The dangerous Delta variant of the coronavirus is spreading so quickly in the United States that it's likely the mutant strain will become predominant in the U.S. within weeks, according to a new analysis.

The variant, first identified in India, is the most contagious yet and, among those not yet vaccinated, may trigger serious illness in more people than other variants do, say scientists tracking the spread of infection.

The Delta variant apparently already accounts for at least 14% of all new infections, according to the research analysis posted online Monday of more than 242,000 infections nationwide over the last six months.

Another reason to get vaccinated

"It definitely is of concern," says William Lee, the vice president of science at Helix, which is under contract with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to help track the variants.

"Just the fact that it's so transmissible means that it's it's dangerous," Lee says, "and so I think you'll see outbreaks of Delta around the country and more people will get sick from it."

Helix launched the study when researchers spotted a drop in the prevalence of the Alpha variant, a contagious strain first spotted in the U.K. that had quickly become the dominant variant in that country and the U.S.

The researchers discovered the drop in relative frequency of the Alpha variant in their spot checks of strains circulating in the U.S. was due to a rapid increase in two other variants: the Gamma variant, first spotted in Brazil, and the Delta variant. The Gamma variant may be slightly better than the original strain at outmaneuvering the vaccines, researchers say.

"It looks like both of them are going to slowly push out Alpha," says Lee, whose study has not yet been peer-reviewed but has been posted on a pre-print server.

How Delta could prompt another U.S. COVID-19 surge

All the vaccines authorized for use in the U.S. appear, in general, to provide powerful protection against all the variants, including Delta. But the rapid spread of the variants is still raising concern because of the large number of people who remain unvaccinated.

"There still are big portions of the country where the rates of vaccination are quite low," notes Dr. Jeremy Luban, a virologist at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. "And, in fact, the Helix paper shows that this Delta variant is increasing in frequency — the speed at which it's increasing in frequency is greatest in those areas where vaccination rates are lowest."

The Delta variant could trigger yet another moderate surge of infections through many parts of the U.S. because of these pockets of unvaccinated people, according to a recent set of projections from the COVID-19 Scenario Modeling Hub, which is helping the CDC plot the future course of the pandemic.

The projections indicate that infections could start to rise again as soon as some time in July, especially if the vaccination campaign continues to stall.

"For the most part, it's a moderate resurgence," says Justin Lessler, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University who is helping coordinate the hub.

"We're not having massive epidemics at a national level, but we have this kind of continuation of the virus just sticking around and keeping us on our toes," Lessler says. "And in specific places there could be substantial epidemics still."

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

Chiquita Brooks-LaSure, administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, leads some of the Biden administration's efforts to expand Medicaid access.; Credit: Caroline Brehman/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Imag

The Biden administration is quietly engineering a series of expansions to Medicaid that may bolster protections for millions of low-income Americans and bring more people into the program.

Biden's efforts — which have been largely overshadowed by other economic and health initiatives — represent an abrupt reversal of the Trump administration's moves to scale back the safety-net program.

The changes could further boost Medicaid enrollment — which the pandemic has already pushed to a record 80.5 million. Some of the expansion is funded by the COVID-19 relief bill that passed in March, including coverage for new mothers.

Others who could also gain coverage under Biden are inmates and undocumented immigrants. At the same time, the administration is opening the door to new Medicaid-funded services such as food and housing that the government insurance plan hasn't traditionally offered.

"There is a paradigm change underway," said Jennifer Langer Jacobs, Medicaid director in New Jersey, one of a growing number of states trying to expand home-based Medicaid services to keep enrollees out of nursing homes and other institutions.

"We've had discussions at the federal level in the last 90 days that are completely different from where we've ever been before," Langer Jacobs said.

Taken together, the Medicaid moves represent some of the most substantive shifts in federal health policy undertaken by the new administration.

"They are taking very bold action," said Rutgers University political scientist Frank Thompson, an expert on Medicaid history, noting in particular the administration's swift reversal of Trump policies. "There really isn't a precedent."

The Biden administration seems unlikely to achieve what remains the holy grail for Medicaid advocates: getting 12 holdout states, including Texas and Florida, to expand Medicaid coverage to low-income working-age adults through the Affordable Care Act.

And while some of the recent expansions – including for new mothers -- were funded by close to $20 billion in new Medicaid funding in the COVID relief bill Biden signed in March, much of that new money will stop in a few years unless Congress appropriates additional money.

The White House strategy has risks. Medicaid, which swelled after enactment of the 2010 health law, has expanded further during the economic downturn caused by the pandemic, pushing enrollment to a record 80.5 million, including those served by the related Children's Health Insurance Program. That's up from 70 million before the COVID crisis began.

The programs now cost taxpayers more than $600 billion a year. And although the federal government will cover most of the cost of the Biden-backed expansions, surging Medicaid spending is a growing burden on state budgets.

The costs of expansion are a frequent target of conservative critics, including Trump officials like Seema Verma, the former administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, who frequently argued for enrollment restrictions and derided Medicaid as low-quality coverage.

But even less partisan experts warn that Medicaid, which was created to provide medical care to low-income Americans, can't make up for all the inadequacies in government housing, food and education programs.

"Focusing on the social drivers of health ... is critically important in improving the health and well-being of Medicaid beneficiaries. But that doesn't mean that Medicaid can or should be responsible for paying for all of those services," said Matt Salo, head of the National Association of Medicaid Directors, noting that the program's financing "is simply not capable of sustaining those investments."

Restoring federal support

However, after four years of Trump administration efforts to scale back coverage, Biden and his appointees appear intent on not only restoring federal support for Medicaid, but also boosting the program's reach.

"I think what we learned during the repeal-and-replace debate is just how much people in this country care about the Medicaid program and how it's a lifeline to millions," Biden's new Medicare and Medicaid administrator, Chiquita Brooks-LaSure, told KHN, calling the program a "backbone to our country."

The Biden administration has already withdrawn permission the Trump administration had granted Arkansas and New Hampshire to place work requirements on some Medicaid enrollees.

In April, Biden blocked a multibillion-dollar Trump administration initiative to prop up Texas hospitals that care for uninsured patients, a policy that many critics said effectively discouraged Texas from expanding Medicaid coverage through the Affordable Care Act, often called Obamacare. Texas has the highest uninsured rate in the nation.

The moves have drawn criticism from Republicans, some of whom accuse the new administration of trampling states' rights to run their Medicaid programs as they choose.

"Biden is reasserting a larger federal role and not deferring to states," said Josh Archambault, a senior fellow at the conservative Foundation for Government Accountability.

But Biden's early initiatives have been widely hailed by patient advocates, public health experts and state officials in many blue states.

"It's a breath of fresh air," said Kim Bimestefer, head of Colorado's Department of Health Care Policy and Financing.

Chuck Ingoglia, head of the National Council for Mental Wellbeing, said: "To be in an environment where people are talking about expanding health care access has made an enormous difference."

Mounting evidence shows that expanded Medicaid coverage improves enrollees' health, as surveys and mortality data in recent years have identified greater health improvements in states that expanded Medicaid through the 2010 health law versus states that did not.

Broadening eligibility

In addition to removing Medicaid restrictions imposed by Trump administration officials, the Biden administration has backed a series of expansions to broaden eligibility and add services enrollees can receive.

Biden supported a provision in the COVID relief bill that gives states the option to extend Medicaid to new mothers for up to a year after they give birth. Many experts say such coverage could help reduce the U.S. maternal mortality rate, which is far higher than rates in other wealthy nations.

Several states, including Illinois and New Jersey, had sought permission from the Trump administration for such expanded coverage, but their requests languished.

The COVID relief bill — which passed without Republican support — also provides additional Medicaid money to states to set up mobile crisis services for people facing mental health or substance use emergencies, further broadening Medicaid's reach.

And states will get billions more to expand so-called home and community-based services such as help with cooking, bathing and other basic activities that can prevent Medicaid enrollees from having to be admitted to expensive nursing homes or other institutions.

Perhaps the most far-reaching Medicaid expansions being considered by the Biden administration would push the government health plan into covering services not traditionally considered health care, such as housing.

This reflects an emerging consensus among health policy experts that investments in some non-medical services can ultimately save Medicaid money by keeping patients out of the hospital.

In recent years, Medicaid officials in red and blue states — including Arizona, California, Illinois, Maryland and Washington — have begun exploring ways to provide rental assistance to select Medicaid enrollees to prevent medical complications linked to homelessness.

The Trump administration took steps to support similar efforts, clearing Medicare Advantage health plans to offer some enrollees non-medical benefits such as food, housing aid and assistance with utilities.

But state officials across the country said the new administration has signaled more support for both expanding current home-based services and adding new ones.

That has made a big difference, said Kate McEvoy, who directs Connecticut's Medicaid program. "There was a lot of discussion in the Trump administration," she said, "but not the capital to do it."

Other states are looking to the new administration to back efforts to expand Medicaid to inmates with mental health conditions and drug addiction so they can connect more easily to treatment once released.

Kentucky health secretary Eric Friedlander said he is hopeful federal officials will sign off on his state's initiative.

Still other states, such as California, say they are getting a more receptive audience in Washington for proposals to expand coverage to immigrants who are in the country without authorization, a step public health experts say can help improve community health and slow the spread of communicable diseases.

"Covering all Californians is critical to our mission," said Jacey Cooper, director of California's Medicaid program, known as Medi-Cal. "We really feel like the new administration is helping us ensure that everyone has access."

The Trump administration moved to restrict even authorized immigrants' access to the health care safety net, including the "public charge" rule that allowed immigration authorities to deny green cards to applicants if they used public programs such as Medicaid. In March, Biden abandoned that rule.

KHN correspondent Julie Rovner contributed to this report.

KHN (Kaiser Health News) is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues. Together with Policy Analysis and Polling, KHN is one of the three major operating programs at KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation). KFF is an endowed nonprofit organization providing information on health issues to the nation.

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

A COVID-19 vaccination clinic last month in Auburn, Maine. A drop in life expectancy in the U.S. stems largely from the coronavirus pandemic, a new study says.; Credit: Robert F. Bukaty/AP

A new study estimates that life expectancy in the U.S. decreased by nearly two years between 2018 and 2020, largely due to the COVID-19 pandemic. And the declines were most pronounced among minority groups, including Black and Hispanic people.

In 2018, average life expectancy in the U.S. was about 79 years (78.7). It declined to about 77 years (76.9) by the end of 2020, according to a new study published in the British Medical Journal.

"We have not seen a decrease like this since World War II. It's a horrific decrease in life expectancy," said Steven Woolf of the Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine and an author of the study released on Wednesday. (The study is based on data from the National Center for Health Statistics and includes simulated estimates for 2020.)

Beyond the more than 600,000 deaths in the U.S. directly from the coronavirus, other factors play into the decreased longevity, including "disruptions in health care, disruptions in chronic disease management, and behavioral health crisis, where people struggling with addiction disorders or depression might not have gotten the help that they needed," Woolf said.

The lack of access to care and other pandemic-related disruptions hit some Americans much harder than others. And it's been well documented that the death rate for Black Americans was twice as high compared with white Americans.

The disparity is reflected in the new longevity estimates. "African Americans saw their life expectancy decrease by 3.3 years and Hispanic Americans saw their life expectancy decrease by 3.9 years," Woolf noted.

"These are massive numbers," Woolf said, that reflect the systemic inequalities that long predate the pandemic.

"It is impossible to look at these findings and not see a reflection of the systemic racism in the U.S.," Lesley Curtis, chair of the Department of Population Health Sciences at Duke University School of Medicine, told NPR.

"This study further destroys the myth that the United States is the healthiest place in the world to live," Dr. Richard Besser, president of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (an NPR funder), said in an email.

