--:-- Shumita Basu: Good morning. It's Friday, December 13th. I'm Shamita Basu. This is Apple News Today.
--:-- Shamita Basu: On today's show, what family separations could look like under a second Trump term, how treating reality TV stars as paid employees could change the industry, and an incredible breakthrough in preventing the spread of HIV. But first, to the American health care system, which has left so many people feeling overwhelmed, helpless, and in some cases, betrayed.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Over the past week, we've witnessed a tremendous public outpouring of that frustration after the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson and the arrest of his alleged shooter. Americans have been feeling this way for a while now. Confidence in the quality of U.S. health care is at an all-time low, according to Gallup. Public approval of doctors and hospitals has dropped over the last decade by more than 10 percent. Only 18 percent of the public views the pharmaceutical industry favorably.
--:-- Vox's Dylan Scott: So many people can relate to the dread of having to call up your health insurance to figure out whether an urgently needed procedure is covered. When people go through those experiences, it's one of the most fraught moments of their lives. Like they or somebody they love is probably experiencing a medical emergency. And on top of that, they're entering this, you know, Kafka-esque bureaucratic nightmare.
--:-- Shamita Basu: He says part of what makes our current system such a nightmare for consumers and what makes it so hard to correct is that no single person or industry is responsible for the failures of the U.S. health care system. And everyone involved is busy pointing fingers at each other. There's this ongoing blame game within the health care industry that makes it just really confusing to understand, like, why this problem exists in the first place.
--:-- Vox's Dylan Scott: Insurance companies blame hospitals and drug companies when consumers are upset about high premiums and out-of-pocket costs. Meanwhile, doctors say dealing with insurance companies and trying to convince them to pay for their patients' care is getting worse. And hospitals blame drug companies for charging high prices.
--:-- Shamita Basu: We saw an example of this blame game gone wrong recently, just in the past week, when Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield announced it would no longer pay for anesthesia if a procedure goes past a certain time limit. The public response to this was overwhelmingly negative. Typical big bad insurance company, people were saying. And Anthem ended up walking back the new policy. But Vox points out this is an example of wrongly placed blame. The policy was actually looking out for patients who are sometimes overbilled by anesthesiologists.
--:-- Vox's Dylan Scott: Sometimes good policy loses out when you've already lost any shred of goodwill. Scott says, blame game aside, we've got to focus on results, and the numbers don't tell a good story. The bottom line is, like, you can look across a bunch of different metrics. But one consistent finding across them when you compare the United States to healthcare in other wealthy countries what you always find is that the U pays more money for health care and on average you know taken collectively gets worse outcomes.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Reforming the system to deliver better care will require some accountability from every sector of the industry. Scott says voters play a role, too. That's been the pattern of health care politics, is people get really mad about it, but then either nothing happens or somebody tries to change something and then voters punish them. We saw this like back in the 90s with the Clinton health reform effort. We even saw it with Democrats in 2008 and 2010.
--:-- Vox's Dylan Scott: He says it's good to look at what other countries have done to design health care that works for everyone, if only to remind us that it is in fact possible. There's not just one blueprint for doing it. A bunch of different countries do it a bunch of different ways, but they share that sort of underlying understanding or goal that we are going to cover everybody and provide some level of baseline medical coverage and services to anybody, no matter their ability to pay.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But the United States kind of stands alone as the wealthy country that has not done that. There are all kinds of ideas about what to do to try to make healthcare better, But getting everybody to agree on what to prioritize and where to focus is really hard when you've got this finger pointing within the health care industry about what the problem really is.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Let's turn now to one of the most controversial policies during Trump's first term in office. his decision to separate more than 5,000 children from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border. You might remember seeing the images of kids held behind chain-link fences, sleeping on mattresses on the floor covered by foil blankets.
--:-- NBC's Kristen Welker: Trump recently, in his first network TV interview since his reelection, was asked by NBC's Kristen Welker about whether his plans for mass deportations in a second term would lead to families being separated again.
--:-- Donald Trump: We don't have to separate a family. Excuse me, Kristen. We don't have to separate families. will send the whole family very humanely back to the country where they came. That way the family's not separated.
--:-- NBC's Kristen Welker: So no more family separations? You're not reviving the zero tolerance policy?
--:-- Donald Trump: Well, it depends on the family. The family may decide to say, I'd rather have dad go and we'll stay here. And in which case they have that option.
--:-- Jacob Soboroff: It's disingenuous to suggest families won't be separated again, particularly for kids who are citizens, but their parents are not. While family separation at the border was ripping children away from parents, mass deportation in the interior is family separation because it will rip parents away from children in their homes or at their workplaces or outside of their schools.
