Julie Rovner, chief Washington correspondent for Kaiser Health News, describes the latest Medicare-for-all bill by Sen. Bernie Sanders and the options for single-payer coverage proposed by lawmakers.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Bernie Sanders has introduced a new version of his “Medicare for All” bill that was a cornerstone of his 2016 presidential campaign. He’s one of several Democratic candidates for president who support some form of national single-payer coverage. But is that easier said than done? Julie Rovner, chief Washington correspondent for Kaiser Health News joins us. Julie, thanks for being with us.
JULIE ROVNER: Thanks for having me.
SIMON: And what’s Senator Sanders proposing this year?
ROVNER: Well, he’s proposing similar to what he’s been proposing since the 1990s, which is basically to make Medicare, the program that now serves 50-some million elderly and disabled Americans, available to everyone and basically get rid of private health insurance at the same time. So everyone would be on Medicare – might not be the same Medicare that we know now, but they would be on a federal government-run program called Medicare that would provide much more robust benefits than most people have now either on Medicare or on their private insurance.
SIMON: More robust benefits, but would that also mean more robust taxes?
ROVNER: Yes, it almost certainly would because there would be no more private health insurance premiums, according to the – at least the proposal that we have. People wouldn’t have to pay copays or coinsurance or deductibles or, you know, the money that now gets paid out of pocket. So taxes would presumably go up to make up for that.
SIMON: A lot of Democratic candidates are running on a policy of Medicare for All. What are some of the features of the plans that we might find worth knowing about?
ROVNER: Well, the Medicare for All plans would basically get rid of private insurance, and this is of some concern for those who are worried about the political prospects. There’s 150 million people who get their insurance from a family member’s employer. That would basically go away. The entire private insurance industry would go away.
There are some other proposals that would either maintain a role for private insurance – maybe they could cover some things. That’s how some countries do it. And then there are others that make the whole thing optional. The people who wanted to go into a public plan could go into a public plan, but those who wanted to keep their private coverage could do that. That’s one of the big debates that’s going to have to happen before anybody settles on any particular plan.
SIMON: And everybody seems to want to bring down health care costs, but there’s a big but, isn’t there?
ROVNER: There is a big but. You know, we are still a free country. If they bring them down too much, you might have providers who wouldn’t want to participate, or you might have hospitals closing their doors.
I mean, at some point, yes, health care is expensive. It doesn’t have to be as expensive as it is in the United States. We pay way more for things than other countries do, but there is going to be some kind of a limit on how low you can push those prices. But remember, however much you pay for the health care, that’s how much is going to have to be then raised in federal taxes to pay for this.
SIMON: Any chance of Republican support for any of these plans?
ROVNER: It seems highly unlikely, at least at this point. This is mostly a Democratic debate about, what do Democrats think the nation’s health care should look like in the coming years and probably decades? Republicans are still kind of figuring out exactly what they would like to propose. Everybody seems to support more coverage, and they know that the status quo isn’t working. People are paying too much, and even middle-class people often can’t afford their health care. But Republicans are – seem, at the moment, happy to call this socialism and leave it at that.
SIMON: If there is an overhaul of health care, but it’s not bipartisan, does that just mean that American health care is going to go back and forth, depending on which party’s in power?
ROVNER: Well, that is the big concern. And there are a lot of Republicans who are saying, you know, we really should work together. And there is some bipartisanship going on now on issues like prescription drug prices and surprise medical bills – that people get unexpected out-of-network bills. But even those are proving difficult to find bipartisan consensus on – at least enough consensus to pass a law. So I think both sides know it would be better if they got together. They just haven’t figured out how yet.
SIMON: Julie Rovner, chief Washington correspondent for Kaiser Health News. Thanks so much.
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.
In the Tennessee capitol, state Rep. Matthew Hill took heat from abortion-rights proponents last month who had gathered to protest a bill he favored that would ban abortions after about six weeks’ pregnancy. That legislation was eventually thwarted in the Tennessee Senate, however, when some of his fellow Republicans voted it down, fearing the high cost of court challenges.
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The new anti-abortion tilt of the U.S. Supreme Court has inspired some states to further restrict the procedure during the first trimester of pregnancy and move to outlaw abortion entirely if Roe v. Wade ever falls. But the rush to regulate has exposed division among groups and lawmakers who consider themselves staunch abortion opponents.
On Thursday, Ohio became the latest state to ban abortions after a fetal heartbeat can be detected. For a long time, Ohio Right to Life supported a more gradual approach to restrict the procedure and deemed what’s come to be called a “heartbeat bill” too radical — until this year. Restricting abortions after a fetal heartbeat can be detected basically bans the procedure after six weeks’ gestation — before many women know they’re pregnant.
“We see the Court as being much more favorable to pro-life legislation than it has been in a generation,” spokeswoman Jamieson Gordon says. “So we figured this would be a good time to pursue the heartbeat bill as the next step in our incremental approach to end abortion-on-demand.”
The Ohio law contains no exception for pregnancies that are the result of rape or incest; it does have an exception for the life of the mother.
Some say the rush to pass these bills is about lawmakers competing to get their particular state’s law before the Supreme Court. The state that helps overturn Roe v. Wade would go down in history.
More than 250 bills restricting abortions have been filed in 41 states this year, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive rights research and advocacy group.
“After the appointment of Justice [Brett] Kavanaugh, there really is just an environment in state legislatures to roll back abortion rights. And so we’re seeing these bans just fly through,” says Elizabeth Nash, who monitors state laws at Guttmacher.
But the speed of passage of some of these laws masks divisions about strategy and commitment to the cause within the anti-abortion movement.
