the invasion, said we are going to start the war here. rick talksdavid roda about landing on utah beach. >> usually they talk about omaha. we lost -- fourth division lost 197 men there on the beach on d-day. day we lost pith -- lost 50% of our men. weekend, on american history tv on c-span3. next, a look at how health care coverlists can health-care mistakes and costs.

this is 90 minutes. >> hello, everybody. i am a professor of journalism here at nyu, the director of the science health reporting program and the science communication workshops. you are here at the arthur l carter journalism institute at nyu. we are pleased c-span is with us as well as our usual live streaming. pleasure to have with macario and lauren

us, both of whom have found waves -- ways to do great journalism and great reporting, while also accruing very large audiences. we have a number of people in the room who would love to do exactly that. our host as always is robert of the wall street journal, a distinguished writer in residence at the carter institute. he will moderate the discussion and do the introductions. welcome to the conversation on science communication. is to dig into how we report the story of science and medicine. to do that we bring together the best in science journalism, science communications to

explore how new research reaches the public. what can journalists learn about reporting from scientists? what can scientists learn from those who cover them closely? what do there differing perspectives tell us about how the news of science is changing? how it reaches the popular culture and how journalists and scientists and doctors might the you the whole thing better than we do now. to repeat, these conversations are sponsored. this is the second in our spring series. forward on march 27, we bring together producers to unpack trade secrets of science videos that reach millions of viewers. on april 24, we are going to

probe coverage of behavior and misbehavior with psychologist. and also an npr reporter. tonight, we consider a public matter of life and death. the hazards of american health care. bad doctors, medical mistakes, crushing costs, and a lack of transparency that too often shields them. we're going to conduct a media autopsy. as we go, i encourage you all to offer your questions. use the microphone please so those of us who are watching online can join and you can tweet your questions to us.

for this conversation tonight, we are joined by one of the most influential voices in medical coverage. she is the reporter and narrator of the six part podcast dr. death. it is a tale of willful medical malpractice which at last count had been downloaded about 30 million times. joining us from texas tonight, a veteran award-winning freelance health and science writer and at recently, she won a prize for excellence in medical science reporting from the council for the advancement of science writing. by her side is one of the nation's leading health care critics. he is a surgeon and professor from johns hopkins university.

he is also the author of the book unaccountable which explores the medical culture that leaves surgical sponges inside patients, and he takes the wrong leg, and overdoses children because of sloppy handwriting. his forthcoming book which i am proud to have a copy of is called the price we pay. what broke american health care and how to fix it. it is coming out i believe in september. forbes calls this a must-read for every american and business leader. each of you is conducting experiments in the public understanding of science and medicine. i want to treat you as our spur -- first specimen slide.

i want to ask you about your work with dr. death. this is the strangest assignment i have ever heard of. the story was already well reported. the doctor in question had already been grabbed by the collar and brought to justice. you were given this assignment i a podcasting company and you had no podcasting experience. how on earth did this come to be? it completely fell in my left one day. i am a print reporter. i was contacted by the company that makes podcast. they had heard the story of christopher dent from a previous podcast called dirty john.

a listener emailed of them and said have you heard of christopher dent? they had not. even though the story got a ton of media attention locally in the dallas area, it had gotten some but not a lot of national attention. >> >> he was a back surgeon and as you might guess from the title of the podcast, not a very good one. he killed people. yes, two people. he had less than 40 patients. more than 30 of them ended up injured. two of them died. they contacted me to tell the story about what happened. my first reaction is i am a

print reporter. i don't know anything about telling an audience story. -- an audio story. i know more now than i did. that was the first challenge of trying to do this. my own technical -- will benefit was doing a story like having you tell a story people think they already know? the ending was out there. how do you start out from the first five minutes, anyone could google it and find out what happened. you didn't have that suspense that you do with some podcasts what you don't know what's going to happen. they were willing to take a chance on me. i took a chance on them. we had to trust each other to tell the story. they ended up being great and

supportive. they are not a journalism organization. they work with journalists and since i did my part, they have now worked with a lot of journalists. they are not a journalism organization and they don't pretend to be. yet they respect and support the tenants of journalism that let you tell a good story. >> i want to make sure i understand. this is not a clip job. they didn't ask you to go to google and pull down what had already been covered. they asked you to re-reported from scratch. >> yes. it was clear given the scope of the story. i'm a freelancer. you don't get paid by the hour. they asked me to commit months and months of my time telling the story in a format i have never used.

i had done an episode of this american life a few years ago. i knew nothing. i learned some working with them because it this american life, they are so good at telling audio stories. that was a 30 minute episode. this was hours of content. >> how did that affect how you reported this? >> the reporting itself was the same in terms of who you go to for sources, where you get documents. that did not change. reporting is reporting no matter what platform you do it on. what did change is how you interview. how you ask questions. that was different. i signed off and getting it was going to be the same process of

this american life where there was an audio producer there doing the recording. so i would do what i would normally do and someone else was doing the recording and all would be well. you can imagine my terror a week after i agreed to do this when i get an emailed says ok here's the fedex tracking number for your recording equipment. i had never used any recording equipment other than my phone before. >> can you give us a quick thumbnail for those who have not heard this podcast? i highly recommend that you do listen to it. can you give us a thumbnail of just how bad a bad doctor can be? >> that is a good question

because that's what i had established in the first episode. the first episode is pretty tough. it is somewhat graphic to describe because i thought to understand of the story, you have to understand how bad a surgeon that he was. he was making mistakes that surgeons never make. for example, he was a back surgeon so he is putting hardware into a patient's back. it is supposed to be screwed into the bone. in one surgery, he put a screw into a back muscle and screwed it into this woman's muscle. he left a sponge inside one patient. i had doctors tell me that he didn't even seem to know basic anatomy. he had a habit of cutting arteries on patients.

which he did this several times. one of his patients who died, she bled to death. he was so bad that one dr. doctor who came along behind him and saw how bad he had done thought it had to be an imposter. no one could have finished medical school and been this bad. someone could've come off the street and done this. that's how terrible he was. >> i want to conclude this little bit right here. how could a surgeon as in a and -- as inept and as dangerous as you have described, is how could that doctor be allowed to harm dozens of patients before he is stopped? aren't there boards and

procedures and reviews? >> that is the central question of the podcast. it became clear that this was not a story about him. it is a story about our health care system. how he operated for almost two years in dallas and he was passed from hospital to hospital. there were safeguards that failed at every turn. that is the central question of the podcast is how did this happen? i describe it as like a crime podcast because he was convicted in a criminal court. this wasn't a whodunit. you knew who did it from the first podcast but it was wide. how did this happen? >> how did this happen?