He said wide differences in life expectancy rates were evident before COVID-19. "For example, life expectancy in Princeton, NJ—a predominantly White community—is 14 years higher than Trenton, NJ, a predominantly Black and Latino city only 14 miles away," Besser said.

Life expectancy in the U.S. had already been declining — albeit slowly — in the years leading up to the pandemic. And the U.S. has been losing ground compared with other wealthy countries, said Magali Barbieri of the University of California, Berkeley, in an editorial published alongside the new study.

The study estimates that the decline in life expectancy was .22 years (or about one-fifth of a year) in a group of 16 peer countries (including Austria, Finland, France, Israel, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom) compared with the nearly two-year decline in the United States.

"The U.S. disadvantage in mortality compared with other high income democracies in 2020 is neither new nor sudden," Barbieri wrote. It appears the pandemic has magnified existing vulnerabilities in U.S. society, she added.

"The range of factors that play into this include income inequality, the social safety net, as well as racial inequality and access to health care," Duke's Curtis said.

So, what's the prognosis going forward in the United States? "I think life expectancy will rebound," Woolf of Virginia Commonwealth said.

But it's unlikely that the U.S. is on course to reverse the trend entirely.

"The U.S. has some of the best hospitals and some of the greatest scientists. But other countries do far better in getting quality medical care to their population," Woolf said. "We have big gaps in getting care to people who need it most, when they need it most."

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

Patrick Doherty volunteered for a new medical intervention of gene-editor infusions for the treatment of genetically-based diseases.; Credit: /Patrick Doherty

Patrick Doherty had always been very active. He trekked the Himalayas and hiked trails in Spain.

But about a year and a half ago, he noticed pins and needles in his fingers and toes. His feet got cold. And then he started getting out of breath any time he walked his dog up the hills of County Donegal in Ireland where he lives.

"I noticed on some of the larger hill climbs I was getting a bit breathless," says Doherty, 65. "So I realized something was wrong."

Doherty found out he had a rare, but devastating inherited disease — known as transthyretin amyloidosis — that had killed his father. A misshapen protein was building up in his body, destroying important tissues, such as nerves in his hands and feet and his heart.

Doherty had watched others get crippled and die difficult deaths from amyloidosis.

"It's terrible prognosis," Doherty says. "This is a condition that deteriorates very rapidly. It's just dreadful."

So Doherty was thrilled when he found out that doctors were testing a new way to try to treat amyloidosis. The approach used a revolutionary gene-editing technique called CRISPR, which allows scientists to make very precise changes in DNA.

"I thought: Fantastic. I jumped at the opportunity," Doherty says.

On Saturday, researchers reported the first data indicating that the experimental treatment worked, causing levels of the destructive protein to plummet in Doherty's body and the bodies of five other patients treated with the approach.

"I feel fantastic," Doherty says. "It's just phenomenal."

The advance is being hailed not just for amyloidosis patients but also as a proof-of-concept that CRISPR could be used to treat many other, much more common diseases. It's a new way of using the innovative technology.

"This is a major milestone for patients," says Jennifer Doudna of the University of California, Berkeley, who shared a Nobel Prize for her work helping develop CRISPR.

"While these are early data, they show us that we can overcome one of the biggest challenges with applying CRISPR clinically so far, which is being able to deliver it systemically and get it to the right place," Doudna says.

CRISPR has already been shown to help patients suffering from the devastating blood disorders sickle cell disease and beta thalassemia. And doctors are trying to use it to treat cancer and to restore vision to people blinded by a rare genetic disorder.

But those experiments involve taking cells out of the body, editing them in the lab, and infusing them back in or injecting CRISPR directly into cells that need fixing.

The study Doherty volunteered for is the first in which doctors are simply infusing the gene-editor directly into patients and letting it find its own way to the right gene in the right cells. In this case, it's cells in the liver making the destructive protein.

"This is the first example in which CRISPR-Cas9 is injected directly into the bloodstream — in other words systemic administration — where we use it as a way to reach a tissue that's far away from the site of injection and very specifically use it to edit disease-causing genes," says John Leonard, the CEO of Intellia Therapeutics, which is sponsoring the study.

Doctors infused billions of microscopic structures known as nanoparticles carrying genetic instructions for the CRISPR gene-editor into four patients in London and two in New Zealand. The nanoparticles were absorbed by their livers, where they unleashed armies of CRISPR gene-editors. The CRISPR editor honed in on the target gene in the liver and sliced it, disabling production of the destructive protein.

Within weeks, the levels of protein causing the disease plummeted. Researchers reported at the Peripheral Nerve Society Annual Meeting and in a paper published in The New England Journal of Medicine.

"It really is exciting," says Dr. Julian Gillmore, who is leading the study at the University College London, Royal Free Hospital.

"This has the potential to completely revolutionize the outcome for these patients who have lived with this disease in their family for many generations. It's decimated some families that I've been looking after. So this is amazing," Gillmore says.

The patients will have to be followed longer, and more patients will have to be treated, to make sure the treatment's safe, and determine how much it's helping, Gillmore stresses. But the approach could help those struck by amyloidosis that isn't inherited, which is a far more common version of the disease, he says.

Moreover, the promising results potentially open the door for using the same approach to treatment of many other, more common diseases for which taking cells out of the body or directly injecting CRISPR isn't realistic, including heart disease, muscular dystrophy and brain diseases such as Alzheimer's.

"This is really opening a new era as we think about gene-editing where we can begin to think about accessing all kinds of different tissue in the body via systemic administration," Leonard says.

Other scientists who are not involved in the research agree.

"This is a wonderful day for the future of gene-editing as a medicine,"
agree Fyodor Urnov, a professor of genetics at the University of California, Berkeley. "We as a species are watching this remarkable new show called: our gene-edited future."

Doherty says he started feeling better within weeks of the treatment and has continued to improve in the weeks since then.

"I definitely feel better," he told NPR. "I'm speaking to you from upstairs in our house. I climbed stairs to get up here. I would have been feeling breathless. I'm thrilled."

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

; Credit: /Rose Wong for NPR/KHN

Claire Lang-Ree was in a lab coat taking a college chemistry class remotely in the kitchen of her Colorado Springs, Colo., home, when a profound pain twisted into her lower abdomen. She called her mom, Jen Lang-Ree, a nurse practitioner who worried it was appendicitis and found a nearby hospital in the family's health insurance network.

After a long wait in the emergency room of Penrose Hospital, Claire received morphine and an anti-nausea medication delivered through an IV. She also underwent a CT scan of her abdomen and a series of tests.

Hospital staffers ruled out appendicitis and surmised Claire was suffering from a ruptured ovarian cyst, which can be a harmless part of the menstrual cycle but can also be problematic and painful. After a few days — and a chemistry exam taken through gritted teeth — the pain went away.

Then the bill came.

Patient: Claire Lang-Ree, a 21-year-old Stanford University student who was living in Colorado for a few months while taking classes remotely. She's insured by Anthem Blue Cross through her mom's work as a pediatric nurse practitioner in Northern California.

Total Bill: $18,735.93, including two $722.50 fees for a nurse to "push" drugs into her IV, a process that takes seconds. Anthem's negotiated charges were $6,999 for the total treatment. Anthem paid $5,578.30, and the Lang-Rees owed $1,270.45 to the hospital, plus additional bills for radiologists and other care. (Claire also anted up a $150 copay at the ER.)

Service Provider: Penrose Hospital in Colorado Springs, part of the regional health care network Centura Health.

What Gives: As hospitals disaggregate charges for services once included in an ER visit, a hospitalization or a surgical procedure, there has been a proliferation of newfangled fees to increase billing. In the health field, this is called "unbundling." It's analogous to the airlines now charging extra for each checked bag or for an exit row seat. Over time, in the medical industry, this has led to separate fees for ever-smaller components of care. A charge to put medicine into a patient's IV line — a "push fee" — is one of them.

Though the biggest charge on Claire's bill, $9,885.73, was for a CT scan, in many ways Claire and her mom found the push fees most galling. (Note to readers: Scans are frequently many times more expensive when ordered in an ER than in other settings.)

"That was so ridiculous," says Claire, who adds she had previously taken the anti-nausea drug they gave her; it's available in tablet form for the price of a cup of coffee, no IV necessary. "It works really well. Why wasn't that an option?"

In Colorado, the average charge for the code corresponding to Claire's first IV push has nearly tripled since 2014, and the dollars hospitals actually get for the procedure has doubled. In Colorado Springs specifically, the cost for IV pushes rose even more sharply than it did statewide.

A typical nurse in Colorado Springs makes about $35 an hour. At that rate, it would take nearly 21 hours to earn the amount of money Penrose charged for a push of plunger that likely took seconds or at most minutes.

The hospital's charge for just one "IV push" was more than Claire's portion of the monthly rent in the home she shared with roommates. In the end, Anthem did not pay the push fees in its negotiated payment. But claims data shows that in 2020 Penrose typically received upward of $1,000 for the first IV push. And patients who didn't have an insurer to dismiss such charges would be stuck with them. Colorado hospitals on average received $723 for the same code, according to the claims database.

"It's insane the variation that we see in prices, and there's no rhyme or reason," says Cari Frank with the Center for Improving Value in Health Care, a Colorado nonprofit that runs a statewide health care claims database. "It's just that they've been able to negotiate those prices with the insurance company and the insurance company has decided to pay it."

To put the total cost in context, Penrose initially charged more money for Claire's visit than the typical Colorado hospital would have charged for helping someone give birth, according to data published by the Colorado Division of Insurance.

Even with the negotiated rate, "it was only $1,000 less than an average payment for having a baby," Frank says.

In an email statement, Centura said it "conducted a thorough review and determined all charges were accurate" and went on to explain that "an Emergency Room (ER) must be prepared for anything and everything that comes through the doors," requiring highly trained staff, plus equipment and supplies. "All of this adds up to large operating costs and can translate into patient responsibility."

As researchers have found, little stands in the way of hospitals charging through the roof, especially in a place like an emergency room, where a patient has few choices. A report from National Nurses United found that hospital markups have more than doubled since 1999, according to data from the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics. In an email, Anthem called the trend of increasing hospital prices "alarming" and "unsustainable."

But Ge Bai, an associate professor of accounting and health policy at Johns Hopkins University, says when patients see big bills it isn't only the hospital's doing — a lot depends on the insurer, too. For one, the negotiated price depends on the negotiating power of the payer, in this case, Anthem.

"Most insurance companies don't have comparable negotiating or bargaining power with the hospital," said Bai. Prices in a state like Michigan, where Bai said the UAW union covers a big proportion of Michigan patients, will look very different from those in Colorado.

Also, insurers are not the wallet defenders patients might assume them to be.

"In many cases, insurance companies don't negotiate as aggressively as they can, because they earn profit from the percentage of the claims," she says. The more expensive the actual payment is, the more money they get to extract.

Though Anthem negotiated away the push fees, it paid the hospital 30% more than the average Level IV emergency department visit in Colorado that year, and it paid quadruple what Medicare would allow for her CT scan.

Resolution: Claire and her mom decided to fight the bill, writing letters to the hospital and searching for information on what the procedures should have cost. The cost of the IV pushes and CT scan infuriated them — the hospital wanted more than double for a CT than what top-rated hospitals typically charged in 2019.

But the threat of collections wore them out and ultimately they paid their assigned share of the bill — $1,420.45, which was mostly coinsurance.

"Eventually it got to the point where I was like, 'I don't really want to go to collections, because this might ruin my credit score,'" says Claire, who didn't want to graduate from college with dinged credit.

Bai and Frank say the state of Maryland can provide a useful benchmark for medical bills, since it sets the prices that hospitals can charge for each procedure. Data provided by the Maryland Health Care Commission shows that Anthem and Claire paid seven times what she likely would have paid for the CT scan there, and nearly 10 times what they likely would have paid for the emergency department Level IV visit. In Maryland, intravenous pushes typically cost about $200 apiece in 2019. A typical Maryland hospital would have received only about $1,350 from a visit like Claire's, and the Lang-Rees would have been on the hook for about $270.

