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California Governor Signs Law Protecting Gig Economy Workers

Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez, D-San Diego, speaks at an August 28 rally in Sacramento, Calif., calling for passage of AB5 to limit when companies can label workers as independent contractors.

Rich Pedroncelli/AP


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Rich Pedroncelli/AP

California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a sweeping new labor law Wednesday extending wage and benefit protections to about a million workers and aimed primarily at drivers contracted by ride-hailing companies such as Uber and Lyft.

Newsom had argued that when workers are misclassified as independent contractors rather than as employees, they lose basic benefits such as minimum wage, paid sick days, and health insurance.

“The hollowing out of our middle-class has been 40 years in the making, and the need to create lasting economic security for our workforce demands action,” Newsom said in his signing statement.

“Today, we are disrupting the status quo and taking a bold step forward to rebuild our middle class and reshape the future of workers as we know it,” Democratic Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez of San Diego, the author of AB5, said in a statement. “As one of the strongest economies in the world, California is now setting the global standard for worker protections for other states and countries to follow.”

Both labor groups and the ride-hailing companies, such as Uber, anticipate national implications from the signing of AB5.

The bill covers workers in a variety of industries, including health care, trucking and media. Some industries, such as real estate, commercial fishing and cosmetology services carved out exemptions from the law.

But the app-based tech companies, primarily Uber, Lyft and Doordash, were not granted exemptions and Uber says it does not plan to reclassify their drivers as employees after the bill goes into effect on Jan. 1, 2020.

The three companies that rely on contracting drivers say they will spend $90 million on a 2020 ballot measure to regulate the gig economy workers.

“We’ve engaged in good faith with the Legislature, the Newsom Administration and labor leaders for nearly a year on this issue, and we believe California is missing a real opportunity to lead the nation by improving the quality, security and dignity of independent work,” Tony West, Uber’s chief legal officer, said in a statement issued before the bill’s signing.

Newsom said in his signing statement that he is prepared for more negotiations with labor and business. “A next step is creating pathways for more workers to form a union, collectively bargain to earn more, and have a stronger voice at work – all while preserving flexibility and innovation,” he said.

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The Chess Grandmaster’s Diet

Chess grandmasters spend hours sitting over game boards. And yet, high-level players lose 10 to 12 pounds on average over a 10-day tournament. ESPN’s Aishwarya Kumar dug into that statistic.



AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:

Chess grandmasters spend hours facing off over game boards. Beyond extending their hands to move pieces or maybe tipping their heads to the side in thought, it really just involves a lot of sitting. And yet, those playing at the highest level lose 10 to 12 pounds, on average, over the course of a 10-day tournament. Now, that improbable statistic was enough to send ESPN’s Aishwarya Kumar down a rabbit hole. She had to know why a mental game takes such a physical toll.

Aishwarya Kumar, welcome to the program.

AISHWARYA KUMAR: Thank you for having me.

CORNISH: Let’s start with the idea of this weight loss or calories burned. How does this compare to other athletes in other sports?

KUMAR: One of the basic facts was the 1984 World Chess Championship, right? So after five months and 48 games, defending champion Anatoly Karpov had lost 22 pounds. And some people said he looked, like, dead. Chess players were burning calories around the same rate as tennis players and competitive marathon runners. Like, in October 2018, Polard, this company that tracks heart rates, monitored chess players during a tournament and found out that this 21-year-old Russian grandmaster, Mikhail Antipov, had burned 560 calories in two hours, which we found out was roughly what Roger Federer would burn in one hour of singles tennis.

And I talked to Robert Sapolsky. He’s been studying primates for a long time now, and he corroborated that fact and said that, you know, chess players can burn up to 6,000 calories in a day by playing a tournament, which is three times that of any human on a regular day.

CORNISH: Now, what did you learn about why? Is it that their brains are just using that much energy, or is there something physiological going on?

KUMAR: Yeah. So the brain obviously is functioning at a much higher level, but we should understand that the brain alone is not causing the weight loss. The brain’s metabolism is causing for different reaction to occur in your body, like increased stress, like loss of appetite, like disturbed sleep patterns. And because of all of these different factors that the brain is setting off – that is the reason they’re losing weight.