Tennessee infighting over “heartbeat bill”
In Tennessee, for instance, there’s a philosophical split between pragmatists and idealists.
A heartbeat bill in the state has had high-profile support, including from the Tennessee’s new governor. But the Republican attorney general warned such a law would be difficult to defend in court. And several Republicans, swayed by that logic, voted no for the heartbeat bill.
“This is an issue that is extremely important to me. It’s the reason I got into politics many years ago,” Republican state Rep. Bill Dunn said as the House approved the measure over his objection earlier this year. Dunn says he wants to stop abortion, but that will require strategy. He points out that no heartbeat bill has ever been enforced. And recent laws in Iowa and Kentucky have been immediately blocked in court. The same is expected for Ohio.
“Number one, it’ll probably never save a life if we go by what’s happened in the past,” Dunn argued on the Tennessee House floor.
But it’s money that ultimately stopped the heartbeat bill this year in Tennessee (It stalled in committee this week, though the state’s Senate Judiciary Committee agreed to review the bill this summer.)
Senate Speaker Randy McNally says he’s pro-life too, but has no interest in wasting tax dollars to make a point.
Even worse, in the view of Republicans who voted against the heartbeat bill, the state could end up paying the legal fees for groups that defend abortion.
“That is a big concern,” McNally says. “We don’t want to put money in their pockets.
The last time Tennessee had a case that went to the U.S. Supreme Court, it cost roughly $1.9 million. The experience was enough to give a few anti-abortion crusaders some pause. They voted this week with Democrats for a one-year delay on a heartbeat bill, vowing to study the issue over the summer.
Name-calling in Oklahoma
Even if it doesn’t result in a case that upends abortion law, heavily Republican legislatures like Oklahoma’s want to be ready.
“If Roe v. Wade ever gets overturned, we won’t be prepared,” Republican Senate Pro Tempore Greg Treat said while explaining his so-called “trigger bill” at a committee hearing in February.
Treat’s legislation, modeled after existing laws in a handful of states, would “trigger” a state ban on abortion and make it a felony if Roe were overturned. A handful of states, including Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Dakota and South Dakota, already have trigger laws on the books.
Oklahoma has some of the strictest abortion laws in the nation, such as mandatory counseling and a 72-hour waiting period. But the most conservative anti-abortion activists in the state want more immediate action. So they targeted Treat and other self-described pro-life Republicans with protests, billboards and fliers, accusing them of not being anti-abortion enough.
“I’ve been called every name in the book these past few weeks,” Treat says. “I’ve had my Christianity questioned. I’ve had a member of my own caucus hold a press conference and call me a hypocrite.”
In response, Treat abandoned the trigger bill.
Now he’s trying something else — an amendment to the state constitution that would reinforce that nothing in Oklahoma law “secures or protects” the right to abortion. But that’s still not anti-abortion enough for some.
“It’s going to add on to that legacy that we have of death and just status quo pro-life policy that does nothing,” says Republican state Sen. Justin Silk.
Not far enough in Georgia
In Georgia, a heartbeat bill passed the legislature, but has paused at Gov. Brian Kemp’s desk. Supporters of abortion rights don’t want him to sign it, of course, but some anti-abortion activists aren’t happy either.
“It really just does not go far enough in the protection of innocent human life,” says Georgia Right to Life executive director Zemmie Fleck. Fleck argues that certain exceptions in his state’s bill — for abortions after rape or incest if the woman makes a police report — make it weak.
Gov. Kemp has until May 12 to sign or veto the measure.
Cost as no object in Kentucky
The American Civil Liberties Union in Kentucky sued the day after a heartbeat bill was signed into law by Gov. Matt Bevin. But even during his annual speech to the Kentucky legislature in February, Bevin acknowledged his intent to challenge Roe v. Wade.
“Some of these will go all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. But at the end of the day, we will prevail because we stand on the side of right and we stand on the side of life,” Bevin said.
Kentucky has become accustomed to defending abortion restrictions in court. Currently, one law that makes it a felony for a doctor to perform a common abortion in the second trimester has been suspended indefinitely.
It is unclear how much it costs Kentucky to defend abortion laws that are immediately challenged. In an emailed statement, Bevin administration spokesman Woody Maglinger writes that the state is using in-house lawyers, and hasn’t hired outside counsel. He declines to provide a cost estimate on hours spent on these cases.
“It is impossible to place a price tag on human lives,” Maglinger writes.
This story is part of a reporting partnership that includes NPR, Kaiser Health News and member stations. Blake Farmer is Nashville Public Radio’s senior health care reporter, and Jackie Fortier is senior health care reporter for StateImpact Oklahoma. Marlene Harris-Taylor at WCPN in Cleveland, Lisa Gillespie at WFPL in Louisville and Alex Olgin at WFAE in Charlotte, N.C., also contributed reporting.
Top government leaders told NPR that federal agencies are years behind where they could have been if Chinese cybertheft had been openly addressed earlier.
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Technology theft and other unfair business practices originating from China are costing the American economy more than $57 billion a year, White House officials believe, and they expect that figure to grow.
Yet an investigation by NPR and the PBS television show Frontline into why three successive administrations failed to stop cyberhacking from China found an unlikely obstacle for the government — the victims themselves.
This story is part of a joint investigation with the PBS series Frontline, which includes an upcoming documentary, Trump’s Trade War, scheduled to air May 7, 2019, on PBS.
In dozens of interviews with U.S. government and business representatives, officials involved in commerce with China said hacking and theft were an open secret for almost two decades, allowed to quietly continue because U.S. companies had too much money at stake to make waves.
