the rail to safe ground going into that first turn.

A. STEVENS: And even with a good post position, sleeker clothing and lighter gear, Chris Goodlett of the Kentucky Derby Museum says there’s one more thing to try.

GOODLETT: Trainers will all joke with us that if you want more seconds – you want to do a little bit better in the race, you need to buy a faster horse.

A. STEVENS: While having the fastest horse is really the only sure bet for winning the Derby, that won’t keep trainers and jockeys from trotting out new tricks to increase speed.

For NPR News, I’m Ashlie Stevens in Louisville.

(SOUNDBITE OF PARQUET COURTS’ “WIDE AWAKE”)

Copyright © 2019 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 May 3, 2019

The U.S. Gained 263,000 Jobs In April, Showing A Healthy Economy

The U.S. gained 263,000 jobs in April, exceeding expectations and providing fresh evidence that the economy is in good health. The unemployment rate tumbled to 3.6%, the lowest in nearly 50 years.



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New numbers came out today showing unemployment last month fell to 3.6%. Or as President Trump put it…

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: The economy is unbelievable.

CHANG: It is certainly good news for a White House that’s been on the defensive for weeks because of the Mueller report.

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Meanwhile, a host of Democratic candidates are crisscrossing the country saying they’re the ones who will fight for the middle class.

(SOUNDBITE OF MEDIA MONTAGE)

JOE BIDEN: The country wasn’t built by Wall Street bankers, CEOs and hedge fund managers.

(CHEERING)

BERNIE SANDERS: Many people watching this program are working two or three jobs just to pay the bills.

KAMALA HARRIS: Middle-class working families in America today are losing.

CORNISH: We’re going to get to the politics of all this in a moment. But first, NPR’s Jim Zarroli is going to take us back to the time when this was the hottest new tune.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, “EVERYDAY PEOPLE”)

SLY AND THE FAMILY STONE: (Singing) I am everyday people.

CORNISH: Jim, an unexpected start to my economic interview…

(LAUGHTER)

CORNISH: …Why are we playing this song?

JIM ZARROLI, BYLINE: ‘Cause the unemployment rate in April was groovy. It was 3.6%. That’s the lowest it’s been since December 1969. There were 263,000 jobs created during the month, so the job market is now as good as it was when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. I spoke to Austan Goolsbee, who chaired the Council of Economic Advisers under President Obama. He says you can’t really compare the job market today to the job market 50 years ago. The labor force is different. We have a lot more retirees today, a lot more women in the workforce.

AUSTAN GOOLSBEE: So it can be hard to compare across decades. But however you want to measure it, it’s still very low. And the job market has been strongly improving for many years now, and it has continued. And that’s great.

CORNISH: At the same time, it was just a few months ago when it seemed like the economy was slowing down, right? I mean…

ZARROLI: Yeah.

CORNISH: …The stock market fell towards the end of last year. Does this jobs report, the April jobs report, mean things are better than they appeared?

ZARROLI: I think it probably means that concerns were kind of overblown. I mean, there have been two big issues – economic issues to worry about. One is that the impact of last year’s big tax cuts has been fading. You know, they stimulated a lot of short-term spending, and then they kind of petered out. The other big problem was a slowdown in Europe and Asia, which sooner or later affects the U.S. economy.

So if you talk to most economists now, they will say those are still problems. The growth rate is slowing. It was 3.2% in the first quarter of this year, probably down to about 2% now. But it is not slowing as much as we thought.

CORNISH: People also used to talk about wages a lot. Now that the unemployment rate is falling, is there evidence that that’s affecting how much workers get paid?

ZARROLI: Yeah, there actually is. I mean, this has been an issue for a while. The unemployment rate has been kind of creeping lower for, like, a decade. But that didn’t really seem to be affecting people’s wages, and a lot of economists didn’t know what to make of that. You know, if workers were becoming scarce, why weren’t employers paying more?

We are now finally starting to see pay rising. Average hourly earnings are up about 3.2%, which is higher than the rate of inflation, which means, you know, overall, average workers are finally starting to come out ahead. And that includes people at the lower end of the pay scale. I spoke with economist Ben Herzon at Macroeconomic Advisers, and here’s what he said.

