Education Secretary, Orwell's 1984, Bacteria to Biogas

Why is Betsy DeVos Such a Controversial Pick for Education Secretary? Guest: Christopher Loss, PhD, Professor of Public Policy and Higher Education, Peabody College, Vanderbilt University The Senate is expected to vote on Betsy DeVos’ nomination Tuesday and, at the moment, it looks like it’ll be a tie requiring Vice President Mike Pence to cast the deciding vote in her favor. No education secretary nominee has ever faced a vote this close – and no cabinet nominee has ever required the Vice President to break a tie vote.  Why is Betsy DeVos’s nomination to lead the US Department of Education so controversial that educators and parents have flooded social media and jammed the phone lines of Senators?  Wrong Care in the Wrong Places Guest: Jane Bolin, PhD, JD, BSN, Director of the Southwest Rural Health Research Center, Professor of Public Health, Texas A&M Changes implemented under Obamacare helped 13 million Americans to get health insurance who didn’t have it before. But there are still tens of millions more who remain uninsured for a variety of reasons and when they end up in a medical crisis, where do they turn? Often, it’s the ER, because US law says people cannot be turned away from the emergency room for lack of insurance. The problem is that the ER is not always the best place to treat the needs of these individuals. They’d often be better off in a doctor’s office or a clinic, but those places don’t take uninsured patients and aren’t open after-hours. So emergency rooms across the nation become the de facto primary care option for millions of Americans, at great expense to the system.  Disease Spreads When People Mistrust the Government Guest: Robert Blair, PhD, Assistant Professor of Political Science and International and Public Affairs, Brown University During the Ebola epidemic in West Africa, more than 11,000 people died in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone. As researchers moved in to determine which neighborhoods were hardest hit by Ebola and why, they discovered a pattern: people who didn’t t