Wendy Cutler, who was a veteran negotiator at the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, says it wasn’t just that U.S. businesses were hesitant to come forward in specific cases. She says businesses didn’t want the trade office to take “any strong action.”
“We are not as effective if we don’t have the U.S. business community supporting us,” she says. “Looking back on it, in retrospect, I think we probably should have been more active and more responsive. We kind of lost the big picture of what was really happening.”
None of the dozens of companies or organizations that NPR reached out to that have been victims of theft or corporate espionage originating from China would go on the record.
And for its part, the Chinese government officially denied to NPR and Frontline that it has been involved in such practices.
Wendy Cutler, a former diplomat and negotiator at the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, delivers a 2015 speech at the Asia Society in Hong Kong. Cutler told NPR that U.S. businesses wouldn’t let the trade office take direct action on their behalf in Chinese cybertheft cases.
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Bruce Yan/South China Morning Post via Getty Images
But that’s not what former U.S. Attorney David Hickton found. When he took over in the Western District of Pennsylvania in 2010, he says, he was inundated with calls from companies saying they suspected China might be inside their computer systems.
“I literally received an avalanche of concern and complaints from companies and organizations who said, ‘We are losing our technology — drip, drip, drip,’ ” he says.
Hickton opened an investigation and quickly set his sights on a special unit of the Chinese military — a secretive group known as Unit 61398. Investigators were able to watch as the unit’s officers, sitting in an office building in Shanghai, broke into the computer systems of American companies at night, stopped for an hour break at China’s lunchtime and then continued in the Chinese afternoon.
“They were really using a large rake — think of a rake [like] you rake leaves in the fall,” he says. “They were taking everything … personal information, strategic plans, organizational charts. Then they just figured out later how they were going to use it.”
But when Hickton went to the companies, eager for them to become plaintiffs, he ran into a problem. None of the companies wanted any part of it. Hickton says they had too much money on the line in China.
“What we were tone-deaf to is [that] we seemed to think we could just walk in and wave the flag of the USA,” Hickton says, “and it just didn’t work.”
Even today, five years later, Hickton still won’t name most of the companies involved — and they have never come forward.
Eventually he was able to convince five largely local companies and the steelworkers union to come forward, mostly, he says, because he grew up in Pittsburgh and went to school with a lot of the managers.
David Hickton, former U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania, speaks during a 2014 announcement of indictments against Chinese military hackers, with former Attorney General Eric Holder and former Assistant Attorney General for National Security John Carlin.
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“I knew these people,” Hickton says. “They trusted me. … We couldn’t ask them to be patriotic at the expense of engendering a shareholder case.”
But, he says, he could have included hundreds — or even thousands — more.
“We’ve made a terrible mistake by being so secretive about our cyberwork,” he says. “We have not fairly told the people we represent what the threats are.”
Government and business leaders interviewed by NPR and Frontline said individual companies were making millions of dollars in China over the past decade and a half and didn’t want to hurt short-term profits by coming forward. They demanded secrecy, even in the face of outright theft.
But now the impact of that secrecy is coming to light, they say. Companies are facing hundreds of millions of dollars in future losses from the theft, and U.S. officials say they are years behind trying to tackle the problem.
Michael Wessel, commissioner on the U.S. government’s U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, says it wasn’t supposed to be this way. U.S. officials had high hopes when China officially joined the World Trade Organization in 2001.
“There was a honeymoon period in the first six or seven years, a desire to try [to] make things work,” Wessel says.
But, he says, starting around 2006, businesses began coming to him saying that China had stolen their designs or ideas or had pressured them into partnerships and taken their technology.
Just like with Hickton, Wessel says, they wouldn’t come forward publicly.
“The business community wanted the administration to come in hard without anyone’s fingerprints being on the reasoning behind it,” he says. “They wanted the profits, but they also didn’t want the possible retribution.”
Wessel says that was never going to work. While nothing in the original trade agreements specifically mentions cybertheft, the U.S. could have brought criminal cases forward, enacted sanctions or opened investigations under rules set up by the World Trade Organization — if a company would let it.
Court cases and documents from recent years offer a clue into what experts believe has really been going on. The Chinese government has been accused of stealing everything from vacuum cleaner designs to solar panel technology to the blueprints of Boeing’s C-17 aircraft.
Hackers from China, often with ties to the government, have been accused of breaking into gas companies, steel companies and chemical companies. Not long ago, Chinese government companies were indicted for stealing the secret chemical makeup of the color white from DuPont. China developed its J-20 fighter plane, a plane similar to Lockheed Martin’s F-22 Raptor, shortly after a Chinese national was indicted for stealing technical data from Lockheed Martin, including the plans for the Raptor.
Chinese hacking made occasional headlines, but none really grabbed Americans’ attention. There was one exception.
In 2010, Google went public in announcing that it had been hacked by the Chinese government. Thirty-four other American companies that were also part of the hack stayed silent. Most have kept it a secret to this day.
A man places flowers outside Google’s Chinese headquarters in Beijing, on Jan. 15, 2010. The tech giant’s accusation that year that it had been hacked by China cast light on a problem few companies discuss: the pervasive threat from China-based cybertheft.
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Vincent Thian/AP
NPR tracked down 11 of the total 35 companies. All of them either did not respond to NPR’s request or declined to comment.
A former top Google official who was closely involved in managing the hack told NPR that Google was “infuriated” that no other company would come forward, leaving Google to challenge China alone.
“[We] wanted to out all of the companies by name,” said the official, who spoke on the condition their name not be used because they did not have permission from Google to speak about the incident. “One of the companies we called, said ‘Oh, yeah, we’ve been tracking this for months.’ It was unbelievable. The legal department talked us out of it.”