CORNISH: I want to talk about world champion Magnus Carlsen from Norway. You learned about his training regimen. Tell me about the moment he realized that he needed a competitive edge and what he did to get it.

KUMAR: Yeah. So it’s interesting with Magnus Carlsen – he realized early on that fixing small things, like what he drinks during the course of a game, will alter the way he functions, especially in the last hour or so of the game. And so one of the things that was really fascinating about this was when I was talking to his dad. His dad was like, oh, we went to the Olympic Training Center. And they were told immediately that the orange juice that he was drinking was causing for the sugar levels to take a huge dip in the fifth and sixth hours of game. And so they were asked to replace that with milk.

CORNISH: Meaning he’d have a little energy crash. So the idea is you need to keep yourself sustained with something that gives you energy but won’t have the crash and that you need to do that even if you’re not skiing, right…

KUMAR: Exactly. Exactly.

CORNISH: …Even if you’re playing chess. So as we look at the world cup of chess, which is happening right now, what are you going to be watching for? What are the things you’ll see and you’ll think, that’s somebody who’s using some training?

KUMAR: I am actually very interested to see how they are sitting because another interesting thing that I found out during the course of the reporting was just how important the posture was. And Magnus Carlsen has perfected the sitting posture that has helped him. He taps his foot gently to keep his alertness on the highest level while still not losing too much energy. He chews gum. So I want to, you know, pay attention to all of those small details during the world cup to be like, OK, you’re – you know, you’re paying attention to all of these smaller elements that’ll set you apart from the rest of the crew.

CORNISH: That’s Aishwarya Kumar, international writer for ESPN. Thanks for explaining it to us.

KUMAR: Thank you so much for having me.

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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Delgres Combines Guadeloupean Heritage With New Orleans Creole And Blues

Delgres performs live in Paris for World Cafe: Sense of Place

Kimberly Junod/WXPN


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Kimberly Junod/WXPN

  • “Mo Jodi”
  • “Respecté Nou”
  • “Mr. President”
  • “Vivre Sur La Route”
  • “Lanme La”

Pascal Danaë was born just outside of Paris and the first time he went to the French overseas region Guadeloupe, he was given the “Letter of Freedom” that belonged to his ancestor, Louise Danaë. She was freed from slavery in 1841 at 27 years old. At the time, she had four children, one of whom was Pascal’s grand grandfather.

The history of slavery and French colonialism plays a big role in the music Danaë makes now with his three-piece blues band Delgres. He named the act after Louis Delgrès, the freedom fighter who resisted the reintroduction of slavery in Guadeloupe by Napoleon in 1802 and died for the cause.

We met up with Delgres at La Boule Noire in Paris to hear live performances of songs from the band’s latest album, Mo Jodi, and to talk about some of the features that make the band so unique. Danaë sang in Creole and his bandmate, Rafgee, played the parts that would normally be handled by a bass guitar on the sousaphone, an instrument typically found in New Orleans brass bands. Danaë also shed light on the historic and musical connection between Africa, the French West Indies and Louisiana, as well as the healing power of the blues.

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It’s Not Just Insulin: Diabetes Patients Struggle To Get Crucial Supplies

Ric Peralta and his wife Lisa are both able to check Ric’s blood sugar levels at any time, using the Dexcom app and an arm patch that measures the levels and sends the information wirelessly.

Allison Zaucha for NPR


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Allison Zaucha for NPR

In the first three months after getting his Dexcom continuous glucose monitor, Ric Peralta managed to reduce his average blood sugar level by three percentage points.

“It took me from not-very-well-managed blood sugar to something that was incredibly well managed,” says Peralta, a 46-year-old optician in Whittier, Calif., who was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes in 2008.

Peralta was so enthused that he became a “Dexcom Warrior,” a sort of grassroots spokesman for the product. It became hard to imagine life without his new monitor, a device that lets him keep track the trends in his blood sugar 24 hours a day on his smart phone. And yet, he’s spent weeks at a time without the device over the past year because of problems with insurance restrictions. Physician groups and patients consider those rules overly burdensome, but insurance groups defend them as necessary.

