September 15, 2019

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Business September 15, 2019

United Auto Workers Votes For Nationwide Strike Against GM

Tens of thousands of members of the United Auto Workers have voted to go on strike against General Motors. The action could shut down plants nationwide.



SARAH MCCAMMON, HOST:

The United Auto Workers union has told more than 49,000 General Motors workers nationwide to walk off the job just before midnight tonight Eastern Time. That’s after the union failed to reach a new deal on a new four-year contract with GM. Michigan Radio’s Tracy Samilton is here to tell us more about it.

Welcome, Tracy.

TRACY SAMILTON, BYLINE: Thank you. Good to be here.

MCCAMMON: And you’ve been here covering these talks between GM and the UAW. How did we get to the point of a strike being just hours away?

SAMILTON: Well, I think this strike has been in the works for some time, especially after GM last year announced it was closing four of its U.S. plants and transferring the workers to other plants and after the UAW increased strike pay in March. And there are a lot more issues beside the plant closings. And the union and GM are really far apart on the – things like wage and profit sharing, health care benefits, permanent jobs for GM’s temporary workers. And we’ve got – at the press conference today, UAW Vice President Terry Dittes said this is something that they just could not get a contract in time. And here he is at the press conference.

(SOUNDBITE OF PRESS CONFERENCE)

TERRY DITTES: We do not take this lightly. This is our last resort. It represents great sacrifice and great courage on the part of our members and all of us.

MCCAMMON: And, Tracy, assuming that there is no deal before midnight tonight, what would a strike mean?

SAMILTON: Well, 49,000-plus GM workers walking off the job and then basically living on strike pay, which is a lot less than their usual paycheck, and then all of GM’s factory production coming to a halt. It’s probably going to be a short strike. But if it’s protracted, you know, it could be a really big problem for General Motors.

MCCAMMON: And even before the strike announcement, the UAW has been in the news a lot recently. Tell us what else is going on with the union.

SAMILTON: Yeah. That’s kind of like – the only thing you can say about that is oy. Four years ago, the FBI arrested a Fiat Chrysler official who created false tax returns to help some UAW officials to hide bribes. And since then, there have been four UAW officials admitting to taking bribes or kickbacks. And then the FBI recently raided the home of the union’s president, Gary Jones, and the home of the former president, Dennis Williams. So this is a really, really big deal.

MCCAMMON: And very briefly, Tracy, how does that play into this larger labor dispute?

SAMILTON: It is casting a big shadow over the talks and the strike. You know, the UAW says, oh, the rank and file are just focused on getting a good contract. But really, workers are – they’re watching this just as we are, and it may, in fact, make them not trust that whatever deal they do get is a good one.

MCCAMMON: All right. That’s Michigan Radio’s Tracy Samilton.

Tracy, thank you.

SAMILTON: Good to be here.

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 September 15, 2019

Understanding Surprise Medical Bills Legislation

There’s legislation in Congress to curb surprise medical billing. NPR’s Lulu Garcia-Navarro talks with Emmarie Huetteman of Kaiser Health News.



LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:

Maybe this has happened to you or someone you love. You go to the hospital. You have a procedure done. Then comes a nasty surprise – a medical bill for thousands or tens of thousands of dollars not covered by insurance. Now legislation in the House and Senate is inching forward that would roll back that practice, but it’s faced a lot of resistance and millions of dollars in advertising and lobbying. Who’s responsible? Emmarie Huetteman of Kaiser Health News joins me now to explain.

Good morning.

EMMARIE HUETTEMAN: Good morning. Thanks for having me.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: So we’ve heard about these so-called surprise bills before, but briefly explain to us what is actually going on here. The official term is balance billing, right?

HUETTEMAN: That’s correct. So what’s happening is, in many parts across the country that haven’t banned this yet, patients get a bill that is the difference between what their doctor charged and what the insurance paid. And in many cases, that’s a huge amount of money, and it’s not what people expected to pay.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: How is this legislation we mentioned designed to help fix that problem?

HUETTEMAN: So the legislation that’s being considered right now looks at a practice called benchmarking to try and pay these surprise bills. Benchmarking means that an insurance company would pay a provider basically a fee based on the average of what other providers in the area had been paid for that service. There are a lot of groups that say this is not the right way to go – doctors in particular. They’re worried that they’re going to end up with depressed fees that make it hard for them to continue to cover their administrative and other costs.

And they favor a method called arbitration. Arbitration would basically look like, you know, the provider would offer their quote for what they think they should be paid for the procedure, and the insurance company would offer their quote for what they think they should pay for the procedure. And a third party would mediate, look at the options and say, OK, I select yours. And hey, loser, you get to pay the fees of arbitration. It’s an interesting process. People criticize it by saying this is not going to make things less complex, but it is the argument being put forward by doctors in particular.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: I was surprised to learn that private equity firms are behind some of this lobbying, too. Explain their role here.

HUETTEMAN: So private equity firms come into the picture because there are at least a few of them that own physician staffing companies. Now, a lot of people don’t really know what a physician staffing company is.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: I have to say I hadn’t heard of it.