--:-- Jacob Soboroff: Part of the reason we could see separations again is because Congress has not taken action on this issue. They can, with one piece of legislation, bar the immigration enforcement apparatus from using family separation as a tool of immigration enforcement, and they haven't done that. It was proposed, most notably by Julian Castro, but the bill went nowhere.
--:-- Jacob Soboroff: He also emphasized that no one involved in this policy has ever been held responsible for the harm done to children by the U.S. government. President Biden famously said in the final presidential debate of 2020 that he believed that the family separation policy was criminal. And Merrick Garland, during his confirmation hearings to become the attorney general, said he couldn't imagine anything worse. than ripping parents apart from their children.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And yet there has been no criminal investigation, as far as we know, opened from within the Justice Department into the family separation policy, despite everything that we know about it.
--:-- Shamita Basu: You can hear more from my conversation with Jacob Soboroff and Errol Morris on this week's episode of Apple News In Conversation. If you're listening in the News app, that episode is queued up to play for you next.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Now to a major development in the world of reality television, where the National Labor Relations Board is weighing in on working conditions for the people who make these shows so popular.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Earlier this week, the NLRB found the hit Netflix dating show Love is Blind violated the workers' rights of its contestants, which could mean cast members are now entitled to federal legal protections for workers. That could open the door to more efforts to unionize across the entire reality TV genre, which is a big deal because from the beginning, it's been pretty inconsistent about compensation and protections.
--:-- New Yorker writer Emily Nussbaum: This is pretty typical industry wide. The conditions of the cast members, the hours they work, and the ways in which producers mess with their heads and the ways in which editors cut them out of order, those aren't just things that happen on Love is Blind. Those are things that are normal for reality television, especially dating shows like The Bachelor.
--:-- Shamita Basu: On Love is Blind, contestants live together. They go on blind speed dates, which in some cases end with an engagement and a dramatic first meeting, followed by a whirlwind of dates before couples go to the altar to decide if they'll actually get married.
--:-- New Yorker writer Emily Nussbaum: The whole season is filmed over just a few weeks, and I can personally attest that with the right attitude, you can watch a whole season in just a few days. Most reality shows have strict rules that contestants must follow Pretty much everyone has to sign an NDA which means they can talk about making the show or complain about how they represented or how production treated them And they can't complain if something gets edited in that didn't really happen in real life.
--:-- Shamita Basu: All of this can make it easier for potential abuse to fly under the radar, since many issues are handled in private arbitration. A woman named Renee went through the whole process, got engaged, and then was cut from the show. And when she spoke about it on various podcasts, and she was engaged to a guy who was unemployed, abusive. It was a terrible situation. When she spoke out about it, she was sued for $4 million.
--:-- Shamita Basu: This woman, Renee Poche, was paid $8,000 for eight weeks of filming the show. She's one of the contestants who brought accusations against the production companies who make Love is Blind to the NLRB. And the board said the show issued unlawful contracts regarding its non-compete and confidentiality rules. It's asking production companies to pay former cast members for lost wages.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Next, the case goes to an administrative judge who will determine if these production companies broke the law.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Before we let you go, a few other stories being featured in the Apple News app. A new January 6th report from an independent watchdog at the DOJ says there is no evidence the federal government incited the attack on the U.S. Capitol.
--:-- Shamita Basu: ABC News reports the findings undercut years of baseless claims by far-right figures who said the FBI played a significant role in sparking the incident. The investigation did find the FBI had confidential informants on site, but they were not instructed to join or encourage the riot.
--:-- Shamita Basu: President-elect Trump has said he will pardon January 6th rioters within hours of assuming the presidency.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The U.S. Postal Service's efforts to replace its aging fleet of mail trucks is way behind schedule. The Washington Post reports that of the 60,000 mostly electric trucks the Postal Service is slated to purchase, only 93 have been delivered.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The defense contractor building the vehicles cites manufacturing problems for the delay. Billions in federal funding went into this project, and it's a cornerstone of President Biden's climate agenda.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And finally, the journal Science has named the HIV drug lenacapavir as its breakthrough of the year. A large trial found the twice-yearly shots reduced HIV infections to zero, an incredible 100% efficacy, according to the journal. A second study yielded similar results.
--:-- Shamita Basu: More than 1 million people a year are infected with HIV globally. And while lenacapavir is not a vaccine, scientists are hopeful the drug can drive down infection rates dramatically and bring us one step closer to ending HIV-AIDS as a global health crisis.
--:-- Shamita Basu: You can find all these stories and more in the Apple News app. And if you're already listening in the News app right now, stick around for the rest of my conversation about family separations with Errol Morris and Jacob Soberoff.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Enjoy your weekend, and I'll be back with the news on Monday.
