Obamacare Exchanges, Dangerous Memes, War Memorial

Obamacare Exchanges, Dangerous Memes, War Memorial

Top of Mind with Julie Rose

  • Aug 22, 2016 11:00 pm
  • 1:41:45 mins

Are Obamacare Exchanges in Trouble? Guest: Katherine Hempstead, Senior Adviser on Health Insurance Coverage at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation A central piece of the Affordable Care Act—also known as Obamacare—suffered a blow in the last week. The nation’s third largest health insurer, Aetna, announced it will withdraw from the insurance plan marketplaces in most states. Aetna is the largest insurer to withdraw in a big way, but UnitedHealth Group and Humana have also begun to retreat from the marketplaces—also known as “exchanges.”  The exchanges were created to help the “uninsurable” get coverage. So what now for those people? Can the exchanges survive without heavyweights like Aetna?  Adult Learners Still Not Being Taught Technology Guest: Iris Feinberg, PhD, Assistant Director of the Adult Literacy Research Center at Georgia State University A growing number of adults older than your typical college student are heading back to school in the US. Some are seeking to finish the college degree they need before applying to certain jobs. Others are feeling the disadvantage of not having grown up immersed in the technology today’s younger workers use so naturally.  But educational researcher Iris Feinberg finds that colleges aren’t teaching older adults the technical skills they need—in fact more than half of community college students say they’ve never taken a computer class while in school. Influence of Internet Memes Guests: Grant Kien, PhD, Associate Professor at California State East Bay Department of Communication; Amalia Alexandru, Digital Product Manager for BeMyApp The photo of a young Syrian boy pulled from the wreckage of a bomb, sitting dazed and bloody in an orange ambulance seat quickly went viral last week. He was photo shopped into pictures with world leaders, and rendered in sketch form by artists in shareable memes, a symbol of outrage and frustration over the response to Syria’s civil conflict.  Viral images and hashtags have the power to raise awareness of an issue and galvanize people in sympathy. Think of the #JeSuisCharlie and #JeSuisParis hashtags after terror attacks in France and the way Facebook was suddenly awash in people turning their status pictures into the French flag.  But more often than not, viral images and hashtags are not helpful in uniting people or sparking meaningful action. Global War on Terror Memorial Guests: Andrew Brennan, Former Army Captain, Founder and Director of the Global War On Terror Memorial Foundation; Jan Scruggs, Vietnam War Veteran, Founder of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are now America’s longest active conflict – nearing 15 years of deployments, 7,000 service members dead and more than 50,000 wounded. But if you go to America’s front lawn—the National Mall in Washington, DC—you will not find a memorial to those men and women.  World War I, II, Vietnam and Korea War veterans all have a monument of remembrance there, but not Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans. Even the question of what to call such a memorial is unclear, frankly.  And there’s the little matter of a US law that says a war must be over for 10 years before a national memorial can be built for it.  None of that is stopping Former Army Captain Andrew Brennan from trying. He’s creator of the Global War On Terror Memorial Foundation and he’s got support of Jan Scruggs, who faced stiff opposition in his quest to get the Vietnam Veterans Memorial built.  Parent Previews Guest: Rob Gustafson, Film Reviewer at ParentPreviews.com Ben Hur, the Charlton Heston epic film about revenge and forgiveness, has returned to theaters with a modern cast and all the special effects we’ve come to expect of action films today—even if it’s horse—drawn chariots racing instead of fast cars. Making Smarter Drones Guests: Karl Warnick, PhD, Professor of Electrical Engineering at BYU; Dave Brown, JD, BYU’s Technology Transfer Office About four times a day, somebody flies a drone too close to a passenger plane or breaks some other airspace regulation. Data from the Federal Aviation Administration show such incident reports last year totaled five times what they were in 2014. It’s no wonder the government has created stricter rules for lightweight drones that take effect at the end of the month. Drone owners will be required to register their craft with the government and get a special license to operate them.  But there will still be operator error and close calls. So drones need to get smarter too. BYU electrical engineering professor Karl Warnick and his students have created a way for drones to see other aircraft and avoid them.