you have written a lot on this topic in the academic traditional medical press but also in the general press for us. in your first look accountable, it looked at this question of medical error. could this happen with any other problem doctors or something unusual about this case? is this a problem that many hospitals wrestle with in your experience? >> thank you for having me here. it is great to be in a place that does great journalism. the reason i love the dr. death podcast so much is that it tells a broader story of what is wrong with the accountability

within the profession. most doctors are good people. they always try to do the right thing or the vast majority of the time are trying to do the right thing. the one struggle that those of us who write about quality and safety -- we evolved together as writers and researchers has been had he prevent sensationalism? you don't want to create hysteria out there. the publicist behind the books or the editors that throw the titles on the articles in the newspapers, suddenly throw the most sensational thing out there and we are seen as christian -- creating hysteria. that has always been a challenge. even in the writeup about unaccountable referring to doctors kill people with sloppy handwriting. we don't use handwriting anymore. we have changed to electronic health records. the handwriting is still bad.

>> patients are not really dying for that reason. there is a bermuda triangle in medicine of accountability. the hospitals will say it is the state medical boards that have to police this. the state medical boards will say it is really the hospital and their department chairs. what you have is a black hole, and then you have some case like the "dr. death story that really exposes not one individual, because the bad apples are out there, but that is not the majority. how does that happen, and i just came back from a meeting of neurosurgeons. a professional neurosurgery association invited me to be a keynote speaker. in a dinner before the speech -- the association, the doctor

start talking, and they start to be very honest. within an hour or two, they start to unload and tell you this fee-for-service system that measures us and pays us by the most spine operations or the most operations that we do is driving all of my partners to do unnecessary surgery. this is just this week. they start telling me, story after individual, after case, after patient with recommended no surgery who sees another one of their partners who says, i can help you. you start to realize the problem in health care right now that dominates the field is not the one off. it is the incentive structure that is resulting in a mass epidemic of inappropriate medical care. if you look at the number of prescriptions doctors prescribed

10 years ago, it was 2.4 billion. last year it hit almost 5 billion. did disease double in 10 years? no, we have a crisis of appropriate is. we are seeing patients where they are demanding things. the problem of appropriateness is one of the biggest drivers of an industry that is now the number one industry in the united states. >> in your book, you make the point of discussing how difficult it is for patients and consumers, for you when you were not the practitioner, one being practiced upon, to get access to treatment costs and error incident rates, complications, infection rates and stuff. i saw a testimony of yours to congress a couple of years ago,

where you said that there was something in the area of 150 different registers that track patient outcomes. a quarter of them we pay for. and yet, almost none of those outcomes are made public. this is a conversation about bad medicine, not about the problem of bad medicine, but the problem of how come this story, which has been told so often, because forgive me, you are not the first medical writers to come across a bad doctor, and you are not the first doctor who is called attention to this. what is it about the story that keeps us in a loop? is it just a transparency problem? >> one of the complicating factors is that medicine is an art. stuff comes up.

you want to tailor your treatment to an individual patient, their needs, and their goals. it is not a recipe. if we measure outcomes, we have got to factor in the complexity of the patient and their unique situation, and their social situation, and how sick were they. that is what we call risk adjustment, and it is never really perfect. we have used that to an excuse to say let us not do any measurement. measurement is not aligned with any stakeholder. no individual stakeholder says we need to measure every single operation that has ever been done and will be done with in this new device. when the robot came out, something that laura has written about, why were we not measuring the outcomes of every patient that had surgery with the robot from day one that it was produced. if we did, it would've taken 10 years for our research group to blow the whistle and say, it is sometimes dangerous, it has no

benefit in a whole host of operations and is costing more money than the standard treatment. not for every operation, but for many. we were not measuring our outcomes. 99% of health care is still unmeasured. go have a knee replacement at the hospital, they will not be tracking how you do at six months and a year. >> one of the things to my point is that the instruments that we do have as patients are completely inaccurate and misrepresented, which is how do you find a doctor? you do the same way when you want to find a restaurant. >> i'm going to call you. or you look online, and some of these rating tools will consider that christopher dent, the vast majority of his

patients ended up dead had or 5 stars. >> you are kidding? >> no, i have that screenshot. in all of his patients, one of the striking things is that all of his patients thought that they were researching him, including the very last patient. he looked online, he searched every tool that he possibly could and found the patient testimonial, the equivalent of how did you do with you. he found those online, he found a video that looked like he had gotten an award, which turned out to be an infomercial, but as a patient, you do not know that. by the time that he was researching him, -- by the time that he was researching him, dent had over 18 patients in months inents over 18

terrible shape. but from what we could tell, he did not do anything different than you or i or -- would do. he thinks he is finding goes into surgery with him. dent cuts a vertebral artery and sews him up. and he almost died. you reported this, and other people have reported this. you go to the hospital, and there was more than one, and what did they say? >> that hospital has closed. it has closed. the other hospitals, in my story were not talking, as you might imagine. they were not talking, and i do not know. the big question is, these websites that all doctors use, he obviously had a carefully curated internet presence. the reviews, some of them were fake, and a lot of these online tools are a disservice to

patients, because patients do not know that they can be manipulated, and can be scrubbed. and yet, that is all we have got. >> i want to explore this for a minute. you are a newbie as a podcaster. the story is well plowed, and developed. how did you proceed in your reporting? what kinds of things did you do? is it just the actuality of voices on tape? >> i had to decide assuming -- am i going to tell it assuming that people know, or assume that people know nothing. i made a conscious decision to go into it fresh, and assume that people knew nothing. i was not going to pay attention to anything else that had been reported before.

i made the decision because it had been reported before, in order to make the story worthwhile, i had to dig up information that had not -- that had not been. and i had to find things that had not been, and explore this territory. it is how this happened. how these safeguards did not work. and, every safeguard that was in place, they all broke down. and, christopher dent, he was an obvious outlier. the vast majority of surgeons are good, capable people who care about their patients. >> yes, thank you, but it was of course you that worked out that the medical error is the third leading cause of death in the united states. so, there are a lot of rate

doctors, we are not trying to malign the profession, and figure out why as journalists and as public intellectuals, he --we can't somehow get the system whatever that is to respond in a useful way. you do not need to defend, we get it. we all have doctors that we like , trust, and respect. do not undercut your own work. >> i did make a decision that i was going to assume that people were starting from ground zero. but telling a podcast, i started listening to a lot of podcasts after i got the assignment. i did not have a lot of the tools that other journalists telling stories have. for example, there were not going to be any plot twists. the guy who you think is guilty, he really was guilty. there was not going to be a surprise ending, there was not

going to be anything that a lot of podcasts have that keep them going. it was a story that you already think that you know. i knew that the one thing that i had to do was to report it to the degree that i could and get the information that i could, because that was the only thing that really i had going for me, the whole success of the story depended on. you might think you know the story, but you really do not know. so, i had to dig out a lot of stuff that nobody had ever heard. >> and doing it while you are teaching yourself how to be a podcaster. >> i still do not know a lot about making a podcast. really? >> you have a knack for it.

