October 25 – Insurance Giants Are Sabotaging Obamacare; The Slaughter of Civilians Underway in Mosul; Again Florida Looks Like the State That Will Decide the Election

Full Program

Part 1

We begin with the sharp increase in 2017 premiums for the most popular health plans sold through Heathcare.gov that average out at a 25% increase nationwide with hikes of 59% in Minnesota and 119% in Arizona. Dr. John Geyman, Professor Emeritus of Family Medicine at the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle joins us to discuss his article at The Hill “Affordable Care Act: imploding and beyond repair” and how the big insurance companies are sabotaging Obamacare as Donald Trump seizes on the data released Monday. We will discuss the inevitable logic of single-payer or Medicare-for-all emerging from the wreckage of Obamacare that Republicans are determined kill but offer no substitute to reform the world’s most expensive healthcare that has the worst outcomes. Now, after having been bribed to get on board the ACA, the big insurance companies are abandoning it, while jacking up prices to make Obamacare more unpopular.

Part 2

Then we speak with Raed Jarrar, an Iraqi who is half Sunni and half Shia and is now the Government Relations Manager at the American Friends Service Committee at the Office of Public Policy and Advocacy in Washington D.C. where he focuses on U.S. engagement in the Middle East. He joins us to discuss how all the sectarian militias in Iraq have blood on their hands as attention is turned to the massacres underway of civilians trapped inside Mosul who according to the U.N. human rights spokesperson, are being slaughtered by the Islamic State fighters under siege from the Iraqi Army and the Kurdish Peshmerga.   

Part 3

Then finally we focus on the important swing state of Florida which is shaping up to be the key to the presidential and senatorial elections now two weeks away. Dr. Susan MacManus, the Distinguished University Professor of Political Science at the University of South Florida joins us to discuss why Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are spending so much time campaigning in Florida and how the U.S. Senate race between Marco Rubio and Patrick Murphy is tightening as Rubio is being portrayed as a “no-show” because of his poor attendance record in the senate while Congressman Murphy is labelled the “phony” because of the embellishment of his resume.