Claire's pain has come back a few times, but never as bad as that night in Colorado. She has avoided reentering an emergency room since then. After visiting multiple specialists back home in California, she learned she might have had a condition called ovarian torsion.

The Takeaway: Even at an in-network facility and with good insurance, patients can get hurt financially by visiting the ER. A few helpful documents can help guide the way to fighting such charges. The first is an itemized bill.

"I just think it's wrong in the U.S. to charge so much," says Jen Lang-Ree. "It's just a little side passion of mine to look at those and make sure I'm not being scammed."

Bai, of Johns Hopkins, suggests asking for an itemized explanation of benefits from the insurance company, too. That will show what the hospital actually received for each procedure.

Find out if the hospital massively overcharged. The Medicare price lookup tool can be useful for getting a benchmark. And publicly available data on health claims in Colorado and at least 17 other states can help, too.

Vincent Plymell with the Colorado Division of Insurance encourages patients to reach out if something on a bill looks sketchy. "Even if it's not a plan we regulate," he wrote in an email, departments such as his "can always arm the consumer with info."

Finally, make scrutinizing such charges fun. Claire and Jen made bill-fighting their mother-daughter hobby for the winter. They recommend pretzel chips and cocktails to boost the mood.

Bill of the Month is a crowdsourced investigation by KHN and NPR that dissects and explains medical bills. Do you have an interesting medical bill you want to share with us? Tell us about it!

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

Moderna says recently completed studies have found its vaccine to have a neutralizing effect against all COVID-19 variants tested, including the delta variant.; Credit: Fred Tanneau/AFP via Getty Images

Studies have found that Moderna's COVID-19 vaccine is effective against several variants of concern, including the delta variant, the biotech company announced.

Moderna said Tuesday that recently completed studies have found the vaccine to have a neutralizing effect against all COVID-19 variants tested, including the beta, delta, eta and kappa variants.

While still highly effective against the delta variant, the study showed the vaccine was less effective against it and certain other variants than against the original strain of the virus.

The antibody response against the delta variant was about two times weaker than against the ancestral strain of the virus.

The news echoes other findings that the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines are highly effective against the delta variant. A study published this month in Nature found that Pfizer's vaccine was able to neutralize variants including delta, though at somewhat reduced strength.

"These new data are encouraging and reinforce our belief that the Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine should remain protective against newly detected variants," Stéphane Bancel, Moderna's chief executive officer, said in a statement. "These findings highlight the importance of continuing to vaccinate populations with an effective primary series vaccine."

The company also said it is developing a booster candidate: a 50-50 mix of its currently authorized COVID-19 vaccine and another messenger RNA vaccine it has developed.

The delta variant is spreading fast

The delta variant is the fast-moving form of the coronavirus that is now found in 96 countries, including the United States.

Last week, Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institutes of Health said the delta variant is "currently the greatest threat in the U.S. to our attempt to eliminate COVID-19," noting that the proportion of infections being caused by the variant is doubling every two weeks.

The delta variant is now infecting at least 1 out of every 5 people who get the virus in the United States. In some sections of the country, the variant is already far more common, particularly in parts of the Midwest and West. At its current pace, the delta variant is expected to be the dominant virus in the U.S. within weeks.

Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, an infectious disease expert at the World Health Organization, called the delta variant "incredibly transmissible."

"These viruses are becoming more fit. The virus is evolving, and this is natural," she told NPR's Morning Edition. "It's more transmissible than the alpha variant, so we need to just do all we can to prevent as many infections as we can and do what we can do to reduce the spread."

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

Advocates for expanding Medicaid in Kansas staged a protest outside the entrance to the statehouse parking garage in Topeka in May 2019. Today, twelve states have still not expanded Medicaid. The biggest are Texas, Florida, and Georgia, but there are a few outside the South, including Wyoming and Kansas.; Credit: John Hanna/AP

There are more than 2 million people across the United States who have no option when it comes to health insurance. They're in what's known as the "coverage gap" — they don't qualify for Medicaid in their state, and make too little money to be eligible for subsidized health plans on the Affordable Care Act insurance exchanges.

Briana Wright is one of those people. She's 27, lives near Jackson, Miss., works at McDonalds, and doesn't have health insurance. So to figure out her options when she recently learned she needed to have surgery to remove her gallbladder, she called Health Help Mississippi, a nonprofit that helps people enroll in health insurances.

Because she lives in Mississippi, "I wasn't going to be eligible for Medicaid — because I don't have children [and] I'm not pregnant," she tells NPR. When she had her income checked for Healthcare.gov, it was just shy of the federal poverty line — the minimum to qualify for subsidies. "It was $74 [short]. I was like, oh wow," she says.

Wright's inability to get a subsidized policy on Healthcare.gov is related to how the Affordable Care Act was originally designed. People needing insurance who were above the poverty line were supposed to be funneled via the federal and state insurance exchanges to private policies — with federal subsidies to help make those policies affordable. People who were under the poverty line were to be funneled to a newly-expanded version of Medicaid — the public health insurance program that is jointly funded by states and the federal government. But the Supreme Court made Medicaid expansion essentially optional in 2012, and many Republican-led states declined to expand. Today, there are 12 holdout states that have not expanded Medicaid, and Mississippi is one of them.

So, Wright is still uninsured. Her gallbladder is causing her pain, but she can't afford the surgery without shuffling household bills, and risking leaving something else unpaid. "I'm stressed out about it. I don't know what I'm going to do," she says. "I'm going to just have to pay it out of pocket or get on some payment plan until it all gets paid for."

Hoping to finally find a fix for Wright and the millions like her who are in Medicaid limbo, several teams of Democratic lawmakers have recently been hashing out several options — hoping to build on the momentum of the latest Supreme Court confirmation that the ACA is here to stay.

OPTION 1: Sweet-talk the 12 holdout states

The COVID-19 relief bill passed in March included financial enticements for these 12 states to expand Medicaid. Essentially, the federal government will cover 90% of the costs of the newly eligible population, and an additional 5% of the costs of those already enrolled.

It's a good financial deal. An analysis by the nonprofit Kaiser Family Foundation estimates that the net benefit for these states would be $9.6 billion. But, so far — publicly, at least — no states have indicated they intend to take the federal government up on its offer.

"If that is not getting states to move, then that suggests that the deep root of their hesitation is not about financial constraint," says Jamila Michener, a professor of government at Cornell University and author of the book Fragmented Democracy: Medicaid Federalism And Unequal Politics.

Instead, Michener says, the reluctance among some Republican-led legislatures and governors to expand Medicaid may be a combination of partisan resistance to President Obama's signature health law, and not believing "this kind of government intervention for these groups of people is appropriate."

What's Next: When asked about progress on this front in an April press briefing, Biden's press secretary Jen Psaki said "the President is certainly supportive of — and an advocate for — states expanding Medicaid," but did not answer a follow up about whether the White House was directly reaching out to governors regarding this option.

OPTION 2: Create a federal public option to fill the gap

Some have advocated for circumventing these holdout states and creating a new, standalone federal Medicaid program that people who fall into this coverage gap could join. It would be kind of like a tailored public option just for this group.

This idea was included in Biden's 2022 budget, which says, in part: "In States that have not expanded Medicaid, the President has proposed extending coverage to millions of people by providing premium-free, Medicaid-like coverage through a Federal public option, paired with financial incentives to ensure States maintain their existing expansions."

But it wouldn't be simple. "That can be quite complex — to implement a federal program that's targeted to just these 2.2 million people across a handful of states," says Robin Rudowitz, co-director of the Medicaid program at the Kaiser Family Foundation, who wrote a recent analysis of the policy options.

It also may be a heavy lift, politically, says Michener. "Anything that expanded the footprint of the federal government and its role in subsidizing health care would be especially challenging," she says.

What's next: This idea was raised as a possible solution in a letter last month from Georgia's Democratic senators to Senate leaders, and Sen. Raphael Warnock said this week he plans to introduce legislation soon.

OPTION 3: Get around stubborn states by letting cities expand Medicaid

Instead of centralizing the approach, this next idea goes even more local. The COVER Now Act, introduced by Rep. Lloyd Doggett, D-Texas, would empower local jurisdictions to expand Medicaid. So, if you live in Austin, Texas, maybe you could get Medicaid, even if someone in Lubbock still couldn't.

The political and logistical challenges would be tough, policy analysts say. Logistically, such a plan would require counties and cities to create new infrastructure to run a Medicaid program, Rudowitz notes, and the federal government would have to oversee how well these new local programs complied with all of Medicaid's rules.

"It does not seem feasible politically," Michener says. "The legislators who would have to vote to make this possible would be ceding quite a bit of power to localities." It also might amplify geographic equity concerns, she says. People's access to health insurance would not just "be arbitrarily based on what state you live in — which is the current state of affairs — It's also going to be arbitrary based on what county you live in, based on what city you live in."

What's next: Doggett introduced the bill earlier this month. There's no guarantee it would get a vote on the House floor and — even if it did — it wouldn't survive a likely filibuster in the evenly divided Senate.

OPTION 4: Change the ACA to open up the exchanges

A fourth idea, Rudowitz says, is to change the law to remove the minimum cutoff for the private health insurance exchanges, since "right now, individuals who are below poverty are not eligible for subsidies in the marketplace." With this option, states wouldn't be paying any of the costs, since the federal government pays premium subsidies, Rudowitz says, but "there are issues around beneficiary protections, benefits, out-of-pocket costs."

What's next: This idea hasn't yet been included in any current congressional bills.

Will any of these ideas come to fruition?

Even with a variety of ideas on the table, "there's no slam dunk option, it's a tough policy issue," Rudowitz says. All of these would be complicated to pull off.

It's possible Democrats will include one of these ideas in a reconciliation bill that could pass without the threat of a Republican filibuster. But that bill has yet to be written, and what will be included is anyone's guess.

Even so, Michener says she's glad the discussion of the Medicaid coverage gap is happening, because it's sensitizing the public, as well as people in power, to the problem and potentially changing the political dynamic down the line. "Even in policy areas where you don't have any kind of guaranteed victory, it is often worth fighting the fight," she says. "Politics is a long game."

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

Many hospitals around the country, including Medstar Washington Hospital in Washington DC., have started sharing their prices online in compliance with a recent federal rule.; Credit: DANIEL SLIM/AFP via Getty Images

A colonoscopy might cost you or your insurer a few hundred dollars — or several thousand, depending on which hospital or insurer you use.

Long hidden, such price variations are supposed to be available in stark black and white under a Trump administration price transparency rule that took effect at the start of this year. It requires hospitals to post a range of actual prices — everything from the rates they offer cash-paying customers to costs negotiated with insurers.

Many have complied.

But some hospitals bury the data deep on their websites or have not included all the categories of prices required, according to industry analysts. A sizable minority of hospitals have not disclosed the information at all.

While imperfect and potentially of limited use right now to the average consumer, the disclosures that are available illustrate the huge differences in prices — nationally, regionally and within the same hospital. But they're challenging for consumers and employers to use, giving a boost to a cottage industry that analyzes the data.

While it's still an unanswered question whether price transparency will lead to overall lower prices, KHN took a dive into the initial trove of data to see what it reveals. Here are five takeaways from the newly public data and tips for how you might be able to use it to your benefit

1) As expected, prices are all over the map

The idea behind the requirement to release prices is that the transparency may prompt consumers to shop around, weighing cost and quality. Perhaps they could save a few hundred dollars by getting their surgery or imaging test across town instead of at the nearby clinic or hospital.

Under the Trump-era rule, hospitals must post what they accept from all insurers for thousands of line items, including each drug, procedure or treatment they provide. In addition, hospitals must present this in a format easily readable by computers and include a consumer-friendly separate listing of 300 "shoppable" services, bundling the full price a hospital accepts for a given treatment, such as having a baby or getting a hip replacement.