to flip it around, martin, you are a trained surgeon. one, where do you find the time and energy to write three books, two of which that you have mentioned. and how did you develop the reporting tools. one of these things is interesting about "the price we pay," it is not spoken from on high, policy voice. this is a a lot of on the ground reporting. what led you that way? >> i realizef that there is a lot i do not know about journalism, and it is a humbling moment when a surgeon says, i have no idea what i am doing. i had that moment, so i have been talking to so many journalists over the years about their stories and research, and

i was fascinated by the fact that you can have a two week deadline and put together a story of conflicts of interest or fraudulent interest 100 times faster than we can do in a two year study that goes into a peer review in a journal that has a process. by the time it comes out it is outdated and the policymakers have passed laws. i reached out to marshall allen, a health care reporter, a very seasoned reporter. he had done several pieces on patient safety and medical errors. i asked him, would you edit this book for me. he, essentially not only edited, but coached me through the process. he said, for example, i discovered in one town in america that this hospital had sued half of the people in the small town for their unpaid

medical bills and then chased them down and garnished their wages. these patients were devastated. and i realized, holy crap. people do not live like me. i have a lot to be thankful for. i am a surgeon, and half of america has less than $300 in savings on hand. when they get a $6,000 surprise bill, that is catastrophic. even though it kills me, and i spent countless weekends flying to towns in america, i think it was 22 towns by the time we were done with the book. he told me, from his position, he is actually in new york and i'm in baltimore. he would be like have you traveled to new mexico yet. he said you need to get on the

ground. i would be like, we have all of the data here. and he was like, you have to get on the ground. i would say i have cases on monday and surgery scheduled. so, getting on the ground i met one woman who invited me to her house. she is a single mom, two kids, and i cannot believe the conditions that she was living in. she told me the story of how her car was in the shop, she could not afford the $800 bill to get the car out of the shop, so she could not get to work. she worked two minimum-wage jobs and she was devastated by a $2000 bill when her kid had asthma and they went to the emergency room. that bill, based on pricing, should not have exceeded $600. i could only get that on the ground.

i learned so much on the ground, visiting how an ambulance company gouges patients. talking to insurance companies and doctors. i'm convinced that health care well, there are health insurance brokers. i did not even know this profession existed, and they have their own conferences. i went to the conference, and if you get a drink or two into them at the conference, they will tell you, our system and our profession is messed up. we get paid giant kickbacks from health insurance companies, so we do not always present all of the options to the businesses, and they are getting ripped off left and right. we are making a killing and it is wrong and it is the untold dirty secret of why health insurance is going up so high. i do not know whether or not that is true, but i have heard it so many times from people on the ground, i was able to do a deep dive on how health insurance is sold to businesses and give them guidance on how

you should buy health insurance for your employees. and pharmacy benefit plans. we had so much stuff that was like, oh my god, we have got to tell somebody. >> so this is the thing -- you got to tell somebody. scientists, lot of post-docs, phd's, that want to reach out to the public directly about their work, maybe they have issues that they care about. a constant refrain. they are always a little nervous about doing this, because there is a widespread belief that there could be a professional cost to putting yourself as a researcher. putting that out there. either this is a show off, or, you know, you are really telling tales. you are revealing the dirty secrets. so i am wondering, you are not a journalist. you are a surgeon. you work by referrals.

you have hospital privileges, it is a network. so have you -- has this cost you anything? is there a backlash here because you keep shooting your mouth off about this stuff, if i put it that way? >> i think anytime if you write a book or even an article, it will be perceived by some as self-promotional. and especially if the media the topic, or if you get one blogger that goes off on it and calls it something -- i think there is a little bit of a courage that it takes to just talk frankly about this. i was talking to a doctor, a prominent u.s. surgeon recently who told me how he could not believe that another surgeon that he works close to openly says he only operates on people he does unnecessary

surgery, borderline back pain, only if they have a very favorable type of insurance that pays them well. he said this openly. my friend says that it is weighing on his ethics and consciousness. we went into medicine for a good reason and he is hearing this and struggling with it. i am thinking, talk to the department chair. it is so hard. i think one of the reasons why we do not have, for example, full negotiated price transparency on what insurance companies are actually paying and some of the commonsense reforms is that almost everyone speaking up on health care today, all of the experts and all of the big panel that the conferences, they are beholden to some giant special interest. they either work at a hospital and are beholden to the hospital special interest, one of the three biggest lobbies in the united states, they are beholden to insurance companies. they are beholden to pharma, they are cold and -- they are beholden to somebody, and you do not get the honest opinion. i know doctors who come up to me and say, i totally agree with everything you are saying about

the inappropriate care, i see it all the time. writesay, why don't you something or say something? why don't you teach this to their students? and they are worried about their internal promotion at the institution. >> are you? >> no, i don't care. i am a cancer surgeon, i break bad news all the time. you only live once. you've got to speak truth. who is going to challenge the special interests? when i met jennifer in new mexico, she is getting hammered by the system. people are getting crushed by their medical bills. 24% of americans are not seeking medical care for fear of being price gouged. if there is one thing in medicine that defines health care today, it is the business model of price gouging have taken over. be it an air ambulance, lab test, er visit or whatever. they pull it out of the master

hospital bill, bill you separately -- people are getting gouged. one in five americans have medical debt in collections. that is not who we are as a profession. when salt invented the polio inventedhe was -- salk the polio vaccine, he did not get a patent on it because he said he wanted every child to getting inout money the way. >> here you have reported in exquisite and quite dramatic detail the absolute kind of worst case, nightmare scenario. this is a local doctor, and in your hometown, texas, your backyard. i am wondering how the medical community that stonewalled you when you were trying to report this, what kind of feedback did you get as this started to unfold? >> oh my gosh. my inbox is still, i think, on fire. i got so many emails from that

they ran thell, gamut from people who said, i cannot believe that anything like this ever happens, or i can totally see how this happens. and a lot of it, if i had to group a majority of responses, from any group, it would have to be nurses. i heard a lot from nurses, or o.r. nurses. -- o.r. nurses. they say it is hard because of the power imbalance and it is hard for us when we see a doctor who we don't think should be operating, because because a lot of times it is the surgeon and then the nurses and the surgeons operate by themselves. and they, a lot of times, have a huge dilemma, and i heard from a lot of nurses who are like, we have been talking and we cannot stop talking about what we would do if we saw this, and we have had a lot of lively discussions