Diabetes activists and legislators have started to focus attention on the surging price of insulin, leading to legislative pushes, lawsuits and congressional hearings. But insulin isn’t the only thing people with Type 1 diabetes are struggling to get. Managing the condition requires other essential, often life-saving medical supplies. And patients frequently face hurdles in getting access to those supplies — hurdles put in place by insurance companies.

A life changing device

Peralta learned about the Dexcom continuous glucose monitor from the mother of one of his patients. He visited the company’s website and, within two weeks, the device had been shipped to his front door.

“I still didn’t 100 percent appreciate exactly how it was going to change my life,” Peralta says. “It was amazing.”

In their home in Whittier, Calif., Lisa Peralta pats Ric’s Dexcom sensor to make sure it’s staying on his arm. Before he got the device, Ric had to check his blood glucose via multiple finger pricks and plastic test strips every few hours.

Allison Zaucha for NPR


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Allison Zaucha for NPR

Typically, people with Type 1 diabetes check their blood sugar by drawing a drop of blood from their finger and placing it on a disposable test strip that’s read by a blood glucose meter. Doctors suggest checking blood sugar this way between four and 10 times per day. These readings are crucial for helping people with diabetes manage their blood sugar — keeping it from getting too low, which can lead to sudden seizures and loss of consciousness, as well as from getting too high, which can cause vision loss, nerve damage and can even, over time, lead to amputations.

Instead, Peralta’s continuous glucose monitor gave accurate blood sugar readings every five minutes. That’s 288 readings per day, or about 278 more readings than even the most conscientious patients get the old-fashioned way.

“When I had to do the old-fashioned finger prick test, I was only doing that right before I ate, so I could see how much [insulin] I was supposed to take,” Peralta says. (People with Type 1 diabetes have to take multiple daily shots of insulin to keep their blood sugar within normal range because their bodies stop producing the naturally occurring hormone.)

“I didn’t realize that I had rather severe [blood sugar] peaks and valleys in between my meal times,” Peralta says.

Tighter control of blood sugar can reduce the risk of heart disease, kidney failure and nerve damage. For Peralta, it also offered peace of mind.

The monitor sounds an alarm when his blood sugar is getting dangerously low; Peralta says his coworkers have started bringing him sugary snacks when they hear the alarm, to help him raise his blood sugar back up to normal. When he takes his family on road trips — a favorite activity — he no longer has to worry about the possibility of passing out while he’s driving.

“It even syncs with my car so I can just say, ‘Siri, what’s my blood sugar?’ And it will come over the car stereo system,” Peralta says. “I’m safe for my family.”

Prior-authorization requirements

When common chronic conditions such as diabetes are well controlled, it prevents worsening disease and saves money for the health system and the patient.

But Peralta says his efforts to use this new tool consistently to manage his diabetes have been stymied by insurance problems that began about a year ago.

The newest Dexcom continuous glucose monitor has three parts: a sensor that measures glucose levels, a transmitter that sends out the sensor’s readings wirelessly, and a receiver that displays those readings on a screen.

Testing blood sugar now involves three pieces of equipment, Ric Peralta says: (Left) Peralta holds the applicator that contains the Dexcom G6 sensor and transmitter he’s about to affix to his arm. (Center) the Dexcom sensor and transmitter in place. (Right) Peralta checks the Dexcom app on his smart phone to see his glucose levels before he eats.

Allison Zaucha for NPR


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Allison Zaucha for NPR

For each of these parts, Peralta needs something called a “prior authorization” from his insurer — a requirement from his insurance company that necessitates his physician seeking approval from the insurance company before prescribing the device.

The Dexcom sensors last about 10 days each and Peralta’s insurance allows him to buy a three-month supply at a time. But he also has to get prior authorization for each supply, meaning every three months his doctor needs to reconfirm with his insurance company that the sensors are medically necessary. Same goes for the device’s transmitters — which last about six months each.

“I have to jump through hoops and they have to jump through hoops to get information from my insurance to get authorization,” Peralta says in frustration, adding, “for the last year, basically every time there’s been something that’s gone wrong.”