The negotiated rates now being posted publicly often show an individual hospital accepting a wide range of prices for the same service, depending on the insurer, often based on how much negotiating power each has in a market.

In some cases, the cash-only price is less than what insurers pay. And prices may vary widely within the same city or region.

In Virginia, for example, the average price of a diagnostic colonoscopy is $2,763, but the range across the state is from $208 to $10,563, according to a database aggregated by San Diego-based Turquoise Health, one of the new firms looking to market the data to businesses, while offering some information free of charge to patients.

2) Patients can look up the information, but it's incomplete

Patients can try to find the price information themselves by searching hospital websites, but even locating the correct tab on a hospital's website is tricky.

Typically, consumers don't comparison-shop, preferring to choose convenience or the provider their doctor recommends. A recent Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker brief, for instance, found that 85% of adults said they had not researched online the price of a hospital treatment.

And hospitals say the transparency push alone won't help consumers much, because each patient's situation is different and may vary from the average— and individual deductibles and insurance plans complicate matters.

But if you do want to try, here's one tip: "You can Google the hospital name and the words 'price transparency' and see where that takes you," says Caitlin Sheetz, director and head of analytics at the consulting firm ADVI Health in the Washington, D.C., metro area.

Typing in "MedStar Health hospital transparency," for example, likely points to the MedStar Washington Hospital Center's "price transparency disclosure" page, with a link to its full list of prices, as well as its separate list of 300 shoppable services.

By clicking on the list of shoppable services, consumers can download an Excel file. Searching it for "colonoscopy" pulls up several variations of the procedure, along with prices for different insurers, such as Aetna and Cigna, but a "not available" designation for the cash-only price. The file explains that MedStar does not have a standard cash price but makes determinations case by case.

Performing the same Google search for the nearby Inova health system results in less useful information.

Inova's website links to a long list of thousands of charges, which are not the discounts negotiated by insurers, and the list is not easily searchable. The website advises those who are not Inova patients or who would like to create their own estimate to log into the hospitals' "My Chart" system, but a search on that for "colonoscopy" failed to produce any data.

3) Third-party firms are trying to make searching prices simpler – and cash in

Because of the difficulty of navigating these websites — or locating the negotiated prices once there — some consumers may turn to sites like Turquoise. Another such firm is Health Cost Labs, which will have pricing information for 2,300 hospitals in its database when it goes live July 1.

Doing a similar search for "colonoscopy" on Turquoise shows the prices at MedStar by insurer, but the process is still complicated. First, a consumer must select the "health system" button from the website's menu of options, click on "surgical procedures," then click again on "digestive" to get to it.

There is no similar information for Inova because the hospital has not yet made its data accessible in a computer-friendly format, said Chris Severn, CEO of Turquoise.

Inova spokesperson Tracy Connell said in a written statement that the health system will create personalized estimates for patients and is "currently working to post information on negotiated prices and discounts on services."

Firms like Turquoise and Health Cost Labs aim to sell the data gathered from hospitals nationally to insurers, employers and others. In turn, those groups may use it in negotiations with hospitals over future prices. While that may drive down prices in areas with a lot of competition, it might do the opposite where there are few hospitals to choose from, or in situations where a hospital raises its prices to match competitors.

4) Consumers could use this data to negotiate, especially if they're paying cash

For consumers who go the distance and can find price data from their hospitals, it may prove helpful in certain situations:

• Patients who are paying cash or who have unmet deductibles may want to compare prices among hospitals to see if driving farther could save them money.
• Uninsured patients could ask the hospital for the cash price or attempt to negotiate for the lowest amount the facility accepts from insurers.
• Insured patients who get a bill for out-of-network care may find the information helpful because it could empower them to negotiate a discount off the hospitals' gross charges for that care.

While there's no guarantee of success, "if you are uninsured or out of network, you could point to some of those prices and say, 'That's what I want,'" says Barak Richman, a contract law expert and professor of law at Duke University School of Law.

But the data may not help insured patients who notice their prices are higher than those negotiated by other insurers.

In those cases, legal experts say the insured patients are unlikely to get a bill changed because they have a contract with that insurer, which has negotiated the price with their contracted hospitals.

"Legally, a contract is a contract," says Mark Hall, a health law professor at Wake Forest University.

Richman agrees.

"You can't say, 'Well, you charged that person less,'" he notes, but neither can they say they'll charge you more.

Getting the data, however, relies on the hospital having posted it.

5) Hospitals still aren't really on board

When it comes to compliance, "we're seeing the range of the spectrum," says Jeffrey Leibach, a partner at the consulting firm Guidehouse, which found earlier this year that about 60% of 1,000 hospitals surveyed had posted at least some data, but 30% had reported nothing at all.

Many in the hospital industry have long fought transparency efforts, even filing a lawsuit seeking to block the new rule. The suit was dismissed by a federal judge last year.

They argue the rule is unclear and overly burdensome. Additionally, hospitals haven't wanted their prices exposed, knowing that competitors might then adjust theirs, or health plans could demand lower rates. Conversely, lower-cost hospitals might decide to raise prices to match competitors.

The rule stems from requirements in the Affordable Care Act. The Obama administration required hospitals to post their chargemaster rates, which are less useful because they are generally inflated, hospital-set amounts that are almost never what is actually paid.

Insurers and hospitals are also bracing for next year when even more data is set to come online. Insurers will be required to post negotiated prices for medical care across a broader range of facilities, including clinics and doctors' offices.

In May, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services sent letters to some of the hospitals that have not complied, giving them 90 days to do so or potentially face penalties, including a $300-a-day fine.

"A lot of members say until hospitals are fully compliant, our ability to use the data is limited," says Shawn Gremminger, director of health policy at the Purchaser Business Group on Health, a coalition of large employers.

His group and others have called for increasing the penalty for noncomplying hospitals from $300 a day to $300 a bed per day, so "the fine would be bigger as the hospital gets bigger," Gremminger says. "That's the kind of thing they take seriously."

Already, though, employers or insurers are eyeing the hospital data as leverage in negotiations, says Severn, Turquoise's CEO. Conversely, some employers may use it to fire their insurers if the rates they're paying are substantially more than those agreed to by other carriers.

"It will piss off anyone who is overpaying for health care, which happens for various reasons," he says.

KHN (Kaiser Health News) is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues. Together with Policy Analysis and Polling, KHN is one of the three major operating programs at KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation).

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

People rest while riding a Los Angeles Metro Rail train amid the coronavirus pandemic on April 1, 2020 in Los Angeles, California.; Credit: Mario Tama/Getty Images

Despite the racial reckoning going on in America right now, and despite the fact that attitudes towards race, inclusion and representation are different now than they were 30 years ago, new research from UC Berkeley shows that a large majority of American metro areas are more segregated now than they were in 1990. The new report from Berkeley’s Institute covers a number of topic areas, but among the key findings were from the national segregation report component of the project, which found Los Angeles to be the sixth-most segregated metro area with more than 200,000 people.

Today on AirTalk, we’ll talk with the lead researcher on the new report and a local historian to talk about how we see the findings of the report play out in Southern California.

Guests:

Stephen Menendian, assistant director and director of research at the Othering & Belonging Institute at UC Berkeley, which works to identify and eliminate the barriers to an inclusive, just, and sustainable society in order to create transformative change; he tweets @SMenendian

Eric Avila, professor of history, urban planning, and Chicano/a studies at UCLA

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

The US Supreme Court is seen in Washington, DC on July 1, 2021.; Credit: MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images

The U.S. Supreme Court ends its spring term today with two final decisions expected to come down, one involving a pivotal voting rights case out of Arizona and the other involving so-called “dark money” and campaign finance. 

Today on AirTalk, we’ll get a summary of the arguments that each side in the two cases will be making, and we’ll look back on the Spring 2021 term overall, as the nine justices will break until the fall.

Guests:

Vikram Amar, dean and professor of law at the University of Illinois College of Law

David Becker, executive director and founder of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, a nonpartisan, non-profit organization that works with election officials around the country to ensure convenient and secure voting for all voters; he is the former director of the elections program at The Pew Charitable Trusts and a former senior trial attorney in the Voting Section of the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division; he tweets @beckerdavidj

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

Sherman Institute, built in the Mission Revival architectural style, enrolled its first students on Sept. 9, 1902.; Credit: SHERMAN INDIAN MUSEUM

Earlier this month, Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland announced an effort to search federal boarding schools for burial sites of Native American kids. 

The effort is similar to the one in Canada, which found the remains of up to 751 people, likely mostly children, at an unmarked grave in a defunct school in the province of Saskatchewan.  

We dive into the history of American Indian Boarding Schools, as well as their evolution and what the schools that still exist, including Sherman Institute High School in California, look like today.

Guests:

Brenda Child, professor of American Studies and American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota; she is the author of many books, including “Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families, 1900-1940” (University of Nebraska Press, 2000)

Amanda Wixon, curator at the Sherman Indian Museum, which is on the campus of Sherman Indian High School; assistant curator at Autry museum of the American West; PhD candidate in history at UC Riverside where her research is in Native American history, especially federal boarding schools and the carceral aspects of the Sherman Institute

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

Facemasks remain worn as firefighter paramedic Jorge Miranda, holding syringe, speaks with Eduardo Vasquez, who has lived homeless on the streets of Los Angeles since 1992, before administering the one-shot Johnson and Johnson' Janssen Covid-19 vaccine as part of outreach to the homeless by members of the Los Angeles Fire Department's Covid Outreach unit on June 14, 2021 in Los Angeles.; Credit: FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP via Getty Images

In our continuing series looking at the latest medical research and news on COVID-19, Larry Mantle speaks with UCSF’s Dr. Peter Chin-Hong. 

Topics today include:

• Two weeks after reopening, LA County’s new COVID-19 cases have doubled

• CDC: Infected vaccinated people carry less COVID-19 virus

• Delta variant is now detected in all 50 states

• J&J: “At present, there is no evidence to suggest need for a booster dose to be administered”

• Novavax claims vaccine’s overall efficacy is 89.7%

• Another respiratory virus is spreading in the U.S.

• Curevac’s final trial show shot is far less effective than other vaccines

• Can we now live with the coronavirus?

• Israel scrambles to curb rising COVID-19 infection rates

• Is it time to rethink “one-size-fits-all” approach for masking?

Guest:

Peter Chin-Hong, M.D., infectious disease specialist and professor of medicine at the UCSF Medical Center; he tweets @PCH_SF

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

A homeless encampment is pictured at Venice Beach, on June 30, 2021 in Venice, California, where an initiative began this week offering people in homeless encampments a voluntary path to permanent housing.; Credit: FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP via Getty Images

The majority of unhoused women across the nation — 57% according to recent data — say domestic violence is the direct cause of losing their permanent home. 

In L.A, almost 40% of women who are homeless say they’ve experienced abuse in the last 12 months.

The choice they’ve been forced to make: Stay in danger with their abusers — or escape, with nowhere to go.

“It’s like jumping from a burning building but there’s no net to catch you,” said Nikki Brown, a survivor and advocate.

There are many, complex reasons why survivors become homeless. Shame is one of them. Yet studies show that one in three women experience some form of intimate partner abuse in their lives. So why don’t we talk about it more?

“It's the greatest secret that's super common and nobody wants to admit it,” said Brown. “There are so many complicated circumstances that make it really hard to leave. And when you can't leave, that element of shame and blame is the thing that makes it so hard to talk about.”

Today on AirTalk, we’re learning more about reporter Julia Paskin’s series Pushed Out, on domestic violence and homelessness in Los Angeles. Do you have an experience you want to share? Give us a call at 866-893-5722.