about how could we speak up and would we still keep our jobs? i heard from other doctors who, again, who said this prompts a lot of discussion because of the surgeons pushing back against christopher dent, they themselves had a lot of pushback at the time. like, why don't you let this go? why is this your problem? other doctors policing themselves. i have heard from medical schools. >> medical schools? >> medical schools, residencies. remember, this guy got out of residency and was operating straight out of residency. one of the big unanswered questions of the podcast, because they wouldn't speak at all, was how did he get out of residency? how did a surgeon this bad even finish a residency program? that question is still unanswered. and a lot of residency directors

said, how could this happen? really, all walks of the medical community -- i think one of the most gratifying things about telling a story like this is i can tell you, there has been a lot of soul searching. and i will tell you, one of the most moving stories i got from a doctor was an anesthesiologist. i do not to give any details too would reveal anything graphically, but he had witnessed a bad surgeon, and he knew that this particular surgeon had been responsible, he thought, for patient death. or five or six. and now that surgeon was at another hospital. he said, i cannot tell you how much your podcast affected me, because this surgeon was so terrible, and i knew the was -- the surgeon was terrible, and i never had the courage to say anything. and hearing these doctors who

did have the courage -- he said that it affected me so much that i've had to retire, because i cannot practice anymore because i am so guilt-ridden. >> let me ask you something. so you used to work for the dallas newspaper. >> yeah. >> the podcast, it is a one-off, more or less. you tell the story once and you walk away. and just at the moment when you are actually getting an awful lot of great tips and follow-up material that, in a different universe and another day, would be the source of many follow-up sustained reporting campaign, perhaps, to address this problem that we all agree is a huge national issue. of course, it expresses itself locally, as all things do. what do you do with all of this wonderful follow-up material that you now have? >> you mean from -- --

>> other doctors, other hospitals? >> i have gotten tons. it would be depressing if i did not know that this was uncommon. the number of messages that i have received from people saying you really should look into this doctor. it is a lot. >> so what do you do with that? in some cases it has been so bad in some cases it has been so bad that i contact local reporters at local papers, because i cannot do another six part podcast about another bad doctor. i have had conversations across the country with local reporters, saying here is this tip from somebody, you should keep an eye on this doctor. but it is hard because local papers, as you know, are struggling and do not have the manpower to do this. but i have had several conversations with local papers about doctors in their community, and i wanted to put them on their radar. so -- because i can't follow-up

about, and i do not want to do another story about another bad surgeon. i feel like that should be a job of someone locally to do it. and i had an advantage because that was local. that was in my backyard. it would be really hard to report on one particular surgeon that ieland, in a city did not live in and i did not have local contacts and i could not follow up and could not be on the ground and drive over to someone's house. >> it seems like a dilemma, it is the thing. you do a big series and investigative project, you shake the tree and the fruit falls. >> yeah. >> and you are kind of not in a position to make use of that fruit. >> no, but i have tried to pass the fruit onto people who can. >> i think we have a question here. >> this is a question from someone on twitter who wants to

know, you alluded to the fact that you are a freelancer and taking on this project was not necessarily an easy call. how do you make freelancing work for you day-to-day? >> that is a really good question. freelancers ask that of themselves all the time. so in terms of making the call to do the podcast, it -- freelancers have a terrible -- if you get freelancers together, everyone has their horror story of work that they did that they were not paid for, because they did work for some publication and the publication went out of business and they did not get paid. even brand names they did not recognize, some businesses declare bankruptcy and reconstitute themselves and you are high and dry. and given that this was a new company that i had not heard of and they were asking me to

commit a substantial amount of time to do. i said ok, this is all well and good, but i want to talk to your ceo and know how much money you have in the bank. >> did you really? >> oh yes. >> you are a very practical person. >> i said, i want to talk to your ceo. i want you to tell me how much money you have, and i want you to tell me that i am not going to do this much work and then you are going to come up to me and say that your company does not exist anymore. they have gotten more successful in the past year. and to their great credit, they said ok, and i talked to the ceo and found out how much money they had. and i signed onto the project. but it is hard, and you have to have a mix of -- i did not come up with this, but it is great advice when you're freelancing. rule -- i have heard different numbers -- i have

heard the 5-1 rule, freelancing. if you are doing five stories, you want the one that you are really passionate about and the one that you enjoy and really want to do, even though you may or may not be getting enough money to live off of, and you have the four others that you are doing because your family has to eat. and so if you've got that one that you are doing all the time that you are passionate about and you really enjoy, you supplement that and diverse if i ersify, take on other assignments that you may not enjoy. i would recommend you want to keep a variety of paying customers across the way so that if you lose any particular one, you are not high and dry. but the issue with the podcast is if i lost this particular one, i was completely screwed. did you have to negotiate movie -- >> did you have to negotiate movie rights?

"serial" is an hbo thing. >> i was completely new to the audio contract. so i did not do much negotiating, because i had no idea. i had no idea what was going into the project. i had no idea about any of this. and i didn't negotiate that much. i mean, it seemed reasonable to say, they wereto not out to take advantage of me. i was new to them too. when they did "dirty john," they worked with richburg offered, offeret, christopher who was a reporter for the los angeles times. the los angeles times was paying his salary. they did not have to negotiate with an individual writer. i did not do that much negotiation. for example, dr. death is going to be made into a movie. i don't get any of that. but contract number 2 -- [laughter]

>> there was an era when magazine stories were picked producers very heavily, and podcasting has tv,me the next source of this, that, and the other thing. >> we have been talking about what journalists always do. which is we look for the compelling examples, and we try to show they are part of a systemic problem. one thing that we are really bad at, and it is hard enough to find those as examples. it is amazing that laura found them the way she did, and marty too, in his travels. but we are worse at writing about policy. big picture health care. this might be totally naive on my part, but it feels like we may, in the next two years, be

actually moving toward a very large expansion of medicare, maybe. something single-payer-ish. and we should be writing about that. but i think we really struggle, and one of the reasons is it is not clear what that would mean for quality of care. so can you each talk about that a little bit? would dr. death have had a harder time killing his patients if we had a single payer type system? marty, the same thing for your explorations. >> well, i can tell you in this one situation, the question is how the income stream affects the care. and i was very conscious of the fact and i reported that in the story that one of the things that kept propelling him and enabling him to get a job was that he was a neurosurgeon. he was a neurosurgeon.