BEN HERZON: The big picture there is that labor markets have tightened, and so businesses don’t have a choice but to raise wages at the rates that we’ve seen to attract the labor that they need.

CORNISH: Before I let you go, any red flags in this jobs report?

ZARROLI: Yeah. We saw the unemployment rate fall to 3.6%, which is very low. Now, there are two ways unemployment falls. One is more people get hired; the other is people stop looking for work. And these numbers tell us that the latter happened. The rate of what we call labor force participation fell. People fell out of the labor force. This is kind of at odds with the very good numbers that we saw otherwise. Economist Austan Goolsbee says it may be something of an aberration.

GOOLSBEE: So let’s hope that that was just a blip. But that’s at least a tiny bit of caution light in what is otherwise, as they say, a nice, fat, juicy jobs number report.

ZARROLI: So this is just something – the labor force participation rate is something that’s worth looking at in the months to come.

CORNISH: That’s NPR’s Jim Zarroli. Thank you.

ZARROLI: You’re welcome.

Copyright © 2019 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 May 3, 2019

Employees Start To Feel The Squeeze Of High-Deductible Health Plans

Clarisa Corber at work at a Topeka, Kan., insurance agency. Corber and her husband — who have three kids, a health plan and $15,000 in medical debt — were profiled in a recent Los Angeles Times investigation into the effects of high-deductible health plans.

Nick Krug/Los Angeles Times


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Nick Krug/Los Angeles Times

Workers with a steady paycheck already know that wages have been stubbornly slow to rise. Meanwhile, those who get health insurance through a job have seen their deductibles shoot up. In fact, says Noam Levey, a health care reporter for the Los Angeles Times, deductibles have, on average, quadrupled over the last dozen years. As a result, even some people who have health insurance are having trouble affording medical care. We talked with Levey about his latest reporting into how the issue is affecting workers and their families.

Interview Highlights

On why he decided to embark on this project:

We’ve spent so much time fighting about Obamacare over the last 10 years and talking about the uninsured that I think we lost sight of this quiet revolution that’s happened with health coverage for the tens of millions of Americans who have coverage through an employer. These are the people who’ve seen deductibles rise astronomically — rising four times in the last dozen years from about $350 on average to $1,350 on average. In some cases, people are seeing $4,000, $5,000, even $6,000 deductibles that they have to pay out of their own pocket before their health insurance kicks in. Needless to say, many, many Americans can’t afford those kinds of bills.

On what he heard in talking to people:

We heard some really heartbreaking stories. So we did a nationwide poll with the Kaiser Family Foundation as part of this project. One of the things that we found was that half of Americans who get job-based coverage say they or an immediate family member in the last year have put off going to the doctor, not filled the prescription or delayed some other kind of medical care because of concern about cost. We found one in five had depleted their savings to pay a medical bill in the last year and one in six reported that they have had to make some kind of difficult sacrifice in order to pay a medical bill.

Some of them were really gut wrenching. We talked to a 27-year-old chef in western Virginia trying to start a family with his young wife. His wife had a miscarriage. They got such huge medical bills he had to take two extra jobs and was working from 5 a.m. until 11 p.m. some days.

These are people with health insurance. This used to be something we heard about all the time for people who didn’t have health insurance, but in many cases these are middle-class people making $75,000 or $100,000 a year. But if they get a $5,000 or $6,000 medical bill — a family of four, kids in school — it’s hard for a lot of people to come up with that kind of money.

On what’s coming next in his reporting

We’re going to be looking particularly at how these high deductibles are problematic for people who have serious medical conditions — diabetes, heart disease, even cancer. One of the things we found particularly troubling is that these people who should be going to the doctor, even they are cutting back on their treatment.

We’re going to be looking at how these high-deductible plans are exacerbating inequality at a time when this is a major issue for Americans about who’s getting the gains in our economy. If you’re living paycheck to paycheck and you get sick, it’s really tough for that group of people.

One of the other things that’s amazing, and I know NPR has looked a little bit at this, is that the growth of online charities and crowdfunding sources like GoFundMe is being driven in large part by people seeking to pay medical bills. And one of the amazing things about those people is that many of them have health insurance.

Noam Levey reports for the Los Angeles Times and can be found on Twitter: @NoamLevey.

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