Guests:

Julia Paskin, KPCC producer and reporter who created the “Pushed Out” series; she tweets @JuliaPaskinInc

Amy Turk, CEO of Downtown Women’s Center, which advocates and offers services for women experiencing homelessness and formerly homeless women; she tweets @AmyFTurk

Nikki Brown, staff attorney at Community Legal Aid SoCal, where she has clients that are domestic violence survivors

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

Detail of boxes with the U.S. donated Johnson & Johnson vaccine against Covid-19 at Universidad de Baja California on June 17, 2021 in Tijuana, Baja California. ; Credit: Francisco Vega/Getty Images

In our continuing series looking at the latest medical research and news on COVID-19, Larry Mantle speaks with Dr. Annabelle De St. Maurice from University of California Los Angeles/Mattel Children’s hospital.

Topics today include:

• J&J says its vaccine is effective against Delta variant

  • J&J vaccine lasts at least 8 months

• WHO says all vaccines it authorized should be recognized by reopening countries

• White House says it will miss July 4 vaccination goal

• Postpartum depression on the rise during the pandemic

• Experts believe Novavax may play a role in combating vaccine hesitancy

• Delta variant is not driving a surge in hospitalization rates in England

Guest: 

Annabelle De St. Maurice, M.D., assistant professor of pediatrics in the division of infectious diseases and the co-chief infection prevention officer at University of California Los Angeles/Mattel Children’s hospital; she tweets @destmauricemd

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom looks on during a news conference after he toured the newly reopened Ruby Bridges Elementary School on March 16, 2021 in Alameda, California. ; Credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

California on Thursday scheduled a Sept. 14 recall election that could drive Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom from office, the result of a political uprising largely driven by angst over state coronavirus orders that shuttered schools and businesses and upended life for millions of Californians.

The election in the nation’s most populous state will be a marquee contest with national implications, watched closely as a barometer of the public mood heading toward the 2022 elections, when a closely divided Congress again will be in play.

We’ll get the latest. 

With files from the Associated Press 

Guests: 

Katie Orr, government and politics reporter for KQED; she tweets @1KatieOrr

Lara Korte, California politics reporter at the Sacramento Bee; she tweets @lara_korte

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

Copy of the book “Beyond Baseball’s Color Barrier: The Story of African Americans in Major League Baseball, Past, Present, and Future” (Rowman & Littlefield, May 2021)

Most of us are familiar with the story of Jackie Robinson, the first Black player to play baseball in the Major Leagues, and while Jackie’s story is arguably the biggest chapter in the story of how baseball was integrated, there’s plenty more to the story that happened both before and after Jackie broke into the Majors. Author, sports historian and Santa Barbara City College Director of Athletics Rocco Constantino dives into this rich history in his new book “Beyond Baseball’s Color Barrier: The Story of African Americans in Major League Baseball, Past, Present, and Future” where he explores the contributions of major figures like Hank Aaron, Willie Mays and Satchel Paige as well as the lesser known ones of players like Vida Blue, Mudcat Grant and Dwight Gooden.

Today on AirTalk, Constantino joins Larry Mantle to explore the history of Black players in baseball, their fight for recognition and integration into the Major Leagues and the issues of race that persisted well beyond Jackie Robinson breaking baseball’s color barrier.

Guest:

Rocco Constantino, author of “Beyond Baseball’s Color Barrier: The Story of African Americans in Major League Baseball, Past, Present, and Future” (Rowman & Littlefield, May 2021); he is a sports historian and the director of athletics at Santa Barbara City College

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

A passenger wearing a protective face covering to combat the spread of the coronavirus, checks her phone while travelling on a bus along Oxford Street in central London on July 5, 2021.; Credit: DANIEL LEAL-OLIVAS/AFP via Getty Images

In our continuing series looking at the latest medical research and news on COVID-19, Larry Mantle speaks with Professor Kristen Choi of UCLA. 

Topics today include:

• Biden to announce new efforts on vaccination campaign as Delta variant spreads

• Hospitalization rates getting worse for black residents of L.A. County 

• Which parts of the U.S. could be breeding grounds for variants?

• New Israeli data about effectiveness of Pfizer against Delta variant

• England to lift mask restrictions

• Cases on rise in immigration detention centers in the U.S. 

• Bay area zoo is vaccinating big cats and some other animals 

Guest:

Kristen R. Choi, professor of nursing and public health at UCLA; registered nurse practicing at Gateways Hospital, based in Echo Park

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

In this photo taken on February 10, 2020 a 'love kit' is seen on the bed in a room at the Dragonfly hotel in Mumbai.; Credit: PUNIT PARANJPE/AFP via Getty Images

A new survey shows that in the era of widespread vaccine availability, American couples are more satisfied in their relationships -- and some are even getting more experimental than they have been.

Led by Indiana University Kinsey Institute researcher Justin Lehmiller in collaboration with the website Lovehoney, which describes itself as “global sexual happiness experts,” the report looked at responses from 2,000 U.S. adults age 18-45, including an oversample of 200 who identified as LGBTQ, and among the major findings of the survey were that more than half (51 percent) of respondents said their sexual interests had changed during the pandemic, and many of those said they’d started trying things they hadn’t before. It also found that 44 percent of people surveyed said they were communicating better with their partner, and among singles surveyed 52 percent say they’re less interested in casual sex and more than a third of them said they weren’t interested in having sex on the first date.

Today on AirTalk, we’ll talk with Professor Lehmiller about the survey, its findings and how the pandemic impacted Americans’ views on relationships and sex.

Guest: 

Justin Lehmiller, social psychologist and research fellow at Indiana University’s Kinsey Institute who conducted the “Summer of Love” survey; author of “Tell Me What You Want: The Science of Sexual Desire and How It Can Help You Improve Your Sex Life” (Hachette Go, July 2020); host of the “Sex and Psychology” podcast; he tweets @JustinLehmiller

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

A fireworks stand, one of about 25 booths that are open for business, advertises on the first day of fireworks sales for Fourth of July celebrations June 28, 2005 in Fillmore, California.; Credit: David McNew/Getty Images

Every year in the days leading up to Independence Day, we’re flooded with public service announcements warning of the dangers and risks associated with fireworks. In LA County, where most fireworks are illegal, it can be even more dangerous as the area’s risk of fire grows. 

Today on AirTalk, we discuss the challenges in enforcing and responding to the use of illegal fireworks and the growing risks. We also want to hear from listeners. What was your Fourth of July experience like this year with fireworks? Do you think more needs to be done to crack down? Join the conversation by calling 866-893-5722.

We reached out to the Los Angeles Police Department, but the department was not able to accommodate our interview request and says updated data is unavailable at this time.

Guest:

Mike Feuer, Los Angeles city attorney; he tweets @Mike_Feuer

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

Chesapeake Bay Program — Press Release — October 31, 2024

Over the past century, technological advancements have vastly improved volcano monitoring. One key innovation was the introduction of modern borehole tiltmeters, devices that measure very small changes in the inclination of the volcano’s surface.  

From wooden boxes and nets to 3D printers and gene editing, USGS scientists use tools old and new to tackle the tricky problems of bat science

The USGS is pleased to announce the release of new US Topo maps for Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. These updated topographic maps offer valuable, current geographic information for residents, visitors, and professionals, providing essential resources for communities in these areas.

USGS groundwater and surface water monitoring data contributed to the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection's (PaDEP) November 1, 2024, declarations of drought watches and warnings for 35 Pennsylvania counties.

Adult Chinook salmon in Alaska and Canada are in trouble, and USGS WFRC scientists are in a race against the clock to find the cause behind their disappearance and a viable solution. A staple in many diets, this salmon species is considered a lifeblood of the region.

At the Cascades Volcano Observatory, staff use technical skills and creativity to solve complex problems and innovate for the future. Erin personifies the cleverness, craftsmanship and creativity that makes volcano science meaningful and FUN! 

NASA released a workshop report on the UNBOUND-FEW workshop series, which was facilitated in part by Tribal Resilience Learning Network staff from the Alaska CASC. The workshop report reveals key recommendations for making data tools more useful for climate adaptation planning.

The Pathfinding Partnerships Award from CO-LABS recognizes impactful, collaborative research projects organized by four or more research entities, including federal labs, in Colorado. This year, the Wildfire Research (WiRē) team received this award for their support of evidence-based community wildfire education to help communities live with wildfire. 

USGS Western Fisheries Research Center (WFRC) biological science technician, Genevieve Kent, is the winner of this issue’s photo contest. 

This summer, USGS Western Fisheries Research Center and collaborating scientists were delighted to find that the abundance of wild born juvenile fall Chinook salmon migrating out of the Snake River has increased by almost 2 orders of magnitude within the last 30 years. 

Geologic mapping has been one of the most fundamental mandates of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) since its establishment in 1879. Congress created the USGS to "classify the public lands and examine the geological structure, mineral resources, and products within and outside the national domain."

Are you attending the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting this year in Washington, D.C.? Don't miss these presentations from staff and partners from across the CASC network!

CDI Monthly Meetings are held on the second Wednesday of the month, from 11-12:30 pm Eastern Time. 

Mauna Loa summit webcams have been down for several months due to wind damage at the radio telemetry site. On November 7, 2024, HVO staff visited the site and performed a partial fix that brought the webcams back online.

At the tops of many mountains and along numerous roads across the USA are small brass disks called benchmarks.  These survey points are critical for mapping the landscape, determining boundaries, and documenting changes, and there are hundreds of them in Yellowstone National Park!

A new study from USGS describes a previously unknown process of marine mineral formation in the Arctic Ocean, driven by frictional heating along tectonic faults rather than by hydrothermal activity. 

Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke for the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division speaks during a news conference Friday announcing a lawsuit against the state of Georgia for its new voting law. Attorney General Merrick Garland is at right.; Credit: Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images

Attorney General Merrick Garland announced Friday that the U.S. Justice Department is suing the state of Georgia over its new voting law, saying that the controversial measure is intended to restrict ballot access to Black voters.

"Our complaint alleges that recent changes to Georgia's election laws were enacted with the purpose of denying or abridging the right of Black Georgians to vote on account of their race or color, in violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act," Garland said at a news conference.

The lawsuit marks the first major action from the Biden administration to combat a series of new restrictive voting measures passed by Republican-led state legislatures. And it came on the eighth anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court decision to gut another key provision of the landmark Voting Rights Act, Section 5.

Garland noted that Georgia experienced record voter turnout and participation in the 2020 election cycle.

In March, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, signed Senate Bill 202, a 98-page omnibus measure that makes sweeping changes to the state's absentee voting rules, adds new voter identification mandates and nearly cuts in half the amount of time for voters to request a mail-in ballot. It also expands early voting access for most counties and formally codifies Sunday voting hours as optional.

The legislation outlaws passing out food or drinks to voters within 150 feet of a polling place or too close to voters waiting in line, a provision that Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke, who heads the department's Civil Rights Division, highlighted at the press conference.

"Historically, minority voters in Georgia have been disproportionately more likely to wait in long lines to vote in person on Election Day," she said. "Given those long and protracted wait times, civic groups, including churches, have at times provided food and water to voters in line to make their wait more comfortable. As we allege in our complaint, this needless ban was passed with unlawful discriminatory intent."

Clarke also said the Georgia Legislature passed the bill through "a rushed process that departed from normal practice and procedure."

"The version of the bill that passed the state Senate ... was three pages long. Days later, the bill ballooned into over 90 pages in the House. The House held less than two hours of floor debate on the newly inflated SB 202 before Gov. Kemp signed it into law the same day," she said. "These legislative actions occurred at a time when the Black population in Georgia continues to steadily increase, and after a historic election that saw record voter turnout across the state, particularly for absentee voting, which Black voters are now more likely to use than white voters."

Garland said the lawsuit is the first of "many steps" the department is taking to protect the right to vote for all eligible voters. He said the Civil Rights Division will continue to examine voting laws that other states have passed.