neurosurgeons make a lot of money for a hospital. and i -- one of the great quotes in there is i talked to a neurosurgeon in dallas about that. who was terrific and has been around a long time. do hospitals keep hiring him, even though there were all of these red flags? and he said, because i'm a cash cow. he just said that exactly. and to answer the question, i can't say if single-payer would have stopped them sooner, but i can say that a lot of the reason that he kept on practicing had to do with the fact that there was money to be made. you know, he could bring in a lot of money. >> marty, you have given a lot of thought to the prescription

cure. what would you say to answer dan's question? >> i think it is a great question that dan brought up. i would say to a group of rising journalists in health care, i would point you to a few health care journalists that have done a lot of work to figure. -- figure out who is writing about certain things and who has new ideas, and i would say that there are about four health care journalists that have taken so much time to get to know me and our research, they haven't visited our research group, -- they have visited our research group, we have had long conversations, when i have an idea, they will run it by the other stakeholders and test it. those deep relationships are where journalists will come up with gold. it is on the ground work, it is building relationships. one of my colleagues, gerry

anderson at johns hopkins, i think he is the world expert on drug pricing. he's got some great ideas. there are a small group of journalists that reached out to him. talk to him, anybody. i love seeing people interested in journalism. we need more of it, and what i would love to see is what we do we have hundreds of thousands of writers and researchers writing in a world that has a 2, 3, 5 year lifetime , and journalism, which is very fact oriented, fact checking, get your evidence -- there is editing, but it is one week, one month, a six-month turnaround sime, and it affect policy, and we are talking in two separate silos. there are a bunch of us in medicine that are trying to merge that divide. one of our biggest struggles is the traditional editors of the medical journals. it is the internal promotions

process, and medical schools where you only get promoted if you publish in certain journals. we just had a back and forth with one of the top editors in the united states for a leading medical journal -- >> which one? journal of the american medical association, number two and number one in readership, about writing individual sentences, taking out a sentence that says "congress should repeal the 1987 amendment that makes pharmacy benefit managers exempt from the sherman antitrust act." they said, we don't like to recommend legislative action, and they cut it right out, even though it is in a commentary format. even though i am a little afraid to say this in public with the cameras on, we are all afraid of getting blackballed. i am a cancer surgeon, i don't care what people think of me. i will find a place to publish it if the leading journals don't

take it, but we have to write in a certain way, and that way has not changed in 100 years. can we just say look, we can talk to the public. we don't have to do it in this robotic format. by the way, hardly anyone reads these things -- we can write in the wall street journal. those would be some of the most effective articles when we put out our research. i have told our team, this teeth on hospitals -- this piece on hospitals suing patients that is coming out. if the top medical journals don't take it, we will take it straight to the new york times and the washington journal. so thank you for doing journalism. if we had more health care journalists, we could have more accountability around 1/5 of the u.s. economy. there is an unlimited number of stories -- just talked to the doctors and neurosurgeons, come to the neurosurgery conference. >> thank you. [laughter] let me ask. i am a new reporter for reasons.

who knows why -- i'm interested in exploring medical issues and health care. where should i look? where should i start? what stones should i be turning over? >> call one of the smartest policy minds in harvard and have lunch with him, he will say yes. i can't speak for him, but these are our colleagues and they have great ideas. they are practical, they have been on the ground, they know what the special interests need and want, so they have feasible ideas, not pie-in-the-sky, ivory tower, academic stuff. medicare just released, apart from us demanding a lot more transparency and some of the stuff that has come out of our writing -- we have demanded that medicare claims data, saying if taxpayers pay for it, they deserve to see it. we now have data on sufficient practice patterns. we can tell which doctor has a practice pattern that is extremely dangerous.

when our research team sees that data and we see the doctors think holy crap, what do we do with this? no one has cut the data to look at individual practice patterns. who brings the patient after the lumpectomy surgery, brings them back 50% of the time to react side that? cise it? we have the names. we need to write about that and the other 400 practice patterns. these doctors need help and accountability. let's start in a civil way. but if they do not respond, maybe we talk about sending the names to the professional just soand saying hey, you know, here are the top 10 most extreme doctors in this complication practice pattern that we see in the medicare data. we would encourage you to address this with them. create some accountability. >> i've got another question

from twitter. "we arewrote to ask talking about journalism as espousing the truth. the new york times is waging a war against trump on the premise of truth. how do you qualify truth and what is the danger of defining what it is in particular situations?" >> i, unfortunately -- journalism has a great tradition. it is like medicine. an incredibly noble tradition. i know so many journalists, unfortunately, that are so out to take trump down that they let personal sense of -- i guess it is patriotism they feel get into their writing. i have to be honest with you. i met with trump a few weeks ago. i met with secretary a's -- secretary azar. i have been impressed at the responsiveness to some of these new ideas we have put out there.

the positions like the pharmacy rebate. the so-called rebate. the federal rebate, it is a kickback to the middleman. they call it a rebate because they think it is like a rebate at a supermarket. it is a nice thing. it is a kickback to the middleman. we explained it to them and they got it and they were on top of they announced -- top of it. they announced, no more kickbacks to middlemen. they want 100% of those rebates to go directly to the patient instead of the middlemen taking the money out of the system. we will see if it passes the rules and the legal challenges. they are listening and they are doing some really good stuff. there is good and bad. unfortunately, when we see some of these good announcements, i know too many health care journalists that are saying this makes trump look good, so we are not going to cover it. i am seeing that bias. the wall street journal this week said the administration is going to push for total transparency of the negotiated prices that are paid at that amount from insurance companies to hospitals, totally lifting

priceil on transparency would cut waste, -- it got 1 wall st journal article. -- one wall street journal article. thank you for writing for the wall street journal. this is big news. it is gigantic. those are some things to keep in mind in health care journalism. >> do you see a difference between facts and truth? is no journalist that i know, and we know a lot of journalists, no journalist that i know i don't think would willingly report anything that is wrong. like wouldn't set out and do a story with an idea that what they were recording was not right or their facts were wrong. the trap i can see and that i do see is journalists falling into the trap of their own

confirmation bias. >> i wanted to ask you about that, so please. >> i do see that, journalists who might think in their head i know the story. i know this, you get a tip on the story and you think this is it. and therefore, you find the facts and the individual facts might be true. i don't think any journalists would again report a fact that is incorrect if they knew it was incorrect. but you can put the facts together and you can see the facts that support the narrative that you already believe and feed into that. and you publish your story. and you would have a story that would be factually true but not -- the individual facts might be true but the overarching truth might not be.