“We felt like we stood up and did the right thing,” the former official said. “It felt like Helm’s Deep, the battle from The Lord of the Rings in which you’re impossibly surrounded and severely outnumbered.”
James McGregor, a former chairman of the American Chamber of Commerce in China, who was there at the time, says the companies kept even business organizations like his from speaking out.
“What they should have done is held a press conference and say, ‘We 35 businesses have been hacked,’ and you would have put it right back on China,” says McGregor. “Instead, they just all hid under a rock and pretended it didn’t happen.”
McGregor says their silence left little room for punishment, and worse, he says, it hid the extent of the problem.
Across the ocean, cybersleuth Dmitri Alperovitch was sitting at his desk at a security company in Atlanta when Google called looking for backup. He says when he took a look, he was stunned.
“I knew pretty much right away this is something very different,” says Alperovitch, who is co-founder of the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike. “For the first time we were facing a nation-state and intelligence service that was breaking into companies — not governments, not militaries, but private sector organizations.”
But, he says, U.S. government officials were nowhere to be seen.
“They did not even publicly concur with the attributions that Google had made at the time,” he says.
Dmitri Alperovitch, co-founder of the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, speaks during the Milken Institute Global Conference in California on May 1, 2017. Alperovitch said he was stunned after Google announced it was hacked by China.
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Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Obama administration officials say they did not turn a blind eye to the Google hack or cybertheft from China.
The administration was struggling with other important priorities, such as North Korea, Iran, the economy and climate change, says Evan Medeiros, Obama’s top China specialist and then a staffer at the National Security Council.
“Direct confrontation with China does not usually result in lasting solutions,” Medeiros says, noting that President Obama secured an agreement with Chinese President Xi Jinping to halt the attacks and put together a regional trade agreement — the Trans-Pacific Partnership — to add pressure.
But neither measure lasted.
“Hindsight is always 20/20,” he says. “I wish that we had spent more time … finding creative ways to punish them for creating a nonlevel playing field.”
Without those punishments, the attacks continued.
In the year after the Google hack, Alperovitch uncovered two more serious intrusions that, he says, involved thousands of American companies.
In the fall of 2011, he went to the White House to warn officials about what he had found. He sat down in the Situation Room with a half-dozen top administration leaders.
“The most surprising thing to me was the lack of surprise,” Alperovitch says. “I got the distinct impression that none of this was news. When I pressed them on why they were not taking stronger action against China, their response was, ‘We have a multifaceted relationship with China.’ ”
Chinese President Xi Jinping shakes hands with U.S. President Barack Obama following a news conference in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 25, 2015. During the visit, the two leaders announced an agreement to halt cyberattacks.
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Pete Marovich/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Alperovitch says White House officials told him that some of the same companies that were being victimized by China also wanted to continue doing business in China.
“They didn’t want to take any action that would jeopardize that billions of dollars of trade we were doing at the time,” he says.
Ask McGregor, the American business representative, how companies can complain about China’s behavior to the U.S. government while simultaneously preventing the government from taking strong action, and his answer is blunt.
“Companies were afraid of China,” he says. “American business companies’ incentives are to make money.”
McGregor today advises dozens of American companies in China, and he says they are confronting a new reality. China is no longer an up-and-comer — it’s a true competitor and quickly closing in on America’s high-tech sector. McGregor says company leaders are beginning to ask whether years of theft and hacking have given China an edge that the United States will no longer be able to stay in front of.
And U.S. government officials are asking whether federal agencies will be able to catch up on enforcement.
Top government leaders told NPR that federal agencies are years behind where they could have been if the theft had been openly addressed.
Even at the Defense Department, as late as 2014, cybertheft from China was not one of the Pentagon’s top priorities.
“Our intelligence agencies were looking at the Middle East, at the Russians,” says Air Force Brig. Gen. Robert Spalding, a China expert who worked for the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the National Security Council.
He says he had never given the issue of Chinese cybertheft much thought. But then, in the fall of 2014, he loaded a confidential briefing into his computer. It was case after case in which the Chinese government had stolen the product designs from almost a dozen high-tech American companies, in a couple of cases almost putting them out of business.
“It immediately changed my conception, my view of the world,” he says. “I realized I did not know how the world worked.”
U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping leave an event in Beijing on November 9, 2017. The Trump administration, and the Obama administration before that, have brought concerns regarding cybertheft to the Chinese directly.
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Nicolas Asfouri/AFP/Getty Images
Spalding says he made it his mission to get the word out to other government agencies. But even in 2015, he says, he was met mostly with a shrug.
He says he went to the departments of Commerce and the Treasury, as well as the U.S. Trade Representative and the U.S. State Department.
“The two responses we got were, ‘Oh my gosh, this is really, really bad.’ And the second one is, ‘That’s not my job,'” Spalding says. “That was almost the universal answer we got every time we went to a senior leader. Bad problem but not my problem.”
Spalding, who retired from the Air Force last year, says in the final years under Obama and now under President Trump, agencies are finally starting to take some action. The Justice Department is bringing criminal cases, the trade representative’s office is investigating China’s dealings and both administrations have brought concerns to the Chinese directly.
But, Spalding says, it may have come 10 years too late.
“We all missed it,” he says. “We have to understand the problem and get to work on it.”
The hazelnut business is in a bind. Demand is rising, supply is tight, and a deadly fungal disease is constraining production. But one man may have found a solution.
AILSA CHANG, HOST:
Demand for hazelnuts is on the rise globally. That’s due in no small part to the popularity of products like Nutella. But the U.S. has remained a relatively small player in the global hazelnut industry. Darius Rafieyan and Stacey Vanek Smith of the podcast The Indicator From Planet Money brings us this story of one man’s decades-long quest to change that.
