welcome to the alona show where you get the real headlines with none of the mersey a lot has the night off i'm christine for or coming live out of washington d.c. where you could say it was a big day today the u.s. supreme court handed down its decision on president obama's affordable care act and found it for the most part constitutional will break it all down behind closed doors will take an in-depth look at the shameful way many restaurant workers in this country are treated and we've got a new segment today called talked to me off of all that for you plus a dose of happy hour but first let's take a look at what the mainstream media decided to miss.

while the countdown has been on for days now and shortly after ten o'clock this morning the u.s. supreme court handed down its ruling on president obama's affordable care act now i said it was handed down i didn't say the big time anchors and reporters in this country actually read it. the supreme court has ruled that the individual mandate is in fact unconstitutional the individual mandate has been ruled unconstitutional the supreme court justices have struck down the individual mandate the centerpiece of the health care legislation the court striking down that mandate is a dramatic blow to the policy and to the president politically if the individual mandate cannot be sustained under congress's power to regulate commerce that means the mandate is gone the justices have just got it wolf the centerpiece provision of the obama health care law you're seeing something we didn't complete in their formation we're going to be inflicting information to get. chief. we're now

getting more information and i just want to get our viewers despite what shannon just read that the individual mandate is surviving the individual mandate may be upheld we're trying to do the best we can right now as we sort through it and we need it later a lower third right you may not be correct take several minutes as a reading through this again we are reading now that the entire law has been upheld the mandate is constitutional a bama carries it's called is in fact constitutional that is our understanding wolf in obviously there has been a lot of confusion early on. i'll say so what we have here are two out of the three major news outlets not just getting a few details wrong but getting the entire thing wrong the so-called most important ruling by the u.s. supreme court in modern day history and our intrepid reporters decided that being first was more important than being right just when you thought twelve years ago

after the two thousand election that the media may have learned a lesson when they prematurely announce the winner of the presidential election well it turns out they still haven't. it took more than five minutes an eternity in t.v. time for these reporters to figure out their mistake but one thing is that untangle it it wasn't long before they shifted their coverage from the announcement to what it all meant now if you at all more wondering what does this mean for me well you wouldn't have really gotten that question answered that is unless you work within a five mile radius of the white house since the mainstream media focused almost solely on the politics of it rather than the policy. what the court did not do on its last day in session i will do my first if elected president of the united states and that is i will act to repeal obama care republicans won't let up whatsoever in our determination to repeal this terrible law the president now still has his signature piece of legislation it's

a federal overthrow really of the health care system and we know that it's going to raise costs for the average american the victory for the president on the policy front the president was not rejected his main mainland more could see it was not struck down how did been struck down it would have been a thunder clap the right will be fired up we saw how much the health care law fired up as i mentioned before the midterms in two thousand and ten this will only increase that turn out on the right americans were promised lower health care costs . they're going up the senate controlled by democrats so as republicans say they still plan to go ahead to try to repeal the obama health care law they know house republican leadership is already scheduled to vote house speaker john boehner says the law hurts the economy by increasing health care costs and making it difficult for small businesses to hire help us defeat obamacare help us defeat the liberal agenda that makes government too big. now there were a couple attempts at interviewing doctors scattered throughout but for the most

part the mainstream media chose to ignore the entire point of them doing their jobs telling the vast majority of americans this groundbreaking decision and what it will mean for them having mitch mcconnell wax poetic or having pundits on both sides pulling their talking points is more of a food fight than well coverage they fed it they fed into the rat race that is washington and let all the big wigs on capitol hill dictate the conversation rather than the other way around. just once in a while it would be nice of producers and people laying out the agenda for the day would ask this question why should the average american care the meat and potatoes of the legislation and why there are significant people's lives well it's that pushed got pushed to the back burner at least to the bottom of the rundown and became yet another thing the mainstream media decided to miss.

now since the mainstream media didn't think it was important to let you know the facts the important stuff about the supreme court's ruling on the affordable care act we figured per usual that we should pick up the slack now first of all a few ways that the health care act in america will be impacted when it goes into an the law goes into effect in two thousand and fourteen insurance companies can no longer impose lifetime coverage limits on your insurance and sure's can no longer deny coverage due to a preexisting condition and turns companies can't drop you when you get sick and small businesses will get tax credits big ones for offering health insurance to their workers and speaking of taxes since the supreme court upheld the mandate as a tax a lot of people have been going on television talking about how this will be a tax on the middle class what they said was that the reason why it's constitutional is because it's a tax increase millions of americans may now have an onerous problem as a result of this ruling. well that's really not very true and thanks to travis walter i'm over at think progress we have some actual information for how the tax

would work people who don't have insurance and aren't exempt based on income levels would have to pay a tax of two point five percent or six hundred ninety five dollars and according to the urban institute tax would only affect between two and five percent of americans so it's hardly the massive tax it's being made out to be and individual mandate aside most of the other affordable care act taxes would be aimed at upper income americans but there is quite a bit more to do. regarding today's ruling and joining me to help me do that is dr margaret flowers congressional fellow for physicians at national health program and liz mair the former online communications strategist to governor scott walker and governor rick perry and former r. and c. online communications director ladies it's a power panel for the ladies i like it's. a lot to talk about and i know you guys probably have a lot to say we're going to start with you i know you've been a major supporter of the affordable care act since its passage. you're not a supporter i'm out of it is not going to work ok ok so. let's start with that why