and i don't even know if journalists realize that. i don't think most journalists would do it, but i can see and i do see and i am sure we have read stories like that, where journalists aren't constantly themselves -- asking themselves ok, what is an alternative explanation for what i'm seeing? and i am not saying i'm immune to this. every person falls victim to individual fact would be true. and i don't know of a journalist who would report facts that were true, but i could see that inc. pieced together in a way that is not true. ckst: this is a pa journalism? happens whens a

journalists might not ask the tough questions, or it is an attempt to so much be not the pack that you want to be edgy and report the story and so you report on the others of something that may or may not be true, i can see that. i can't see a journalist willingly reporting something that is not true, that i can see them being blinded by their own confirmation bias. into thes gets question that, oftentimes there is a difference between you, who are a policy person, but you are doing journalistic things, out in the field, talking to people those arecare, journalistic techniques, but you are confident in your policy judgment. you,'t want to speak for

but that is exactly what we are trained not to be confident in, that it is somebody else's job to come up with a solution. so you didn't really answer dan's question, which is why i would like to bring it back. so are the things we are talking about, these systemic flaws, medical error, the costs you are very passionate about, are these baked into this system? and if we change the system, to use the example dan put forward, a single-payer model, with those problems disappear? i'm from washington dc, so we are very good at not answering questions directly. here's the problem. single-payer is very attractive, especially right now, because it cuts a lot of the middlemen out. host: the people you say are the problem. pharmacy manager kickback, the gpo, all those get eliminated immediately with the single-pair system.

it is very attractive right now, especially with record levels of waste. here is the problem with single-payer. 10 years into it, 20 years into it, every country in the world that has adopted can't resist tightening the belt a little more every year. you go down the road and it is a massively underfunded infrastructure. we have seen it with medicare, medicare cut every year a little more, a little more, little more. of can coming in the middle the night now and take out someone's appendix at 2:00 in the morning, all kinds of difficult work, and get paid $230 or something like that. $1000 case, be a but every year it gets cut, cut, cut. so i don't think medicare for all is a lasting solution. it is a short-term, immediate meeal but over time, let give you a million times better alternative to medicare for all.

make full price transparency, including the negotiated prices for all shop at both services totally transparent, and let competition eliminate the waste in the system. and that is why i wrote the book , the price we pay. i heard so many people in the profession of medicine, in their job in the health-care industry say, my job in doing this is a total joke, if we had fair competition i would not even need to exist. january 2018, health care became the number one business in the united states that is not something to be proud of. record rates of inappropriate care, so i don't think medicare for all is a real solution. we need price transparency. he administration right now, thanks to "the wall street journal" they only got one article and are actually considered price transparency of the actual, negotiated prices, the real prices, not some jacked

up, artificial price that is 25% higher than what they would take from some insurance company for the same service. there is a joke knowing on and the joke is on the american patient, jacking up a bill and then having some secret deal. if you go to a restaurant there is not a menu for you, and you, person whonority, works for this company, special-interest, there is not six menus, there is one menu, and if we had that for health care, people could shop. >> i wonder if people are aware thinkt, because if people medicine operates under the normal rules of capitalism, when it doesn't. i've heard this argument that we need to let market forces do it, get the government out of health care, this is a very popular ifme, and yet i don't know they realize that it might have the illusion of capitalism, but it isn't really.

how much awareness do you think payle have of how much they as a result of that? thanksink more and more, to health care journalists that are writing about the absurdity of a $40,000 rabies shot and stories like this. right now the price transparency train has left the station. momentum. tremendous the american people love it. who doesn't like transparency? but right now there is an attempt to hijack it with this argument, people don't shop based on price. few people look at prices and when they do they pick the most expensive thing. that is a distracting conversation because even though only a fraction of people would use the price to shop, proxies use the prices, health plans use the prices, employers shopping on your behalf use the prices,

insurance companies are scoping there in-network centers and use the prices, so proxies use the prices. and we are hearing this old argument from an old study, if you show the study -- if you somebody the price and they are not paying, they pick the most expensive thing. guess what? the average deductible in the united states is $5,000, people are starting to pay, some people look at prices and that will drive the market to change and then the proxies will drive the market to change. so don't let anyone ever tell you price transparency is not going to work because people don't look at prices. that is a distraction. if you said, i have this do onstory idea i want to a podcast on price transparency. would that happen? >> it depends. you would have to find a way to tell that story. this is the challenge you brought up earlier.

you would have to find a way to tell that story that makes it relevant and engaging for people, and there are reporters who do that. marshall allen is a master at being able to tell policy stories in a way that makes sense completely, engaging to people. so i think yes. it would just depend on how you tell the story. one reason journalists don't do it more is number one, it is hard, it is hard to do this. i think also, a lot of journalism, less and less but it is happening in local newsrooms, and they don't have the resources, the time, the ability to be able to tell these stories of individual patients and how they are affected. yes, it just depends on -- you would have to figure out a way to tell it in such a way that people are going to go first 15 minutes and

not think, this is boring. do podcastsnts to on the new book, i would be happy about that. host: it is not a theoretical question in the following way. as we said at the beginning, this is a much-told story. has ais no secret america problem with the health care system, with costs, with medical that, and these are things articulate policy analysts and critical medical journalists have well discussed, and yet we are still in the station. and if the train pulls out and goes that way toward state-payer or is it certified surgeons need be reformed, or whatever, we seem to be stuck. and i find that curious.

because every journalist wants to change the world and every health care policy analyst wants to change the world in a shape that they have in mind. it is curious to me why this particular thing seems to be so intractable. i can't answer that. i'm not a policy person. i don't know. i'm out there trying to tell the stories to get things to change, i'm not in a position to make the changes, so i don't know. it's a good question, but i can't answer. i'm incredibly optimistic about the future of health care and it has nothing to do with the government. employers are fed up with the traditional way of doing business. they are doing direct contracting based on value to hospitals. we are seeing on dole's move us away from the fee for service system. we see young people who believe in holistic care that is good,

primary care and not just overtreatment. i'm very optimistic about the future of health care. i think sometimes things have to totally shouter -- totally shouter for us to start over, and a lot of it is messaging. and that is why i look up to journalists like laura so much. storytelling, good journalism and research needs to all blend together and i agree, marshall allen does that well. america,e uninsured in in part that problem got addressed rallying around one problem -- around one number, 44 million. they said it one million times, 44 million people had no health insurance. that galvanized people and they rallied around and that number is much lower today. right now we need to talk about the bubble, we need to talk about 24% of americans avoiding medical care because of your of bills, we need to talk about predatory billing and change our lexicon. the movie i loved the most was