DARIUS RAFIEYAN, BYLINE: I first met biologist Tom Molnar in his office at the Rutgers University Ornamental Field Lab. He was surrounded by these big plastic bins just filled with thousands upon thousands of hazelnuts.
TOM MOLNAR: For example, here’s one that has ridges and lumps. And to me, that’s kind of an ugly looking hazelnut.
STACEY VANEK SMITH, BYLINE: Hazelnuts have a problem. More than 70 percent of the world’s hazelnuts come from one place – come from Turkey. And that, of course, leaves Nutella lovers everywhere very vulnerable.
RAFIEYAN: The United States does have a small hazelnut industry in Oregon, but that doesn’t come close to meeting global demand. The East Coast would be perfect for growing these trees, but there’s one big problem.
MOLNAR: We would have had a hazelnut industry in the northeast if it wasn’t for Eastern filbert blight.
RAFIEYAN: Eastern filbert blight – it’s a fungal disease. It’s native to North America. And it grows beneath the bark of hazelnut trees.
MOLNAR: So as we look down in here, you’ll see that there’s little pustules. So those are like little mushrooms. Those are the fruiting bodies, where the spores will actually be ejected from and spread to other trees.
RAFIEYAN: This fungus has been Tom’s sworn nemesis for 23 years.
VANEK SMITH: Hazelnuts are this kind of miracle crop. They can grow without irrigation, without chemical fertilizers or pesticides. The only problem they needed to solve was Eastern filbert blight.
RAFIEYAN: And so Tom figured that somewhere out there the gene for disease resistance that he needed was hiding. So he set out to find that gene. For seven years, Tom traveled all over the native hazelnut range collecting specimens. And this was not your typical horticultural fieldwork. Once, while crossing into Ukraine with 80 pounds of nuts in his suitcase, he even got shaken down by the local police.
MOLNAR: They start screaming at me. They have guns. And this is silly, but at the same time, I had a suitcase full of all the nuts that I so desperately did not want to lose.
RAFIEYAN: But you were more worried about the nuts than the money.
MOLNAR: I was very nervous about the nuts. Those were my babies.
RAFIEYAN: After years of collecting all this genetic material, he came back to New Jersey, and he got to work breeding.
VANEK SMITH: Eventually, after years of failures, Tom did it. He created a tree strong enough to resist the blight.
RAFIEYAN: Does he have a name?
MOLNAR: Seven twenty-five (laughter). This is H3RZP25. So we call him 725.
VANEK SMITH: Tom sees this as the start of a whole new industry on the East Coast.
RAFIEYAN: If it takes off, that could make Tom a very, very rich man. But, you know, he says he didn’t spend 20 years of his life sifting through hazelnuts just for the money.
MOLNAR: Ever since I was young, I wanted to do something that had a positive impact beyond just my individual life. And I think that’s what drew me to tree breeding. Plants can sort of live on forever. So if you select the right variety, that could be around way after you’re gone. But maybe your grandchildren can grow that in your yard and think about that, you know, their grandfather actually selected that plant.
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.
Several 2020 Democratic candidates support Medicare for All, but what would that proposal look like in action?
ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
If there’s a single issue that’s defining the Democratic field of 2020 presidential candidates, it’s health care, Medicare for All, to be precise.
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KAMALA HARRIS: I believe the solution – and I’m – and I’m – actually feel very strongly about this – is that we need to have Medicare for All
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ELIZABETH WARREN: Medicare for All is all about…
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BETO O’ROURKE: The best way to get there is by having Medicare for All.
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BERNIE SANDERS: The strengths of a Medicare for All program…
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KIRSTEN GILLIBRAND: That’s why I am for Medicare for All.
SHAPIRO: When Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders unveiled his 2020 Medicare plan for all this week, several other Democratic presidential candidates stood alongside him.
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SANDERS: The American people want and we are going to deliver a Medicare for All single-payer system.
SHAPIRO: So what would that system look like? NPR’s health policy correspondent Alison Kodjak is here to talk us through that. Hi, Alison.
ALISON KODJAK, BYLINE: Hi, Ari.
SHAPIRO: Start with a bit of history. Where did the idea of Medicare for All begin?
KODJAK: So the idea of, like, a government-funded, universal health coverage goes way back to the Depression. Franklin Delano Roosevelt convened a committee on economic security in the midst of that economic crisis, and they advocated not only Social Security, but they wanted to include national health insurance in the system. That program failed because of opposition mostly from doctors.
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FRANKLIN D ROOSEVELT: We can never insure 100 percent of the population against 100 percent of the hazards and vicissitudes of life, but we have tried to frame a law which will give some measure of protection.
KODJAK: Thirty years later, Medicare was passed into law.
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UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: President and Mrs. Johnson and Vice President Humphrey arrive for ceremonies that will make the Medicare bill a part of Social Security coverage.
KODJAK: It didn’t cover everybody either. It only covered retirees.
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UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: The new bill expands the 30-year-old Social Security program to provide hospital care, nursing home care, home nursing service and outpatient treatment for those over 65.
KODJAK: So universal coverage, the idea of it, has been on the table for, in one form or another, ever since the 1930s.
SHAPIRO: So, in the present day, when we hear all these Democratic presidential candidates talk about Medicare for All, what does that proposal they’re talking about right now mean?
KODJAK: That proposal that came out this week, it would eliminate private health insurance altogether, have the government be the single payer for people’s health care. Everybody would get coverage. Hospitals, if they’re private now, would stay private. Doctors would remain in the private sector. But the government would be the sole payer of health care, and everybody would get insurance.