“Prior authorizations are in place to protect patients, to improve safety and to try to make sure that the care they receive is as safe as possible and also as affordable as possible,” says Kate Berry of the trade group America’s Health Insurance Programs.

But to Ric Peralta, the requirement is a burden.

The most recent snafu happened in March. Peralta ordered a new supply of sensors directly from Dexcom but says the company submitted a request for approval of a new transmitter, as well. And because his insurance approves the sensors and transmitters on different authorization timelines, the whole claim was denied. Peralta estimates he spent four hours on the phone with Dexcom and his insurer over the next month and a half to sort it all out. During that time he had to revert to finger stick tests.

“It’s maddening,” Peralta says. “If I do not have my proper management of this disease I’m going to die from it. And they’re making it as difficult as possible.”

Peralta says he’s so enthusiastic about the benefits of closely monitoring his glucose levels he’s become a “Dexcom Warrior” — a sort of grassroots spokesman for patients with diabetes who use the company’s continuous glucose monitoring system.

Allison Zaucha for NPR


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Allison Zaucha for NPR

A burden on doctors, too

Prior authorizations have become a major concern of physicians across the U.S. health care system, as evidenced by a December 2018 survey by the American Medical Association.

Of the 1,000 physicians surveyed, 91 percent said prior authorizations “have a negative impact on patient clinical outcomes;” 75 percent said the requirements “can at least sometimes lead to patients abandoning a recommended course of treatment;” and 28 percent said the prior authorization process had “led to serious or life-threatening events” for their patients.

“In my practice we have five individual physicians, and we hired five full-time employees whose primary duty is obtaining prior authorization and dealing with insurance companies,” says Dr. Bruce Scott, an otolaryngologist from Kentucky and Vice Speaker of the AMA House of Delegates.

“Prior authorization is a burden on providers and diverts valuable resources,” Scott says. “That’s a problem.”

The AMA has even created a website that catalogs stories of patients and providers who say they’ve struggled to gain access to important medical products and procedures because of problems getting prior authorizations from insurers — everything from pain medication for a cancer patient to X-rays in the ER. Scott says the AMA doesn’t expect insurers to completely do away with requirements for prior authorization, “but we believe that it should be focused and that it should be better planned.”

The American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists — an organization of the physicians whose specialty is often associated with diabetes treatment — goes even further.

“We feel that physicians that are specialists in endocrine disease should not be required to fill out prior authorizations for endocrine treatments,” says Dr. Scott Isaacs, an endocrinologist from Atlanta and member of the board of directors of AACE.

“It’s a huge burden for the patients trying to get this sorted out. Sometimes it’s red tape; sometimes it’s a true denial,” Isaacs says. “It’s a huge burden for the doctors as well, and the doctors resent it.”

Berry, of the insurance group AHIP, acknowledges that there’s room for improvement in the prior authorization process. In fact, in January 2018, the AMA and AHIP signed a consensus statement identifying five areas for improvement. It was cosigned by the American Hospital Association, the American Pharmacists Association, the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association and the Medical Group Management Association.

Who bears the greatest burden?

For Ric Peralta, the ultimate burden of getting all these prescriptions filled falls on him and patients like him.

After his latest mix-up with the sensors in March, he discovered the battery in his transmitter had died.

Peralta made another frustrated call to Dexcom, and recently got a complimentary transmitter to get him back on the system while his formal order goes through the approval process.

“I’m quite nervous about what’s going to happen again in two months when I am needing to call in orders again,” Peralta says.

“Am I going to have to go through this whole thing over again?”

This story is part of NPR’s reporting partnership with Kaiser Health News. Bram Sable-Smith is a freelance reporter based in Madison, Wisc., who often covers health care. Reach him on Twitter: @besables.

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American Becomes 1st Person To Swim English Channel 4 Times Without Stopping

Sarah Thomas, a 37-year-old cancer survivor, swims across the 21-mile English Channel. She said she was stung on the face by a jellyfish during her epic swim, in which she crisscrossed the channel four times, a journey that ended up being more than 130 miles because of the tides.

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Jon Washer/AP

Sarah Thomas, an American ultramarathon swimmer, has just completed a swim that no other human on the planet has ever accomplished.