i loved itort," and because it took a boring and complex subject, the financial crisis, and made it understandable to an everyday person who knew nothing about that industry. that is what i try to do with "the price we pay." because pbm's, insurers, all this stuff is so complicated, how do you presented in a way that is understandable where somebody can say, no, it is not up to the experts and we can't understand? overcharging and there is lack of transparency. host: i have a question that should emerge. >> really interesting things to fact check for tonight event. i was curious about the classic, journalistic problem when dealing with sources who have suffered from traumatic events. i was curious if you could speak to that, especially with the

personal medium of the voice, and what what that like in the reporting process in your podcast. >> it is something i wrestle with and all of us who write you have this, dilemma of, how do you talk to are regularlyu asking people to tell you about the worst thing that ever happened to them? so how do you tell that story in a way that is respectful and yet doesn't exploit the pain they feel? righttting that balance andxtremely important, especially when i was doing a story like dr. death. because what these people had been through was terrible. i mean, it was absolutely horrible what they had suffered,

and i didn't want to use their suffering for purposes of entertainment and being salacious. and yet at the same time, you also had to know how terrible it was. how terribly surgeon he was. if you will notice, those of you who listen to the podcast, the first episode is pretty intense, describing the details of what he did wrong and the suffering that he caused. on, there story goes is less and less of the details. there is less about these patients after the first couple isepisodes, because there also the incident of his best friend, who ended up a quadriplegic because i felt like, you didn't need to know, you didn't need to know the suffering of every patient after that, you didn't need to know the details. so that was one of my solutions. detail, ievery

agonized over how much i say, how much i do, tell much is enough to convey the suffering without causing that line? altogether there were probably about 40,000 words of copy over the whole script, but that first episode was probably rewritten 10 or 12 times. it was re-recorded several times, because we would go back and listen and, to walk that balance. and ion't have a formula don't have an answer. i can tell you that it is something i wrestle with and other reporters wrestle with, that you don't want to exploit people's pain. one thing i am conscious of and try to do both in my reporting on my storytelling is, you don't make someone the product of their pain. in other words, i always try to ask, who were you before this

happened? tell via -- tell me about you, your family, tell me about you as your person, and i try to convey that i see you as an individual, i don't just see you as this thing that happened to you. and i try to convey that in the story. these are not props in your stories come in your stories, they are human beings. host: you are not doing the famous janet malcolm thing of seducing the source and getting to do the thing? .> no and there are details i leave out, and sometimes they are very compelling details, but it feels too invasive. and there were details, not about him personally but about the relationship with his children, his own personal life details that we left out,

because we didn't even want to invade his relationship with his children, because it is not their fault, they are not the story, they are not what happened. something we always have to be conscious of, something i have to be conscious of, and i am not alone in that. but it is a good question, it is something that, as a journalist, you will do your whole life. host: i have a question in the from a distinguished writer in residence at new york university. >> called in the big guns. guess it's ok if i try to get back to this question i think you have asked twice, and i'm going to ask a third time. differently,ask like journalists do. you mentioned "the big short." andved "the big short"

actually understood it. what got me about it is the very almost a post script, sort of an epilogue at the top of the screen in text. i don't remember if it was bloomberg or reuters, by the way, they have come back with these credit default swaps, they just call them something different. and it was 2016 or whatever the year was, almost 10 years after the crash. everybody who graduated, i think it was after 2009, you will know the story so you can tune out for a second, but one of the atrpies who were later hired reuters wanted to do a story in class and it was about the fact that all of the evidence says the best way to treat heroin addiction among prisoners, in other words they come into

prison, they are addicted, it could be any opioid, it but it is to give them heroin. what evidence there is is pretty clear and actually nobody debates that, and he said, i'm going to call the board and say, why on earth are you not giving heroin to prisoners? that is awesome. you should do that. here's what you should also do. you should call the guy who is running against the legislator, this is texas, of course, who is running on a platform of don't give heroin to prisoners, and the guy running against him who is saying, it's a good idea because scientific evidence says so. i want you to first figure out who is going to win that election, i'm going to bet you a real nice dinner on it, and texas. we doe are up against is the great journalism, write the great books, we hear policy

stories over and over, we have convinced ourselves and yet actually translating policy, policy stories, or actually translating evidence to good policy remains one of the stubborn, stubborn problems of journalism, of legislation, of our world. so how do we do that? i'm not asking you to give me the 10-second version, but how do we do that? we've known about this for a long time. so what do we do? >> is that a question, sir? [laughter] >> what do you do? you own a big megaphone. >> i do. well, i don't own it. host: you know what i mean. you have command of a big .oicebox

>> i do, and i'm not claiming this is an evidence-based way of going about it. but laura is talking about these stories now being told, people dipping you and emailing you and what have you, that is my life. at retraction watch we constantly hear far more stories than we could ever do. even at our height we couldn't do a fraction of them. to i believe it is important keep up that drumbeat and tell the stories, in this case of the vulnerable, tell the stories of the misconduct, the fraud, the bad surgeon, the most murderous surgeon. i think that is really important because what happens that is what you did, which is you call attention to a local reporter, we do that all the time. we like to break the story and then i call someone at the local it in i've done baltimore, i've done it everywhere.

sometimes they pick it up, sometimes they don't. i'm happy when they give us credit for the story, will be honest about that. but i think you have got to do that, but you also have to do ,hat you both, all three of you tonight's guests, you really do, which is to connect those stories to the actual policy. and there are people who do it well, marshall is one of them. and that is what i'm trying to do, what my staff is trying to don't claim that is a solution, because if it was i wouldn't ask the question. host: do you have a quick answer? >> not a quick one. >> he was one of the people i was referring to when i said we were trying to bridge the medical journals and journalism together. that's what other outlets are doing. unfortunately, we have become

intoxicated with a false lexicon. in medicine they have defined evidence in a pyramid, well you randomized, controlled trial to prove a parachute works. and we can learn more from outliers sometimes than giant trials. a patient who had brain cancer who was a long-term survivor at jon hopkins, why did that patient survive? turns out they had an infection, maybe it stimulated the immune system, maybe something happened. we can learn more from that one patient. so i think we use a false lexicon sometimes. bucket ofs the doctors, hospitals and health care we are trying to work around and you will be back at the ending of the big story. but then there is stories like the horrible messaging around hormone replacement therapy, making inappropriate conclusions from a study that never made

those conclusions, 90% of doctors will say it causes cancer even though it doesn't, studies in the new england journal of medicine that it was misrepresented in the media, and the doctors believe it, that is a giant thing that needs to be overturned in a good health care journalist can do that. and that is one of those things that is high-impact. i have a question about the media and television and how shows job you think these are produced like amsterdam or grey's anatomy or good doctor. how would are they at portraying these health issues? >> great question. after i wrote a book i got a call from hollywood saying, we want to turn it into the tv series, "the resident." it is now in season two, doing

well with ratings, it looks like it's reallye life, because i've done a good job bringing certain issues to the general public. some of the stuff is sensationalized, hollywood, a soap opera, some of the stuff offends doctors because it is not medically super accurate sometimes, but if they are spending money on a shout they are delivering messages. season two is about the medical device industry, the good and bad. season three, i don't know if i can say this in public, but what the hack, it will be about medical billing and predatory billing, overtreatment was in season one, so i think we need to use every avenue out there. when obama went on "the late show" and they said, why are you going in the late show as president? and he said, people only get their information from avenues like this, and i think we need to use everything to educate people about the issues in health care today. host: we are running to the end.