HUETTEMAN: Not surprising. Basically, a company will hire a doctor, and then you get hired out to hospitals, and they help you with a lot of the administrative tasks that really, like, take up a lot of doctors’ time. These groups are owned by private equity in many cases. Some of the biggest ones are that provide a lot of the emergency room doctors in this country, for instance. And so you see those physician staffing groups really pushing back against this legislation in Congress right now. And you have to look at it and say, you’re owned by private equity, which, ultimately, you’re interested in profits…

GARCIA-NAVARRO: Profit.

HUETTEMAN: …For your investors. Yeah.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: And you cite, actually, something very interesting. Research from 2017 shows that when a physician staffing company owned by private equity entered a market, out-of-network billing rates went up between 81 and 90%. And when you see other groups working with a hospital, rates increased by 33 percentage points, which sort of suggests that these groups coming in are going to naturally raise costs. And maybe the pushback isn’t so much about how much these fees are, but more about, actually, these private equity firms.

HUETTEMAN: It’s possible. At the very least, they’re involved in this fight, and the fight has been a deep-pocketed fight, let’s say. There’s a lot of money being thrown around, and it makes sense that some of that money would be coming from these groups that have a lot to lose.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: It would seem like an easy win for legislators to say, people don’t want bills; people don’t want surprise bills. Why isn’t this getting more traction?

HUETTEMAN: You’re right to ask. And even though there are Democrats and Republicans who agree that surprise billing should be fixed, as I said, there was a lot of money that’s been thrown around recently into attack ads. There’s a lot of lobbyists wandering Capitol Hill and a lot of doctors wandering Capitol Hill. And even though it’s the year before the election, it’s close enough to Election Day that a lot of members of Congress are worried about taking a hard vote.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: That’s Emmarie Huetteman of Kaiser Health News. Thank you very much.

HUETTEMAN: Thank you.

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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Sports September 15, 2019

Protests Against Ban On Women At Men’s Soccer Games In Iran

NPR’s Lulu Garcia-Navarro talks with former Iranian soccer coach Katayoun Khosrowyar about Sahar Khodayari, a young woman who died after trying to watch a stadium soccer game in Iran.



LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:

Women in Iran are prohibited from attending men’s soccer games in the national stadium. To get around that, some women dress up as men to go. They risk arrest and worse. Last week, Sahar Khodayari was sentenced to six months in prison for attending a men’s game. At the court, she then set herself on fire in protest and she died. Her death has now sparked worldwide outrage, with calls on FIFA, the sport’s governing body, to intervene. Activists have used the hashtag #bluegirl on Twitter, the color of Khodayari’s favorite Iranian team. That includes Kat Khosrowyar, former coach to Iran’s national under-19 women’s team. She’s now head coach at Seattle’s Reign Academy and she joins us now on the line. Thank you so much.

KATAYOUN KHOSROWYAR: Thank you, Lulu. It’s an honor to be here today.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: Why do you think this prompted such a huge outcry and response?

KHOSROWYAR: This has never happened before. I mean, I’ve lived in Iran since 2005. It’s only been a few months that I’ve moved back to the U.S. And, you know, growing up there, there was no women’s soccer. So I helped, you know, pick up and create that platform for women. For me, this is like something that is, you know, completely outrageous – to hear that something so bad has happened to, you know, a fan – a woman who was a huge soccer fan. You know, because I was there for 15 years, and I’ve seen how soccer is ingrained in our DNA. So this has been a really unfortunate event and it’s very difficult to cope with.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: Kat, Iran isn’t a hyper-segregated society. Men and women work together. They socialize and mix in public life. So why do authorities separate men and women in stadiums?

KHOSROWYAR: This is a very good question. It’s a very, very tricky question, as well, because I still don’t know the answers to that. And I don’t know the answer because of this specific stadium – Azadi Stadium is in the capital of Tehran. It holds 100,000 people. It has a lot of security. And I think what is going through, you know, their head is that they don’t know how to, you know, protect the women that go in there with, you know, 100,000 men all over the place. But if you go to, like, the other big cities of Iran, if you go, like, with other sports, there is no problem with it.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: FIFA President Gianni Infantino has previously urged Iranian authorities to take “concrete steps” for women to attend games. Are authorities likely to respond to pressure from FIFA?

KHOSROWYAR: The authorities are responding. I think the government does want this to happen, it just takes time. There has been a lot of talk for the past few years, they just want to test it. For example, last year, with my national team, we were able to go twice, which was very historic. So we only thought that that was going to continue. But the government needs to facilitate opening the stadium for women and, you know, FIFA has demanded it. I do, you know, hope the situation gets resolved quickly for women to come watch their favorite team play and support them.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: You’ve seen the hashtag #bluegirl trending on Twitter. You asked in a tweet what sports fans could do to support female soccer fans in Iran. Do you think fans can actually change things?

KHOSROWYAR: Fans are the change-makers in the country. You know, soccer is the national sport. I think that this has to somehow evolve into getting more women involved and men have to, you know, support this cause because we do need, you know, their help. We do need the fact that they’ve been, you know, working in soccer for a much longer time than we have to get involved in helping us progress. So I think men need to either come together to, like, help us or, you know, it’s just going to continue the way it is. And men have a huge role – bigger role than us to help facilitate what what happens next.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: That’s Kat Khosrowyar, head coach at Seattle’s Reign Academy. Thank you so much.

KHOSROWYAR: Thank you, Lulu, for having me.

(SOUNDBITE OF HOMAYOUN SHAJARIAN’S “LIBERATION: TASNIF ON KHAYAM QUATRAIN”)

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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