The 37-year-old from Colorado plunged into waters off the shore of Dover, England, in the wee hours of Sunday morning. Her goal: swim across the English Channel.

Then do it again.

And again.

And again.

Thomas completed the final leg of her swim at around 6:30 a.m. local time Tuesday in just over 54 hours— the first person to cross the channel four times without stopping.

According to the Channel Swimming Association, the English Channel is about 21 miles wide.

In an interview with the BBC, Thomas said she was in disbelief that she had done it and was surprised by a group of well-wishers who were waiting for her on shore when she got out of the water.

She’s done it ????
After treatment for breast cancer last year, Sarah Thomas has become the first person to swim across the Channel four times non-stop ????????????????
Congratulations! #channelswimmer #sarahthomas pic.twitter.com/5Kfi4GzOnT

— BBC Breakfast (@BBCBreakfast) September 17, 2019

“I’m really just pretty numb,” she said. “There was a lot of people on the beach to meet me and wish me well and it was really nice of them, but I feel just mostly stunned.”

She also told the BBC that she planned to sleep the remainder of the day, adding: “I’m pretty tired right now.”

Just a year ago, Thomas was completing treatment for breast cancer. In a Facebook post on Saturday, a day before starting her epic exploit, Thomas dedicated her swim to “all the Survivors out there.”

“This is for those of us who have prayed for our lives, who have wondered with despair about what comes next, and have battled through pain and fear to overcome,” she wrote. “This is for those of you just starting your cancer journey and those of you who are thriving with cancer kicked firmly into the past, and for everyone in between.”

The Guardian points out that Thomas is not the first person to swim across the English Channel multiple times — four swimmers have crisscrossed it three times without stopping.

As the crow flies, Thomas’ swim should have been approximately 80 miles long. But the journey ended up being more than 130 miles because of the tides, the Guardian reports.

The newspaper also says Thomas drank a carbohydrate-laden shake every half hour to keep her body replenished. Her mother, Becky Baxter, said the shake was “tied to a rope” and tossed to Thomas from a nearby boat where a crew was keeping a watchful eye on her.

As the crow flies, Thomas’ record-setting swim four times across the English Channel should have been approximately 80 miles long. It ended up being more than 50 miles longer because of the pull of tides.

track.rs/ssthomas3; ESRI-National Geographic


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track.rs/ssthomas3; ESRI-National Geographic

“She drinks a third of that bottle in 10-15 seconds, and then she takes off again,” Baxter said, according to the Guardian. “She is a freak of nature. She really had to dig deep to finish this. She could have quit many, many times. There were several obstacles, but she never quits.”

Before Thomas’ final leg, a member of her team posted on Facebook about water conditions in the channel at the time: “Dark, windy, and choppy conditions tonight for the final leg of the English Channel 4 way crossing.”

And there were other obstacles. Thomas told the BBC that the salt water hurt her throat, mouth and tongue.

The currents on the last leg pushed her “all over,” she told the broadcaster, adding: “I got stung in the face by a jellyfish. [The water] wasn’t as cold as I thought it might be, but it was still chilly.”

The official Twitter account for the Channel Swimming & Piloting Federation, the governing body for English Channel swimming, called Thomas “an absolute legend.”

Congratulations to Sarah Thomas for successfully completing a 4-way historic crossing of the English Channel. An absolute legend! We’ll have official confirmation of times shortly (I assume everyone needs a good sleep after that!)

— CS&PF (@csandpf) September 17, 2019

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As Texas Cracks Down On Abortion, Austin Votes To Help Women Defray Costs

A group gathers at the state capitol in Austin, Texas, in May to protest abortion restrictions. In defiance of the state’s ban on city funding of abortion providers, the Austin City Council has found a workaround to help women seeking the procedure.

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Austin is about to become the first city in the U.S. to fund groups that help women who seek abortions pay for related logistical costs, such as a babysitter, a hotel room or transportation.

The move is an effort to push back against a new Texas law that went into effect Sept. 1. The state law bans local governments from giving money to groups that provide abortions — even if that money doesn’t pay for the actual procedure.