"We will not hesitate to act," Garland said.

The Justice Department announced this month it would vigorously defend voting rights. Garland said that the department will double the number of voter enfranchisement lawyers and focus attention on litigation related to voting rights.

In response to the filing, Kemp said the lawsuit is "born out of the lies and misinformation the Biden administration has pushed against Georgia's Election Integrity Act from the start."

"[Biden and his allies] are weaponizing the U.S. Department of Justice to carry out their far-left agenda that undermines election integrity and empowers federal government overreach in our democracy," he said in a statement.

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, another Republican who notably defended the state's administration of the 2020 election, said in a statement he "looks forward to ... beating [the administration] in court."

Garland's announcement comes just days after Senate Republicans united to block Democrats' attempts to pass sweeping voting rights legislation.

Senate Judiciary Chairman Dick Durbin, D-Ill., tweeted his approval of the lawsuit shortly after the announcement Friday.

"If Republicans think the fight for voting rights ended with their filibuster of the For the People Act, they are sorely mistaken," he wrote. "Glad to see the Biden Administration is joining this effort. We must protect our democracy."

The Republican National Committee also linked the failed Senate vote to the Department of Justice's lawsuit.

"After failing to sell the partisan federal election takeover known as H.R. 1 to the American people, Joe Biden is now weaponizing the Justice Department to attack election integrity," RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel said in a statement.

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

President Biden signed a memorial bill to recognize the victims of the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting and offered his condolences to people who are awaiting news on their loved ones in the wake of the deadly Surfside, Fla., partial condo collapse.

Biden — who was vice president when a 29-year-old man killed 49 people and wounded 53 more in the nightclub mass shooting — signed the bill to enshrine a monument to the dozens killed in the Latin Night massacre.

The shooting occurred at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Fla., in June 2016. The month of June is celebrated annually as LGBTQ Pride Month in the United States.

"May a president never have to sign another monument like this," Biden said.

Biden also offered his thoughts to the victims and loved ones of those affected by the catastrophic collapse this week of a Miami-Dade County condo. Authorities say four people have been declared dead and an additional 159 are considered missing in the rubble.

"I just want to say, I've spoken to Gov. [Ron] DeSantis, and we've provided all the help that they have, they need," Biden said. "We sent the best people from FEMA down there. We're going to stay with them."

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

President Biden plans to visit the Champlain Towers condo collapse later this week.; Credit: Lynne Sladky/AP

The White House says President Biden and first lady Jill Biden will travel to Florida Thursday to view first hand the partial collapse of the Champlain Towers condominium.

Asked by reporters if he planned to visit Surfside, Biden said, "Yes I hope so, as soon as we can. Maybe as early as Thursday." The White House issued a formal announcement of the trip shortly afterward.

The official death toll in the collapse has risen to 11, with some 150 people unaccounted for.

The Biden administration has responded to the disaster, dispatching FEMA administrator Deanne Criswell to the scene earlier this week.

"[The agency] has deployed an Incident Management Assistance Team, as well as building science experts, structural engineers and geotechnical experts to support search-and-rescue operations, and a mobile command center," White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Monday.

Psaki said the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is also providing technical assistance for debris removal. Two FEMA-supported search-and-rescue teams are also involved in the response to the collapse.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has praised FEMA and the Biden administration for "stepping up to the plate" in providing assistance in the search and recovery effort. Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava said Biden's upcoming trip would be "an important reminder that our county, our state and our nation are giving everything we have to search for the victims of this tragedy and support the families in this incredibly devastating time."

Here's what we know about what led to the collapse. Follow more coverage on the aftermath here.

Florida Division of Emergency Management is urging people with information about loved ones who are either unaccounted for or known to be safe to call 305-614-1819.

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

Progressive activists are watching the end of the Supreme Court session for a possible retirement announcement from Stephen Breyer, the court's oldest current justice. Breyer will turn 83 in August.; Credit: Erin Schaff/The New York Times via AP/Pool

For Erwin Chemerinsky, this is a familiar feeling: Seven years ago, the dean of the University of California Berkeley School of Law publicly called for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to retire from the Supreme Court because he reasoned too much was at stake in the 2016 elections.

Ginsburg didn't listen then, but he's hoping Justice Stephen Breyer will listen now — but Breyer has given no indication whether he plans to stay or go.

"If he wants someone with his values and views to take his place, now is the time to step down," Chemerinsky told NPR.

Progressive activists are hoping that Breyer, who will turn 83 in August, will announce he is retiring Thursday, the same day the Supreme Court delivers its final two opinions of the term. But a justice can decide to retire at any time — though both Anthony Kennedy and Sandra Day O'Connor announced their respective retirements at the end of the court's session.

Chemerinsky is part of a growing rank of progressives who are breaking with the polite, political norms of the past when it comes to questioning service on the Supreme Court. Ginsburg's death last year and the subsequent appointment of Amy Coney Barrett to deliver a conservative supermajority on the court had a lot to do with that.

"I think a lot of people who thought that silence was the best approach in 2013 came to regret that in the aftermath of [Ginsburg's] untimely passing last year," said Brian Fallon, executive director of Demand Justice. "I think it would be foolish of us to repeat this same mistake and to greet the current situation passively and not do everything we can to signal to Justice Breyer, that now is the time for him to step down"

Since Democrats took control of the Senate in January, Demand Justice has organized public demonstrations, billboard and ad campaigns, and assembled a list of scholars and activists to join their public pressure campaign for Breyer to retire.

The risk, as Fallon sees it, is twofold. The first is the perils of a 50-50 Senate.

"The Democrats are one heartbeat away from having control switch in the Senate," he said. "There's a lot of octogenarian senators, many of whom have Republican governors that might get to appoint a successor to them if the worst happened."

The second is the 2022 midterms when control of the Senate will be in play.

"If [Senate Minority Leader] Mitch McConnell reassumes the Senate majority leader post, at worst, he might block any Biden pick, and at best, Biden is going to have to calibrate who he selects in order to get them through a Republican-held Senate."

Both Chemerinsky and Fallon concede the public campaign is not without some risk.

"I've certainly heard from some that this might make him less likely to retire, perhaps to dig in his heels," Chemerinsky said.

The campaign has also not caught fire on Capitol Hill, where only a small handful of progressive senators have — tactfully — suggested they'd like to see Breyer retire of his own accord.

Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., told CNN this month he did not support any Senate-led pressure campaigns on the court, but he added: "My secret heart is that some members, particularly the 82-year-old Stephen Breyer, will maybe have that thought on his own, that he should not let his seat be subject to a potential theft."

Senate Judiciary Chairman Dick Durbin, D-Ill., also distanced himself from the public retirement push, telling NPR: "I'm not on that campaign to put pressure on Justice Breyer. He's done an exceptional job. He alone can make the decision about his future. And I trust him to make the right one."

Absent any change in the status quo, Democrats will control the Senate at least until 2023. If the court's session ends without a retirement announcement, Fallon said he expects the calls for Breyer's retirement will grow louder. It's all part of what he said is a new, more aggressive position on the Supreme Court from the left.

"In some way, we are trying to make a point that progressives for too long, have taken a hands-off approach to the court," he said. "And they've been sort of foolish for doing so because the other side doesn't operate that way."

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

Supporters of Donald Trump try to break through a police barrier Jan. 6 at the U.S. Capitol. The House of Representatives is set to take up legislation Wednesday to create a select committee to investigate the insurrection.; Credit: Julio Cortez/AP

The House of Representatives is expected to take up legislation Wednesday to create a select committee to launch a new inquiry into the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, marking the latest turn in a partisan fight to investigate the riot.

Senate Republicans blocked a move last month to vote on an outside commission, leaving Democratic leaders with plans to move forward with a House select committee instead. But some Republicans who supported the independent commission now say they'll oppose the select committee.

Already, several congressional committees have launched their own inquiries into the riot, which have run parallel to criminal investigations by the FBI that have led to more than 500 arrests connected to the breach of the Capitol.

"We hope to get to the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth with respect to the events of Jan. 6," said Rep. Hakeem Jeffries of New York, who chairs the House Democratic Caucus. The committee would look into "what happened that fateful day, why it happened and how do we prevent that type of violent assault on the Capitol, the Congress, and the Constitution from ever happening again."

How the panel would work

The panel will face challenges confronted by other previous select committees, including the one formed by Republicans to look into the 2012 terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., has not yet named the chair of the panel or the Democratic lawmakers she plans to tap to be on it.

The panel will have subpoena power and a total of 13 members, with eight selected by Pelosi and the remaining five by House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif. But Pelosi has not ruled out a veto of McCarthy's selections since the panel's resolution directs those appointments to be made with her consultation.

Pelosi has also signaled that she could use one of her eight picks to select a Republican. Quickly, Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, who was recently ousted from her House leadership role by McCarthy and others, became a potential contender. Cheney hasn't ruled out the possibility, saying the final decision is Pelosi's.

For now, House Republicans, like Democrats, aren't saying who could be on the committee, but they are quick to slam the plan.

"If you look at the last vote (on the commission), it was overwhelmingly opposed by Republicans and what we've said is, look there are a lot of standing committees that have jurisdiction," House Minority Whip Steve Scalise, R-La., said. "Speaker Pelosi should be exercising that same ability — not going down a partisan route."

But this time, Scalise and others could have more company to oppose the panel. Among them, Rep. John Katko of New York, the ranking Republican on the House Homeland Security Committee, who helped broker the deal on the bipartisan commission with the committee's top Democrat, Chairman Bennie Thompson of Mississippi.

On Tuesday, Katko called the panel a "turbo-charged partisan exercise," arguing it would be skewed with Democratic picks, with all 13 members ultimately selected by Pelosi. As a result, Katko said he'll vote no on the select committee and can't envision a scenario where he would serve on it.

"I led the charge to create a Jan. 6 commission that would be external, independent, bipartisan and equitable in membership and subpoena power," Katko said. "The select committee proposed by Speaker Pelosi is literally the exact opposite of that."

How a bipartisan commission failed

Pelosi announced the plans to move forward with the committee last week. It marked nearly a month after the Senate fell a few votes short to move forward with floor debate to take up bipartisan legislation to establish the independent commission to investigate the insurrection.

Six Republicans joined Democrats to move to debate, with a final Senate tally of 54 to 35, that fell short of the 60 votes needed to proceed. Earlier in May, the House approved the commission plan by a 252-175 vote, with 35 Republicans joining Democrats.

The legislation was modeled after the commission established in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, with a panel of commissioners divvied evenly between the parties and with bipartisan subpoena power.

Ahead of the votes, former President Donald Trump blasted the plan and asked GOP leaders to reject it. Both McCarthy and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., followed suit, along with a majority of their party in both chambers.

Pelosi and other Democrats have blasted Republicans for blocking the move.

"They had an opportunity, and I don't think it should be lost on any of us that Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans turned this opportunity away to have a bipartisan, even-split commission," said Rep. Pete Aguilar of California, the chief deputy whip for House Democrats.

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

The closely-watched New York City mayoral primary election tumbled into chaos this week as the NYC Board of Elections announced it had released incorrect preliminary results on Tuesday.

City officials admitted they failed to remove 135,000 test ballots from the election management system before starting to count the real votes from Election Day and early voting, skewing the results.

"The Board apologizes for the error and has taken immediate measures to ensure the most accurate up to date results are reported," the agency tweeted.

The error is complicated by the fact that New York City is using ranked-choice voting, in which each round of vote counting hinges on the results from the previous round.

Some of the top candidates vying to lead the country's largest city blasted the board's mistake as they — and about 8.5 million other New Yorkers — awaited the results of a revised tally expected to be released on Wednesday.

Ranked-choice voting, explained

Instead of choosing just one candidate to vote for, New York City voters in last week's election were able to rank their top five candidates in order of preference.