SHAPIRO: And what would that mean for patients, especially people like you and I who get coverage through our employer right now?
KODJAK: Well, we’d no longer get coverage through our employer. We’d get it through this government health insurance plan. The benefits might be much more generous than we have now. We wouldn’t have to pay part of the premium. There would be no copayments under this plan.
But that’s a big sticking point. How do you pay for that? It would have to be through tax increases of some sort because it would increase government spending. The one thing to keep in mind is that we already pay a huge amount for health care in this country, almost $4 trillion a year.
So you’re paying one way or another. Your private insurance is expensive. An average family plan provided through employers is about $20,000 dollars a year. And that often includes copayments and deductibles.
SHAPIRO: That’s a lot of money going to the insurance companies.
KODJAK: Sure is.
SHAPIRO: What happens to them under this plan?
KODJAK: Well, that’s the big question. Senator Sanders was asked about it earlier today on CBS.
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SANDERS: Under Medicare for All, we cover all basic health care needs. I suppose if you want to make yourself look a little bit more beautiful, you want to work on that nose, your ears, they can do that.
ED O’KEEFE: So basically Blue Cross Blue Shield would be reduced to nose jobs.
SANDERS: Something like that.
KODJAK: Yeah. So if that’s the case, the insurance industry, as it stands now, would shrink quite a lot. Today, about 540,000 people work in health insurance. Now, some of those people would probably get jobs with the government, but it would be a big disruption.
SHAPIRO: Yeah. And health care is about 18 percent of the U.S. GDP. So we’re talking about a huge shake-up for the economy. What are the implications of that drastic of a change to the system?
KODJAK: Yeah, it is a huge part of the economy. Most economists don’t really see that as a good thing, that we shouldn’t be spending that much on health insurance and health care in this country. So one goal of moving to a single-payer plan like this would be to make the system less expensive. There’d be no profit motive. There’d be fewer administrative costs. Perhaps we would pay doctors or hospitals less for procedures and care. And so if that succeeded, it might cut costs, which economists would applaud. But again, there would be losers, and it would be hugely disruptive to the economy.
SHAPIRO: You mentioned Senator Sanders. Which other 2020 candidates support this and which are not so sure?
KODJAK: Well, at his side in the announcement were Senators Kirsten Gillibrand, Senator Elizabeth Warren. Cory Booker has been behind it. So has Kamala Harris. Amy Klobuchar, who’s running, has said that she would rather see incremental progress on the Affordable Care Act, protect what we have now and make it better. And there are a lot of others who stand with her and say we should just stick with what we have and improve it.
SHAPIRO: NPR health policy correspondent Alison Kodjak, thank you.
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.
Finn, a black lab, is a bat dog for the Minor League Las Vegas Aviators. Finn was dashing to the plate, but an umpire beat him there and tossed the bat aside. Fans were not happy and booed the ump.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
Good morning. I’m David Greene. Finn the Bat Dog got off to a slow start the other night. The black lab’s job is to clear baseball bats from home plate for the minor league Las Vegas Aviators. He was dashing to the plate, but then an umpire beat him there and tossed the bat aside. The crowd – not happy.
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UNIDENTIFIED SPORTSCASTER: Gone.
UNIDENTIFIED CROWD: (Booing).
GREENE: Finn did chase that bat down. Way to stay paws-itive (ph), Finn.
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.
Angelique Kidjo’s Celia is out April 19 on Decca Records.
Laurent Seroussi/Courtesy of the artist
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Laurent Seroussi/Courtesy of the artist
Angélique Kidjo now has a pair of albums that are essentially covers of other artists, but interpreted with an African sensibility so majestic as to render the originals almost as source material.
On 2018’s Remain In Light, Kidjo made the implicit African influences of Talking Heads’ original vision explicit. Kidjo didn’t channel New Wave, or even rock and roll, as a starting point; instead, she used West African polyrhythms to reinterpret the band’s take on then-modern life in America. It was one of my favorite albums of last year.
Somehow Kidjo had the time to record a second tribute album, this time dedicated to an individual artist.
Celia refers to Celia Cruz, perhaps the most well-known vocalist to come from Cuba during any era. The ten tracks span several decades of Cruz’s career, from before she left Cuba in 1960 to her groundbreaking recordings for the celebrated Fania Records label in New York in the 1970s, to “La Vida Es Un Carnaval,” the 1998 song that became her late career hit and anthem. Kidjo’s reinterpretations rearrange the molecules of songs that many of us know by heart. The results are glorious.
The tongue twister “Cucala” becomes a rhythmic pattern for both guitar and hand drums as Kidjo sings the Spanish-language lyric that is an ode to joy of dancing. It’s a brilliant take on a song that I honestly thought couldn’t get any better.
Cruz never shied away from the island’s African culture, especially on songs like”Yemaya” and “Elegua.” These two tracks on Celia strip away the classic, horn-driven guaracha feel of La Sonora Matancera’s 1950s-era orchestrations and become deeply emotional prayers to the two Afro-Cuban deities.
“Quimbara,” one of Cruz’s most well-known anthems, serves as Celia‘s mission statement. The original was based on guaguancó, which was a bold move at the the time. Why? Mambo and cha-cha-cha were the ruling Latin dance rhythms of the day, and here was an Afro-Cuban folkloric beat. On Celia, Angélique Kidjo changes the rhythm from a solid 4/4 to a languid, yet powerful 6/8. Afrobeat-style guitar approximates the West African koraand punctuates it all with a funky, horn driven, stop-time statement of its massive chorus.