Last week, the Austin City Council approved a line item for the city’s latest budget that, as of Oct. 1, sets aside $150,000 to pass along to nonprofits led by abortion rights activists that provide “logistical support services” for low-income women in the city.

Supporters of the new city budget item describe it as a unique workaround to the state’s law, because none of these groups actually provide abortions.

“The city has to find creative ways to help vulnerable communities in our city, and I see this as just another way,” says Councilwoman Delia Garza, Austin’s mayor pro tem.

John Seago, the legislative director for Texas Right to Life, says that though Austin is not violating the letter of the state law, its leaders are clearly violating “the principle” behind it.

“The Legislature did not believe that it is ethical to use taxpayer dollars to benefit the abortion industry,” Seago says. “So whether it is the clinic itself, whether it is paying for the procedure itself, there is an industry built around that that we don’t want to use taxpayer dollars to benefit.”

Shortly after the city’s budget was passed last week, former Austin Councilman Don Zimmerman sued the city in an effort to block the funding. In his lawsuit, filed in a Travis County district court, Zimmerman claimed “this expenditure of taxpayer money violates the state’s abortion laws.”

Supporters of Austin’s effort say the budget item is on solid legal ground. They also say it’s an important step in ensuring that low-income women, at least locally, can obtain legal abortions in a state that has been steadily scaling back access to the procedure in the past decade.

Erika Galindo, an organizer with the Lilith Fund, told the Austin City Council during a meeting this summer that Austin should take a stand as some cities pass all-out bans on abortion. In fact, earlier in the summer, Waskom — a small city in East Texas — banned the procedure and declared itself the state’s first “sanctuary city for the unborn.”

“The city of Austin has an opportunity to set a new standard for creative and equitable solutions for communities at a time when state lawmakers and local governments like Waskom’s city council have turned their backs on low-wage workers and women of color,” Galindo said.

Austin’s city leaders say the makeup of their city council also likely played a small role in the decision to fund these programs. While Waskom’s ban was passed by an all-male council, Austin’s majority-female city council decided to take a different approach.

“I don’t think it’s any coincidence that you have a majority-female council making these kinds of issues a priority,” Garza says. “We have seen how this right has been chipped away at — all kinds of barriers being placed in front of women who are simply seeking an option that is still a constitutional right in this country.”

The city’s leaders and staff are still working out how women will qualify for the money and what groups to contract with, but it’s expected that some groups that are already doing this work across the state will be getting city support.

Among those groups is Fund Texas Choice, a statewide nonprofit group that provides travel arrangements for abortion appointments for women in Texas who can’t afford them. Sarah Lopez, an organizer with the group, says the group’s help can include providing women with gas money, bus tickets or ride-shares — and sometimes a hotel room to recuperate in.

More often than not, Lopez says, she’s helping women who are already parents and who can barely afford the procedure itself — let alone all the costs that come with actually making it to the appointment. For many of these women, she says, just a little help goes a long way.

“I was chatting with someone yesterday,” Lopez says. “She had just made her appointment but then rescheduled because she was like, ‘Oh, I didn’t realize I would have to be gone for three or four days — so I had to push my appointment another week and a half in order to find child care.’ ” (Texas law requires at least two office visits before a woman can get an abortion. And women living in rural parts of the state often have to travel 200 miles away, or more, to the closest abortion clinic.)

The groups that facilitate such support won’t be able to use Austin’s allocated funds for women who reside outside the city, though. And in Texas, travel barriers are even bigger outside major cities.

In 2013, Texas lawmakers passed a controversial law that imposed strict restrictions on abortion providers in the state. That law, known as House Bill 2, required clinics to be equipped and staffed like surgical centers, and it required doctors who provide abortions to have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital. Following that law’s passage, many clinics around the state shut their doors.

Even though the U.S. Supreme Court eventually struck down those restrictions, many of these clinics have yet to reopen – especially the clinics that closed in rural parts of Texas.

Despite Austin’s new plan, women living in parts of the state that don’t have a clinic will still have to rely on statewide programs such as the one run by Lopez’s group — and such programs have limited budgets. Still, Lopez says, Austin’s effort does take some of the pressure off such groups financially and frees up more money for women living in rural areas.