It was the first time in decades New York used ranked-choice voting, which city voters overwhelmingly approved in a 2019 ballot measure.

NPR's Domenico Montanaro explained how the process works:

1. "If someone gets 50% plus one after all the first-choice votes are counted, then the election is over and that candidate wins. 
2. "But if no one gets 50% plus one, it's on to Round 2.
3. "The person with the lowest number of first-place votes is eliminated, and that candidate's voters' second choices get redistributed as votes for other candidates.
4. "This reallocation of votes goes on until someone reaches 50% plus one."

If just two candidates remain at the end, the candidate with the most votes wins.

What happened this week

On Tuesday, the city Board of Elections released the first ranked-choice voting reports from the election.

With only first-preference votes counted as of election night, Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams boasted a nine-point lead over attorney Maya Wiley. Those first reported ranked-choice results shrank Adam's lead to just two points ahead of former Sanitation Commissioner Kathryn Garcia, Gothamist reported.

But just hours later, the board tweeted that it had become aware of a "discrepancy" in the ranked-choice voting results and pulled them from its website.

In a follow-up apology, the board acknowledged that it had erroneously left 135,000 test votes in its election system, producing "additional records" that likely impacted an accurate tally.

"At this point it really seems like an issue of human error," WNYC reporter Brigid Bergin told NPR's Morning Edition.

"The board does conduct a lot of pre-election testing to make sure their systems are working and, obviously, that was even more important this time, because it was the first time they were using this new ranked-choice voting system," she added.

Bergin said the board is expected to release a corrected ranked-choice voting report Wednesday, but it will still be preliminary and it won't include 124,000 absentee ballots.

How the candidates are reacting

All of the mayoral contenders expressed frustration with the board's blunder.

"Today's mistake by the Board of Elections was unfortunate," Adams tweeted Tuesday. "It is critical that New Yorkers are confident in their electoral system, especially as we rank votes in a citywide election for the first time."

Garcia, who was fleetingly thrust into second place by the incorrect ranked-choice voting report, called for a more thorough accounting of what went wrong.

"The Board of Elections' release of incorrect ranked choice votes is deeply troubling and requires a much more transparent and complete explanation. Every ranked choice and absentee vote must be counted accurately so that all New Yorkers have faith in our democracy and our government," she tweeted.

Progressive candidate Maya Wiley said this week's misstep was just the latest in a string of mistakes by the board.

"This error by the Board of Elections is not just failure to count votes properly today, it is the result of generations of failures that have gone unaddressed," Wiley said. "Today, we have once again seen the mismanagement that has resulted in a lack of confidence in results, not because there is a flaw in our election laws, but because those who implement it have failed too many times."

WNYC's Bergin said she thought the misstep would not cause voters to question the election results but that it may diminish the board's reputation in the eyes of the public.

"This agency is really the last bastion of true patronage politics in New York," she said. "There's been a push to overhaul the agency, to give the staff more authority over political appointees. But ultimately that's all up to state lawmakers to do."

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

Incoming President Biden and Vice President Harris stand with their respective spouses Jill Biden and Doug Emhoff after delivering remarks in Wilmington, Del., on Nov. 7, the day the Democrats were declared the winners in the 2020 election.; Credit: Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images

We know that President Biden won the 2020 election (regardless of what former President Donald Trump and his allies say). We just haven't had a great picture of how Biden won.

That is until Wednesday, when we got the clearest data yet on how different groups voted, and crucially, how those votes shifted from 2016. The Pew Research Center just released its validated voters' report, considered a more accurate measure of the electorate than exit polls, which have the potential for significant inaccuracies.

The new Pew data shows that shifts among suburban voters, white men and independents helped Biden win in November, even while white women and Hispanics swung toward Trump from 2016 to 2020.

To compile the data, Pew matches up survey respondents with state voter records. Those voter files do not say how a person voted, but they do allow researchers to be sure that a person voted, period. That helps with accuracy, eliminating the possibility of survey respondents overreporting their voting activity. In addition, the Pew study uses large samples of Americans — more than 11,000 people in 2020.

It's a numbers-packed report, but there are some big takeaways about what happened in 2020 (and what it might tell us about 2022 and beyond):

Suburban voters (especially white suburban voters) swung toward Biden

Suburban voters appear to have been a major factor helping Biden win. While Pew found Trump winning the suburbs by 2 points in 2016, Biden won them by 11 points in 2020, a 13-point overall swing. Considering that the suburbs accounted for just over half of all voters, it was a big demographic win for Biden.

That said, Trump gained in both rural and urban areas. He won 65% of rural voters, a 6-point jump from 2016. And while cities were still majority-Democratic, his support there jumped by 9 points, to 33%.

Men (especially white men) swung toward Biden

In 2020, men were nearly evenly split, with 48% choosing Biden to Trump's 50%. That gap shrank considerably from 2016, when Trump won men by 11 points. In addition, this group that swung away from Trump grew as a share of the electorate from 2016 — signaling that in a year with high turnout, men's turnout grew more.

White men were a big part of the swing toward Biden. In 2016, Trump won white men by 30 points. In 2020, he won them again, but by a substantially slimmer 17 points.

In addition, Biden made significant gains among married men and college-educated men. All of these groups overlap, but they help paint a more detailed portrait of the type of men who might have shifted or newly participated in 2020.

However, we can't know from this data what exactly was behind these shifts among men — for example, exactly what share of men might have sat on the sidelines in 2016, as opposed to 2020.

Women (especially white women) swung toward Trump

The idea that a majority of white women voted for Trump quickly became one of the 2016 election's most-cited statistics, as many Hillary Clinton supporters — particularly women — were outraged to see other women support Trump.

While that statistic was repeated over and over, Pew's data ultimately said this wasn't true — they found that in 2016, white women were split 47% to 45%, slightly in Trump's favor but not a majority.

This year, however, it appears that Trump did win a majority of white women. Pew found that 53% of white women chose Trump this year, up by 6 points from 2016.

This support contributed to an overall shift in women's numbers — while Clinton won women of all races by 15 points in 2016, Biden won them by 11 points in 2020. Combined with men's shifts described above, it shrank 2016's historic gender gap.

Notably, the swing in white women's margin (5 points altogether) was significantly smaller than white men's swing toward Biden (13 points altogether).

Hispanic voters swung toward Trump

Trump won 38% of Hispanic voters in 2020, according to Pew, up from 28% in 2016.

That 38% would put Trump near George W. Bush's 40% from 2004 — a recent high-water mark for Republicans with Hispanic voters. That share fell off substantially after 2004, leading some Republican pollsters and strategists to wonder how the party could regain that ground. Trump in 2016 intensified those fears, with his nativist rhetoric and hard-line immigration policies.

There are some important nuances to these Hispanic numbers. Perhaps most notably, there is a sizable education gap. Biden won college-educated Hispanic voters by 39 points, but the Democrat won those with some college education or less by 14 points.

That gap mirrors the education gap regularly seen in the broader voting population.

Unfortunately, Pew's sample sizes from 2016 weren't big enough to break down Hispanic voters by gender that year, so it's impossible to see if this group's gender gap widened.

Nonwhite voters leaned heavily toward Biden

Unlike white and Hispanic voters, Black voters didn't shift significantly from 2016. They remained Democratic stalwarts, with 92% choosing Biden — barely changed from four years earlier.

Nearly three-quarters of Asian voters also voted for Biden, along with 6 in 10 Hispanic voters and 56% of voters who chose "other" as their race. (Those groups' sample sizes also weren't big enough in 2016 to draw a comparison over time.)

2018 trends stuck around ... but diminished

In many of these cases where there were substantial shifts in how different groups voted, they weren't surprising, given how voters in the last midterms voted. For example, white men voted more for Democrats in 2018 than they did in 2016, as did suburban voters.

What it means for 2022

The data signals that Democrats' strength with Hispanic voters has eroded, but that the party succeeded in making further inroads in the suburbs, including among suburban whites.

It suggests that these groups, already major focuses for both parties, will continue to be so in 2022, with Republicans trying to cement their gains among Hispanics (and regain suburban voters), while Democrats do Hispanic outreach and try to hold onto the suburbs.

However, it's hard to project much into the future about what voters will do based on the past two elections because of their unique turnout numbers.

"It's hard to interpret here, because 2018 was such a high turnout midterm election, and then our last data point, 2014, was a historically low turnout midterm election," said Ruth Igielnik, senior researcher at Pew Research Center.

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

A waitress wears a face mask while serving at Langer's Delicatessen-Restaurant in Los Angeles on June 15.; Credit: Frederic J. Brown/AFP via Getty Images

Normal is not easily defined.

The past 15 months, though, have certainly been anything but.

Americans are starting to believe a "sense of normal" is approaching fairly soon, however, according to a new NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist survey. The poll also found that with the coronavirus receding in this country, mask-wearing is declining and Americans are going out more. But they remain cautious about being in large crowds.

As the country continues to open up, more focus turns to the economy, which cratered during the beginning of the pandemic last year. And Americans are split by race, gender and politics on whether President Biden's ambitious policies are helping or not.

Race, gender, party divides on Biden and the economy

Three months ago, in a similar survey, 49% of adults said the president's policies were strengthening the economy, while 44% said they were weakening it.

Now, that's declined a net of 6 points, as 44% of respondents in the new poll say Biden's policies have strengthened the economy and 45% say the opposite. The percentage who were unsure also jumped 4 points. It's all a little bit of a warning sign for Biden, as he pushes for two large — and expensive — spending packages.

There are significant splits by race and gender:

• Just 39% of whites said Biden's policies have strengthened the economy, but 52% of people of color say they have.
• 54% of independent men say his policies have weakened the economy, while 56% of independent women say they've strengthened it. 
• 45% of white male college grads say Biden has strengthened the economy, but a significantly higher 64% of white women with college degrees said so.

Inflation vs. wages by party

A quarter of Americans rank inflation as the U.S. economy's top concern. That's followed by wages, unemployment, housing costs, labor shortages, gas prices and interest rates.

But there's a sharp political divide on the question. Republicans and independents rank inflation as their top concern, while for Democrats, it was wages. Just 4% of Republicans said wages were their top concern.

Return to "normal"

Americans are growing increasingly optimistic about when life will return to a "sense of normal," as the survey labels it.

In April, three-quarters of Americans said they believe it will take six months or more. Now, it's just half. About a quarter (27%) say it will be less than six months, up from 15% two months ago.

People are also growing more comfortable doing certain things, saying they're:

• dining out at restaurants (78%) and 
• visiting unvaccinated friends and family (75%).

But they are not as comfortable doing others:

• almost 7-in-10 are not going out to bars; 
• about two-thirds are not attending live concerts or sporting events (65%);
• and a majority have also not resumed going to in-person religious services (54%).

COVID-19 vaccines and going back to work

While half say they are concerned about another coronavirus surge, almost 9-in-10 U.S. adults with jobs say they are at least somewhat comfortable returning to work.

Notably, a majority (57%) of those with jobs do not believe employers should require COVID-19 vaccines as a condition to return to in-person work.

More than a quarter of Americans say they will not get vaccinated. The most resistant to getting vaccinated continue to be supporters of former President Donald Trump. Half of them say they won't get the shot, the highest of any group surveyed. Trump has touted the vaccine and got it himself.

Since Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines came out, noting that Americans who have been vaccinated can largely set masks aside, there's been a double-digit decline in those saying they wear a mask even when it's not required.

There's also been a double-digit increase in those saying they generally do not wear a mask. In May, 49% said they wore masks even when it was not required. Now, that's just 36%.

One-in-five said they generally do not wear masks. Two months ago, it was less than one-in-10.

Affordability, not coronavirus, limiting vacations

Speaking of getting back to normal, a majority of Americans say they plan to take a vacation this summer.