What puts the song over the top is the call-and-response improvisation of the title. It’s done at twice the speed of the rhythm underneath (what musicians call double time) and it never clashes. Kidjo has so expertly tied the original guaguanco to her 6/8 that it serves as a point of cultural pride that Africa could claim Celia Cruz as one of their own. And that is the point of every track of this album.
Celia Cruz’s music and her entire being was a reminder of the presence of Africa in Cuba. Angélique Kidjo’s Celia musically closes that circle with reverence and more than a little love.
Host Ailsa Chang speaks to NPR’s David Folkenflik about the news that American Media intends to sell its tabloids, including National Enquirer.
AILSA CHANG, HOST:
This evening, the parent company of the National Enquirer announced its intention to sell the tabloid and several of its sister tabloids. This comes after a series of scandals and controversies that involved the Enquirer’s ties to President Trump. NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik joins me now. Welcome.
DAVID FOLKENFLIK, BYLINE: Hey, Ailsa.
CHANG: Hey. So what’s the company saying about why they’re interested in selling all of a sudden? Are they in financial trouble?
FOLKENFLIK: Well, if you believe the official line, they say they’re exploring and intend to sell the Enquirer, a couple of the sister tabloids because they want to focus on some of their more upscale lifestyle magazines. In the last year and a half or so, they acquired US Weekly and Men’s Journal from Jann Wenner’s media outfit. There is a financial cloud hovering over AMI, American Media Inc, the parent company of the National Enquirer. It declared bankruptcy in 2010. It’s got a lot of debt. But it’s impossible to think about this intended sale without thinking about all the scandals and controversies that have just wrapped themselves around this publication.
CHANG: Yeah. Can you take a moment to walk us through some of those controversies?
FOLKENFLIK: Yeah. And they’re pretty intense. Think back to what we learned over recent months from federal investigators about the Enquirer’s role in the 2016 campaign of Donald Trump. You know, if you looked on the covers, you saw all these stories damaging Hillary Clinton badly, helping Trump, portraying him in tight light. What we didn’t know during the campaign was that they had engaged by their own concession in an effort to pay a former Playboy model $150,000. She had said that she had had a significant romantic involvement with President Trump, and they did what they called catch and kill. They promised her a contract to print a column by her in Men’s Journal. But actually it was an effort to keep her story of her involvement with President Trump out of the public, particularly before the election. And that was a big one. The editor and the CEO, David Pecker, collaborated with federal prosecutors in order to avoid prosecution themselves for crimes.
CHANG: And then most recently the Enquirer tangled with Jeff Bezos, who owns both Amazon and The Washington Post.
FOLKENFLIK: That’s right. He’s the controlling owner and one of the richest people on the globe. He is the personal owner of The Washington Post. And that’s an important element. The National Enquirer had been intently going over his personal life intending to reveal elements of his extramarital involvement with his girlfriend. And he took to Medium and posted a long thing saying that actually National Enquirer was trying to blackmail him into making a statement saying that they weren’t acting in any way out of political motivation and that he felt that they were.
And his people have suggested – he suggested that in fact they were acting on behest of Saudi Arabian interests, an interesting note to strike in part because it appeared as though there was some possible financial involvement of some Saudi investors in American media even if that didn’t fully play out. So one of the elements of this of course is Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post is one of the chief media antagonists of President Trump.
CHANG: Right.
FOLKENFLIK: It’s really attacked the Post for its reporting. And so there seems to be that element at play there as well. The Washington Post is reporting that the hedge fund manager who essentially controls the parent company got fed up with all the scandal after the Jeff Bezos story.
CHANG: So what’s next? Are there any potential buyers circling the Enquirer already?
FOLKENFLIK: Well, you know, it’s an incredible brand. It’s survived a lot of controversies in the past. In order to talk to you this evening, I ducked out of a Broadway show about Rupert Murdoch and The Sun, a British tabloid. It’s had a lot of controversies in the past. It survived. I’d be surprised if the Enquirer didn’t live to see another day.
CHANG: That’s NPR’s media correspondent David Folkenflik. Thanks, David.
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.
The federal government is charging the maker of the addiction drug Suboxone with fraud and conspiracy in marketing the drug to doctors.
ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
Share prices for the British drugmaker Indivior plunged today on the London Stock Exchange. The drop came on news that the U.S. Justice Department indicted the company on fraud and conspiracy charges. Indivior makes the drug Suboxone, widely used to treat people suffering from opioid addiction. Federal prosecutors now claim the company falsely marketed Suboxone as safer and less prone to abuse than cheaper generic drugs. North Country Public Radio’s Brian Mann reports.
BRIAN MANN, BYLINE: The 28-count indictment filed in a Virginia court claims Indivior executives lied when they claimed dissolvable Suboxone films placed under the tongue would be safer, harder to misuse than generic tablets that were about to come on the market. Government investigators say, in some cases, Indivior’s version of the drug was more risky. The indictment claims taxpayer-funded programs like Medicare and Medicaid were cheated out of billions of dollars. Justice Department officials declined NPR’s request for an interview. Robert Bird is a professor of business law at the University of Connecticut who follows opioid cases closely. He says this criminal indictment sends a powerful signal to a drug industry already snared in the opioid addiction crisis.
ROBERT BIRD: Not only the companies that are being indicted but also other organizations and competitors who will look at these prosecutions and say, I don’t want this to happen to me.
MANN: Indivior executives also declined to be interviewed by NPR. But company spokesperson Jennifer Ginther read from a prepared statement, denying any wrongdoing and describing the federal indictment as misguided.
JENNIFER GINTHER: Indivior’s top priority has always been the treatment of patients struggling with opioid addiction. No other company has done more to fight the opioid crisis.
