Patt Morrison for Tues, June 9

PATT MORRISON SCHEDULE

Tuesday, June 9, 2009

1-3 p.m.

 

**PLEDGE DRIVE

1:07 – 1:19

Reform, at a Price: Healthcare Ready for Surgery

16 years after Bill Clinton tried it, and after almost two years of hypothetical discussions of it on the campaign trail, we have finally reached the moment of truth: several different bills proposing various forms of radical reform of the American healthcare system are slowly making their way through Congress and President Obama has declared he wants to implement a new national healthcare plan by the Fall.  As the system goes under the knife it promises to be a painful surgery—badly needed reforms will come at a price, perhaps mandated insurance or taxing employers’ health benefits.  What are the economics of healthcare reform and what are the positives & drawbacks to each plan?

 

Guests:

Jonathan Gruber, professor of economics at MIT; director of the National Bureau of Economic Research’s Program on Children; associate editor of the “Journal of Health Economics”

• Gruber serves on the board of the Massachusetts Commonwealth Health Insurance Connector Authority, the main implementing body for the state’s health care reform effort.

 

 

1:24 – 1:37

Reform, at a Price: Organized Labor’s Stake in Healthcare

Part of what makes the effort to reform healthcare so unwieldy is the sheer size and scope of the problem, from millions of uninsured poor Americans to the middle class that can’t keep up with escalating medical costs.  Enter the AFL-CIO, the grandfather of organized labor that has a prominent place at the surgery table.  Unions have been vilified for winning generations-worth of generous insurance benefits, the high costs of which might have been part of the failures of GM and Chrysler.  What shape of reform works best for blue-collar, middle class workers?

 

Guests:

Gerald M. Shea (SHAY), assistant to the president for governmental affairs at the AFL-CIO; he attended Obama’s Health Care Forum at the White House in March

 

 

1:43 - 1:55

Reform, at a Price: Small Business Looks for Relief

Small business owners have been on the front line of the healthcare battle for several decades, weathering the steadily increasing costs of insuring their employees and devising some of the most imaginative solutions.  Even if small businesses are wary of plans to mandate health insurance for every American (putting a big strain on business-owners), the cost of insurance has become so burdensome there is a consensus that something needs to be done.  How can insurance costs be controlled while also reforming the insurance market?

           

Guests:

Amanda Austin, director of Federal Public Policy in the Senate, National Federation of Independent Business

 

 

[NPR NEWS]

 

2:07 – 2:37

OPEN

 

 

2:43 – 2:55

One Million Strong and Growing…Well Almost

The English language is said to gain a new word every 98 minutes and we have begun the count down to, hold on to your tiles scrabble fans, one million!  The Austin-based Global Language Monitor is set to announce the language’s one millionth word around 2 a.m. on June 10^th. Leading the pack of contenders is “noob.” Sometimes typed as n00b, the term is used as a moniker for people that are new to online gaming communities. Though some say that even the most genius among us have a vocabulary limited to fewer than 100,000 words, knowing that there are a million to learn is definitely awe-inspiring. Join us as we talk about what words are counted and what makes them count -- as we join in on the count down.

 

Guests:

Paul Payack (PAY-ack), president and chief word analyst of the Global Language Monitor and founder and former president of your Dictionary.com. His latest book is "A Million Words and Counting: How Global English is Re-Writing the World"