you have a thought you would like to add? >> not about medical television. host: about the job the fiction industry is doing highlighting these issues? >> i don't know. my daughter watches grey's but i haven't really watched the shows so i can speak on that at all. host: i think we have time for one more question. aboutid find an article price transparency in a newspaper named "nyt." article it said, if you are the only hospital in town, doesn't matter because prices can be transparent but it is still the only game. so is price transparency a solution to this problem? >> first of all, we can call out

gouging. it is completely inconsistent with the medical's mission and completely consistent with a hospitals nonprofit, tax-free status. so we have actually been calling hospital ceos who are engaged in grievous price gouging and saying, we know exactly what is happening, this is 1/10 the price, this patient has had horrible financial hardship from this, we did not in medicine take an oath to treat a patient and then put them in financial ruin, that is not who we are as a profession, so we are trying to create accountability around the. word, transparency. as a journalist, how do you feel about transparency? [laughter] >> well, i'm in favor of it. [laughter] host: i'm in favor of it, too. we have sadly come to the end of the conversation although we still have an awful lot to talk about. the two of you have taken something that has been plaguing us for more than generation and

have given us something new to think about, and some hope that perhaps there are some solutions out there, both in ways to cover it and in ways to fix it, and for that, i thank you both. [laughter] -- [applause] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2019] which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] -- [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] narrator: on june 4 it will be 30 years since the chinese communist party sent tanks and armed troops into beijing's tiananmen square, where pro-democracy students were peacefully protesting and calling for democratic reforms. chinese soldiers then killed hundreds and possibly thousands of people, mainly students. this day, china does not commemorate what happened at tiananmen square on june 4. meanwhile, a state department spokesperson is calling for those who have been jailed because of protests to be released. next, we take you back to when

resident george h w bush walked into the white house briefing room to announce the u.s. response to the killing of protesters in china. president bush? -- president bush? during the past bush: during the past few days there has been widespread and continuing violence, many casualties and many deaths. we deplore the decision to use chinesend i now call on leadership publicly, as i having in private channels, to avoid violence and to return to their previous policy of restraint. demonstrators in tiananmen square were advocating basic human rights, including the freedom of expression, freedom of the press, freedom of association, and these are goals we support around the world.

these are freedoms that are enshrined in both the u.s. constitution and the chinese constitution. throughout the world we stand with those who seek greater freedom and democracy. this is the strongly-veldt -- the strongly-felt a view of my administration, our congress, and the american people. in recent weeks we have encouraged mutual restraint, nonviolence, and dialogue. instead there has been a bloody and violent attack on the demonstrators. the united states cannot condone the violent attacks and cannot condone the consequences for our relationship with china, which has been built on a foundation of rod support by the american people. time for anthe emotional response, but for reason, careful action that takes into account both our long-term interests and recognition of a complex, internal situation in china. there clearly is turmoil within

the ranks of the political leadership as well as the people's liberation army. and now is the time to look beyond the moment to important and enduring aspects of this vital relationship for the united states. indeed, the biting of democracy we have seen in recent weeks owes much to the relationship we have developed since 1972, and it is important at this time to act in a way that will encourage the further development and deepening of the positive elements of that relationship in the process of democratization. it would be a tragedy for all of china were to pull back to its pre-1972 era of isolation and repression. mindful of these complexities and yet of the necessity to strongly and clearly express our condemnation of the events of recent days, i am ordering the following actions.

suspension of all government-to-government sales and commercial exports of weapons, this pension of visits between u.s. and chinese military leaders, sympathetic review of requests by chinese students in the united states to extend their stay, and the offer of humanitarian down medical assistance through the red cross to those injured during the assault, and review of other aspects of our bilateral relationship asked the events in china continue to unfold. democratization of communist societies will not be a smooth one, and we must react to setbacks in a way which stimulates rather than stifles progress toward open and representative systems. narrator: watch 2019 commencement addresses and other speeches from our archives at c-span.org. type commencement in the video library search window on our homepage.

♪ i can only see it from her perspective. i have had a lot of people pray for me similarly, and as a christian i believe that christianity has a very long tradition of divine healing, so i certainly don't think that it is not possible for god to heal people. narrator: sunday on c-span's q hyundai, a duke divinity school assistant professor and prosperity gospel scholar talks about her memoir, "everything happens for a reason," reflecting on being prosperity diagnosed with stage iv cancer at the age of 35. >> it is gone, right? there is no pain in your stomach, right? well, that is real. >> you can see how quickly he moved from paring for her as the anointed vessel of god, and then his confidence in himself as that vehicle, and in the idea that because you didn't have pain in that moment, that she

was definitely healed. and has very dramatic approach to faith healing is one that i somewhatnd to be manipulative. narrator: q and a, sunday night at 8:00 eastern on c-span. narrator: sunday on american history tv on c-span3 we of thee our coverage 75th anniversary of d-day. at 6:00 p.m. on american artifacts with historian and author jared frederick. >> they landed a half mile off course and there was a little uncertainty, perhaps hesitation, as to what exactly they should do. but the assistant division commander, theodore roosevelt junior, son of the president, who was the oldest american participant in the invasion, said very defiantly, we are going to start the war right here. narrator: at 6:30 pm on oral

histories, veteran talks about landing on utah beach. theyen they show d-day usually talk about omaha and the carnage that was there, which there certainly was. but they make it look like we didn't have any difficulty, really. and we did, we lost the fourth division, we lost 197 men right there on the beach on d-day. but the next day when we we lost 50% of our men within three or four days. narrator: this weekend on american history tv on c-span3. >> next, look at recent cyber attacks on sony and yahoo!, and ways to prevent hacking from foreign governments. this discussion at the aspen institute and washington, d.c. is one hour 20 minutes.