MANN: This point – Indivior’s central role treating people addicted to opioids – represents a fascinating wrinkle in this case. The Justice Department has filed criminal charges against other opioid makers in the past, winning a guilty plea in a $600 million settlement from Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin in 2007. But Indivior doesn’t actually make prescription painkillers. It makes drugs like Suboxone designed to treat people suffering from opioid dependency.
ALAN LESHNER: It’s a highly effective medication that we endorse in our report.
MANN: Alan Leshner chaired a panel for the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine that released a new study last month finding that drugs like Suboxone are being underutilized. He worries that all the bad publicity surrounding drug companies and their products will make it harder for people struggling with opioid addiction to get treatment drugs.
LESHNER: So there’s a tremendous amount of stigma surrounding everything related to addiction. And the stigma and misunderstanding has kept a tremendous number of people from getting the treatment that they need.
MANN: These recovery drugs matter because more than 100 Americans are still dying from opioid overdoses every day. But like other medications that contain opioids, Suboxone can be abused. This federal indictment claims that while Indivior downplayed the risks of their drugs, the company also boosted profits by helping create a black market connecting patients suffering from addiction with doctors writing too many prescriptions for Suboxone at too strong a dose. In its statement, Indivior rejected that claim, saying the company never deliberately diverted its product to increase sales.
The stakes here are high. If Indivior is found guilty, prosecutors say the company should forfeit at least $3 billion in penalties. Indivior and other big drugmakers, including Purdue Pharma and Johnson & Johnson, already faced hundreds of civil lawsuits stemming from the opioid crisis. Brian Mann, NPR News.
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.
NPR’s Ailsa Chang speaks with sports radio host Donovan Lewis about Dirk Nowitzki’s 21-year NBA career with the Dallas Mavericks after his final home game.
AILSA CHANG, HOST:
All right, Dallas, Texas, has long been known as a football town where the silver star looms large. But sports fans paid new attention to basketball when a 7-foot German player named Dirk Nowitzki joined the Dallas Mavericks in 1998. Now Nowitzki has officially announced he’s retiring after this season, his 21st with the Mavericks. Here he is at last night’s ceremony.
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DIRK NOWITZKI: As you guys might expect, this was my last home game – yeah.
CHANG: Over the decades, Nowitzki and his Dallas fan base forged a deep bond. And to talk more about that, let’s bring in Donovan Lewis, who’s a sports radio host at The Ticket in Dallas. Hey, Donovan.
DONOVAN LEWIS: Hello. How are you?
CHANG: I’m good. So you’ve been there for most of Nowitzki’s career. What was the atmosphere like last night for his final game in Dallas?
LEWIS: I think we all thought that this was his final year and his final home game, but Dirk never let on that it was officially the end. So, you know, you always hold on hope because this guy brought so much joy to every single basketball fan in Dallas because we all thought for a long time that basketball just wasn’t going to be king around here and we never would…
CHANG: Yeah.
LEWIS: …Get a title. But this guy came in. And all of a sudden, he just won us over. And they played relevant basketball in Dallas for a decade and a half. And I don’t think a lot of people realize or appreciate that because we just got spoiled because basketball was so good, and it was…
CHANG: Yeah.
LEWIS: …All because of this one guy. We won a title…
CHANG: Yeah.
LEWIS: …In 2011, and that’s climbing a mountain. And that’s like, OK, this is the ultimate. You know what? I’ll take that back. I love the title, but the ultimate was celebrating the guy that’s been here for two decades…
CHANG: Yeah, yeah.
LEWIS: …Playing basketball. He’s one of ours, and I just absolutely loved it.
CHANG: I mean, it wasn’t just the fans who adored him. He loved Dallas. He spent 21 seasons with the Mavericks. Why do you think Nowitzki felt so loyal to Dallas?
LEWIS: I think Mark Cuban, the owner of the Mavericks, had a lot to do with it. And I think winning that title had a lot to do it also – with it all so. This town was so starved for success in basketball.
CHANG: (Laughter).
LEWIS: And OK, maybe you were close to climbing that mountain, and it didn’t happen. So being here for so long, he wanted to do it for this city. And once that happened, it was like, OK, this guy sacrificed blood, sweat and tears. We see, we hear that all the time.
CHANG: Yeah.
LEWIS: But that’s literally what happened.
CHANG: Now, a few of Nowitzki’s his favorite players, I understand, were in attendance last night. They made speeches about him. Here’s what Charles Barkley had to say.
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CHARLES BARKLEY: Let me say this about Dirk Nowitzki. He’s the nicest man ever.
(CHEERING, APPLAUSE)
CHANG: There it is, that love again. Why do you think so many people felt such a personal connection to this guy?
LEWIS: A, because it’s true. He is the nicest guy ever. And for him to be a superstar, one of – I guess we kind of equate superstars as being a little standoffish. I mean, you have to because a lot of people demand a lot of your time, whether it’s pictures or autographs or whatnot. Social media yesterday was filled with people posting their pictures with Dirk, just ordinary people.
CHANG: Well what about you? Do you have a favorite personal story with Dirk?
LEWIS: You know, on our radio show, we have a yearly interview with Dirk. The first time I met him was 2007, and I’m starstruck. This is the – my favorite basketball player, and he’s sitting right down and talking to us. Even every year after that, he’d come up, and he would remember my name and sit down and talk and all that stuff. So it’s really crazy to think that this guy that you see on TV that’s doing all the things that he’s doing and winning championships will sit down and, you know, know you by name. It’s – it kind of blows your mind a little bit. But he’s just that kind of guy.
CHANG: Donovan Lewis with The Ticket in Dallas, thanks so much for joining us.
LEWIS: Thank you for having me. It’s my pleasure – anytime.
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.