“I think it’s incredible,” Lopez says of the Austin decision. “I really hope to see that other cities in Texas kind of follow suit.”

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Man Tells Bernie Sanders He Will Kill Himself Because Of Medical Debt

The presidential candidate, in a Nevada campaign stop, pushed back on criticism of his “Medicare for All” plan. Instead of asking Sanders questions, people have vented about health insurance problems.



NOEL KING, HOST:

Senator Bernie Sanders took a lot of criticism from his fellow candidates in last week’s presidential debate over his health care plan. So Sanders used a recent campaign trip to Nevada to defend his “Medicare for All” proposal. NPR’s Scott Detrow was there. And just a quick note, this story has an exchange that some listeners might find disturbing.

SCOTT DETROW, BYLINE: The day after the debate, Sanders was in Carson City. His voice was still hoarse. And he was clearly still thinking about the night before, when several other candidates criticized his plan to entirely do away with private health insurance.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

BERNIE SANDERS: But I was not pleased that Vice President Biden distorted what Medicare for All is and, in fact, simply parroted the line coming from the health care industry.

DETROW: Biden says building on Obamacare and creating an optional Medicare-type national plan is the better approach. But for Sanders, private companies and their profit motives are the root of the problem. He blasted the insurance industry in Nevada, along with the big pharmaceutical companies he blames for spreading opioid addiction.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

SANDERS: Oh, somebody here says lock them up. No, we don’t do that. They are rich and powerful. I’m sorry. Clearly, you do not understand the criminal justice system in America.

(CHEERING)

DETROW: Lately, Sanders has been turning rallies into town halls where, instead of asking him questions, people vent about their health insurance problems. In Carson City, a man named John Weigel told Sanders how his bills keep piling up to over $100,000. And this exchange may be disturbing for some listeners.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

JOHN WEIGEL: I can barely take care of myself. And I do not have the energy to fight these people…

DETROW: Weigel was angry and desperate.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

SANDERS: How are you going to pay off a hundred…

WEIGEL: I can’t. I can’t. I’m going to kill myself…

SANDERS: Hold it, John. Stop it. You’re not going to kill yourself. All right. Stop it…

WEIGEL: I can’t deal with this. I have Huntington’s disease.

DETROW: Sanders and his wife, Jane, spoke with Weigel after the event. And Sanders supporters have since set up an online fundraising effort to help him with those bills. After Carson City, it was on to Reno in Las Vegas. Nevada is the third state up in the presidential contest. That’s due largely to the influence of one man, former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. Reid’s retired now and battling cancer. But he’s still paying close attention, and he’s still in touch with the 2020 candidates. So I drove to his house in the Las Vegas suburbs.

Fifteen. We’re looking for 17.

Reid was wearing a straw fedora sitting in his sunny living room.

HARRY REID: It’s my house. I can put my hat on if I want, right?

(LAUGHTER)

DETROW: Nevada’s often the overlooked early state. It isn’t in the national campaign narratives much.

REID: People go to New Hampshire. It’s easy. Iowa’s easy. South Carolina’s easy. Coming to Nevada’s harder. But they’re making a mistake not coming here more often.

DETROW: Reid points out Nevada is the first early state with a significant minority population. Latinos, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders make up a big chunk of caucus goers.

REID: We’re a state that looks like the rest of the country, and you don’t have that other places.

DETROW: Several of the campaigns say immigration, climate change and affordable housing are key issues in Nevada. In Las Vegas, Sanders rolled out a $2.5 trillion plan to expand affordable housing and address homelessness.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

SANDERS: If you’re spending 50% of your limited incomes on housing, how do you pay for food? How do you pay for transportation?

DETROW: In a crowded primary field, Sanders is relying on the electorate buying into the policies he’s embraced for decades. Still, here and there, he’s showing some adaptation to modern campaigning.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

SANDERS: What I’d like to do now, if it’s OK with you – if anybody would like to come up and do a selfie, we’d love to do it. Anybody want to do that?

(CHEERING)

DETROW: Scott Detrow, NPR News, Carson City, Nev.

(SOUNDBITE OF GEORGIA ANNE MULDROW’S “BASS ATTACK BAP”)

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