But of the significant minority (45%) who say they aren't taking one, almost three times as many cited affordability (35%) as the main reason for not going, as opposed to concerns about COVID-19 (12%).

Methodology: The poll of 1,115 U.S. adults was conducted using live telephone interviewers from June 22 through June 29. Survey questions were available in English or Spanish. The full sample has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.7 percentage points, with larger margins of error for smaller group subsets.

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

President Biden listens as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis speaks about the collapse of the 12-story Champlain Towers South condo building in Surfside, Florida.; Credit: Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images

President Biden landed in Florida on Thursday to visit privately with families whose loved ones were in the 12-story Champlain Towers South condo when it collapsed.

Biden also met with first responders to thank them for their rescue work. Search and rescue efforts paused on Thursday because of structural concerns. So far, 145 people are still unaccounted for while 18 people have been confirmed dead.

During a briefing with local and state officials, Biden said the federal government would pick up 100% of the costs associated with the response to the building collapse. I think I have the power and will know shortly to be able to pick up 100% of the costs of the county and the state. I'm quite sure I can do that," Biden said.

Biden sat beside Florida's Republican Governor Ron DeSantis, who thanked the president for his support, saying "we've had no bureaucracy" from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

"You recognize in each individual unit, there's an amazing story, and lives have been shattered irrevocably, as a result of this," DeSantis said. "We have families with kids missing. And we even have young newlyweds who hadn't even been married a year who were in the tower when it collapsed," he said.

"What we just need now is we need a little bit of luck. We need a little bit of prayers. And you know, we would like to be able to, you know, to see some miracles happen," DeSantis said.

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

Allen Weisselberg, the Trump Organization's longtime chief financial officer, watches as then-U.S. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump addresses a 2016 news conference at Trump Tower in New York City.; Credit: Carlo Allegri/Reuters

Former President Donald Trump's family business and its longtime chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, have been charged by the Manhattan district attorney's office in a case involving alleged tax-related crimes.

Before the indictment was released Thursday, Weisselberg's personal attorneys, Mary Mulligan and Bryan Skarlatos, said in a statement that the CFO "intends to plead not guilty and he will fight these charges in court."

Trump has long denied any wrongdoing.

In a statement Thursday afternoon, the former president said:

"The political Witch Hunt by the Radical Left Democrats, with New York now taking over the assignment, continues. It is dividing our Country like never before!"

The investigation by Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. began in 2018 around the time Trump's former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, pleaded guilty to campaign finance charges related to payments of hush money. These were made in the final months of the 2016 presidential campaign, as Cohen put it in court, "in coordination with, and at the direction of, a candidate for federal office." The goal was to block two women who claimed they had extramarital affairs with Trump — former Playboy model Karen McDougal and adult film star Stephanie Clifford, whose stage name is Stormy Daniels — from telling their stories publicly.

New York state Attorney General Letitia James' office launched its own probe in 2019 after Cohen testified in a congressional hearing that Trump manipulated property values to lower his tax obligations and to obtain bank loans. James' investigation was initially focused on potential civil charges, but it recently expanded to include a criminal probe in partnership with Vance.

This year, the investigators have homed in on noncash payments made to top officials in Trump's companies, including Weisselberg.

The U.S. Supreme Court paved the way for the charges, declining in February to block a subpoena from Vance's office seeking Trump's financial records. Vance first requested tax filings and other financial records from Trump's accounting firm, Mazars USA, in 2019.

In a statement released in May, Trump said the New York-based investigations were part of a "Witch Hunt," adding, with a reference to how his presidential campaign started in 2015: "It began the day I came down the escalator in Trump Tower, and it's never stopped."

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

Attorney General Merrick Garland ordered a pause on federal executions Thursday while the Justice Department reviews policies and procedures on capital punishment.; Credit: Win McNamee/Getty Images

Attorney General Merrick Garland has imposed a moratorium on scheduling federal executions, the Department of Justice announced on Thursday. The department will review its policies and procedures on capital punishment, following a wave of federal executions carried out under the Trump administration.

In a memo to the Justice Department, Garland justified his decision to halt the deeply controversial practice, citing factors including its capricious application and outsized impact on people of color.

"The Department of Justice must ensure that everyone in the federal criminal justice system is not only afforded the rights guaranteed by the Constitution and laws of the United States, but is also treated fairly and humanely. That obligation has special force in capital cases," Garland said in the memo.

"Serious concerns have been raised about the continued use of the death penalty across the country, including arbitrariness in its application, disparate impact on people of color, and the troubling number of exonerations in capital and other serious cases," he added. "Those weighty concerns deserve careful study and evaluation by lawmakers."

Under former President Donald Trump, the federal government carried out its first executions in a generation last year, with 13 inmates put to death in Trump's final year in office. That included an unprecedented number of federal killings carried out in the last days of his single-term presidency, bucking a nearly century-and-a-half practice of pausing capital punishments during the presidential exchange of power.

Then-Attorney General William Barr said the executions were being carried out in cases of "staggeringly brutal murders." Civil rights activists had rallied to spare the lives of those on death row. Concerns of how humanely the sentences could be carried out, as well as the recent exonerations of a number of death row inmates, were major factors in the demonstrations to cease state-sanctioned killings.

"The Department must take care to scrupulously maintain our commitment to fairness and humane treatment in the administration of existing federal laws governing capital sentences," Garland said in his memo on Thursday.

President Biden, who nominated Garland to the top law enforcement post, opposes capital punishment. During his campaign, Biden pledged to pass legislation to end the federal death penalty.

Some congressional Democrats have been working on such legislation, but no action has been taken. Some progressives and activists opposed to capital punishment had been expressing frustration that they have not seen more movement on the issue from Biden.

"A moratorium on federal executions is one step in the right direction, but it is not enough," said Ruth Friedman, director of the Federal Capital Habeas Project. "We know the federal death penalty system is marred by racial bias, arbitrariness, over-reaching, and grievous mistakes by defense lawyers and prosecutors that make it broken beyond repair."

Friedman said Biden should commute all federal death sentences, warning that a pause alone "will just leave these intractable issues unremedied and pave the way for another unconscionable bloodbath like we saw last year."

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

A voter marks his ballot at a polling place on Nov. 3, 2020, in Richland, Iowa. A new poll finds ensuring access to voting is more important than tamping down voter fraud for most Americans.; Credit: Mario Tama/Getty Images

A majority of Americans believes ensuring access to voting is more important than rooting out fraud, the latest NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist survey finds.

At the same time, there was broad agreement that people should have to show identification when they go to the polls.

Two-thirds of Americans also believe democracy is "under threat," but likely for very different reasons.

"For Democrats, Jan. 6 undoubtedly looms large," said Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist Institute for Public Opinion, referring to the violence and insurrection at the Capitol, "while, for Republicans, it's more likely about Trump and his claims of a rigged election."

Voting access vs. fraud

By a 56%-41% margin, survey respondents said making sure that everyone who wants to vote can do so is a bigger concern than making sure that no one who is ineligible votes.

But there were wide differences by political party and by race.

Among Democrats, almost 9 in 10 said access was more important, but almost three-quarters of Republicans said it was making sure no one votes who isn't eligible.

By race, a slim majority of whites said ensuring everyone who wants to vote can was most important, but almost two-thirds of nonwhites said so.

Photo ID is popular

Nearly 8 in 10 Americans said they believe voters should be required to show government-issued photo identification whenever they vote.

Majorities of Democrats, Republicans, independents, whites and nonwhites all said so. Democrats were far lower, though, with 57% believing photo ID should be required.

Biden holding steady

President Biden gets a 50% job approval rating, largely unchanged from last month. There is a sharp partisan divide with 9 in 10 Democrats approving, and more than 8 in 10 Republicans disapproving.

Biden continues to get his highest ratings when it comes to his handling of the coronavirus pandemic, and his economic approval is holding steady. But Americans have less confidence in his handling of foreign policy, especially immigration. His approval on immigration ticked up slightly from March when it was last measured in the poll.

By a 50%-43% margin, respondents said Biden had strengthened America's role on the world stage.

Americans are split about whether the country is headed in the right direction or not — 49% said it wasn't, 47% said it was. It's an improvement, however, from right after the Jan. 6 insurrection when three-quarters said the country was on the wrong track.

The tone has gotten worse in Washington since Biden was elected, 41% said, but that's better than the two-thirds who said so consistently during the Trump years.

Methodology: The poll of 1,115 U.S. adults was conducted using live telephone interviewers from June 22-29. Survey questions were available in English or Spanish. The full sample has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.7 percentage points with larger margins of error for smaller group subsets.

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

Comedian Paul Mooney takes part in a discussion panel after the world premiere screening of "That's What I'm Talking About" at The Museum of Television & Radio January 30, 2006 in New York City.; Credit: Paul Hawthorne/Getty Images

In the past couple of weeks, we’ve lost several industry icons, including Paul Mooney, Charles Grodin and Norman Lloyd. 

Actor and comedian Paul Mooney was a boundary-pushing comedian who was Richard Pryor’s longtime writing partner and whose bold, incisive musings on racism and American life made him a revered figure in stand-up. He was 79. Charles Grodin was an offbeat actor and writer who scored as a caddish newlywed in “The Heartbreak Kid” and later had roles ranging from Robert De Niro’s counterpart in the comic thriller “Midnight Run” to the bedeviled father in the “Beethoven” comedies. He was 86. Norman Lloyd’s role as kindly Dr. Daniel Auschlander on TV’s “St. Elsewhere” was a single chapter in a distinguished stage and screen career that put him in the company of Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, Charlie Chaplin and other greats. He was 106. Lloyd’s son, Michael Lloyd, said his father died at his home in the Brentwood neighborhood of Los Angeles. Today on FilmWeek, our critics reflect on their work. Plus they share a couple of their favorite films of the 2021 so far. 

With files from the Associated Press

Guests:

Angie Han, film critic for KPCC and deputy entertainment editor at Mashable; she tweets @ajhan

Wade Major, film critic for KPCC and CineGods.com

Peter Rainer, film critic for KPCC and the Christian Science Monitor

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

Actor Dwayne Johnson (L) and Simone Alexandra Johnson attend the People's Choice Awards 2017 at Microsoft Theater on January 18, 2017 in Los Angeles, California. ; Credit: Christopher Polk

When Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson debuted his Hollywood persona in World Wrestling Entertainment in 2003, he was two years removed from his first successful protagonist role in "The Scorpion King" and on the heels of more film success with roles in "The Rundown" and "Walking Tall." 

Little did anyone foresee that "Hollywood" Rock would buoy the overall representation for Asian and Pacific Islanders in popular film for the next 20 years.

Last week, the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative released a report documenting the prevalence of Asian and Pacific Islanders both on-and off-screen across the top-grossing films each year from 2007 to 2019.  Of the 1,300 films examined, only 44 featured API actors playing lead roles, nearly a third of which were played by Johnson. 

The report offers more staggering statistics:

• In 2019, over a quarter of API characters in the top-grossing films died. Most died by drowning, explosions, stabbing or suicides

• Of the over 51,000 speaking characters in the 1,300 films examined, only 6% were Asian, Asian American or Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islanders

• Only 50 of the 1,447 directors in the 1,300 films examined were of API heritage.

• In 2019, 67% of API characters played stereotyped roles

The release of this report comes at a time of rising anti-Asian hate crimes nationally, and the authors of the report believe the portrayal of Asian and Pacific Islanders in mass media contributes to that. Today on FilmWeek, we delve into the study's findings and discuss the history of API filmmakers and actors in Hollywood.

Guests: 

Nancy Wang Yuen, professor of sociology at Biola University in La Mirada; she is co-author of “The Prevalence and Portrayal of Asian and Pacific Islanders Across 1,300 Popular Films”; she tweets @nancywyeun

Justin Chang, film critic for the Los Angeles Times and NPR’s Fresh Air; he tweets @JustinCChang

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.