aren't you a supporter what do you think is wrong with it so the affordable care act is based on legislation that was passed in massachusetts in two thousand and six at the state level written by the for heritage foundation exactly and passed by governor romney so it really is based on what's called the individual mandate forcing people to purchase private insurance as you said if they don't have it subsidizing the purchase of that private insurance for some people if they qualify and expanding medicaid it keeps the i mean i guess the long and short of it is the private insurance industry in the middle of our health care and they're the problem so when you order people to buy something the person selling that is the beneficiary here exactly it's giving more customers to the private insurance industry and using our tax dollars to subsidize that to the tune of four hundred forty seven billion dollars that are going to private insurers who then try to hang on to as much of that as they can they try not to pay for health care if they can avoid that and so so where are wasting dollars that could be used to pay for actual health care but you know in the same way that people are required to you know where seatbelts buy

car insurance if their drivers i mean this is something that at least the way the heritage foundation's out several years ago it's to make it so you know even if you're healthy and young if you get hit by a drunk driver or if something happens to you that someone else doesn't have to pay for it i mean that might make sense if we actually had a private insurance system that was about paying for health care what we have in this country is that this for profit insurance companies are. beholden to their investors to make a profit for them they complicate our health care they get in between patients and doctors and try to do whatever they can to obstruct the actual delivery and hank that should be all the public therefore financial barriers to care people who have health insurance still can't afford necessary care and people go bankrupt even though they have insurance when they have a serious illness so if it actually worked that might be a solution but it's about profit not about how to write well i'm going to let me go to us what's your take on and let's first just focus because we will talk about the president as well as mitt romney but i want to focus first on sort of the meat and

potatoes of this legislation what's good what's bad i generally agree actually with a lot of what you said which is maybe perhaps surprising coming from a republican standpoint but the fact of the matter is the thing that people who are on the libertarian side of the republican party find particularly noxious about this is the idea that it is government forcing you to buy a product that we have been told for many many years is a bad product and many people believe is a bad product and that is something that runs completely counter to a lot of people's feeling philosophical beliefs it's something that's very counterintuitive and i think it's something that's very problematic i mean i'll throw this same question to you and i know i know you said you're a libertarian so is so if you maybe agree with ron paul on this that i know your answer i mean you know it is some people would kind of take his interpretation as a sort of survival of the fittest thing but the fact is not being forced to buy something is one thing but that means that if something happens other people have to pay for it because we happen to live in a country where doctors cannot deny helping i think and i think if you actually go

and you research this you'll find that the extent of the free rider program has been vastly overstated the heritage foundation has vastly overstated it governor romney vastly overstated it in the course of pushing through romney care in massachusetts you're a doctor i think you probably have a pretty good sense of this the fact of the matter is it is not the problem that people say that it is and at the end of the day one of the problems that we have that this law does not address and which needs to be addressed if we are to maintain a pro. that system which i would personally prefer i think we probably just disagree on that one one of the things that needs to happen if that is to be maintained if we are to maintain quality medical care in this country that this act does not deal with and romney care does not deal with is we need to bring down costs if you bring down costs associated with health care that allows people to obtain better access to the health care or cheaper insurance in the first place which interestingly is exactly what president obama said when he was running for president when he didn't support the individual mandate well let's talk about that and we do have clips from

both president obama and mitt romney and let's hear first from mitt romney what he said about this back in two thousand and six. secondly with regards to the. individual responsibility program which are very pleased to see that the compromise from the two houses include the personal responsibility principle that is just central to bringing health care costs down for everyone and getting everybody the health insurance. the servant need. that's certainly a very different song than the one he's saying today which was after the ruling was read when he said. as president it would be his first priority to get rid of this and interestingly enough mitt romney actually raised about one hundred thousand dollars right after he spoke. but but talk about that i mean what do you think i mean this is a very different viewpoint oh sure i mean and that's what you see with romney

generally is and on fan of his i'll just come straight out and say he may be preferable to barack obama on a number of things but he does change his opinion quite a bit and this is probably one of the foremost examples of that where now he's obviously criticizing a law that is essentially the federal version of what he signed into law and that's a problem and let me get we'll get to your point as you mentioned earlier president obama said something a little different just back in two thousand and nine let's hear what he had to say . on this mandate the government. is forcing people to spend money find you if you don't how is that not a tax the whole of the second we've driven down the costs we've done everything we can and you actually can't afford health insurance or you're just decided you know what i want to take my chances and then you get hit by a bus and you and i have to pay for the emergency that may or you but it starts accident that don't know that that's not true george. for us to say that you've got to take responsibility to get health insurance is absolutely not a tax increase what it's saying is that we're not going to have other people

carrying your burdens for you. so president obama no doubt scored a major victory today but he's tends to disagree with the chief justice in terms of the legal aspect of this i mean what do you think about that but i think first of all i think that having this be a political conversation is the wrong conversation this is become too much of what is obama think what is romney i think if romney had passed this bill at the national level you would have had the republicans defending it and the democrats opposing it so while i agree with you on some points what i what i am most about is what what is the policy say what is the evidence show what works in this country but the bottom line is we're living in a time when. you know the conversation has swayed to cut spending cut spending restore the future for our children so and so you say margaret that you want to have a public you know public option which it would just would not be included not in a bill in the way it was passed i mean honestly i wouldn't even support

a public want to have it has got a book option who would have added another insurance to our already complex insurance if we want to get savings if we really want to control our health care costs and extend health care to every person in this country we need to have a single single funded publicly funded system the fastest way we can solve our health care crisis is to drop two words from the current medicare law over sixty five extend medicare to everyone then you have a public a fine funded system that's there for people when they need it it's paid for progressive. so that those who can you know people pay based on their means right now that's not the case it's what we need is something that's there for us when we need it because everyone's going to need it at some point it's not like driving a car where you have a choice what i'm saying is i mean how do you convince a congress and a president that this is the right way to do in the times that we're living well first of all with the fortunate thing is that the people are on our side that we have polling data for the past two decades that folly shows sixty to sixty five percent of people in america support

a national medicare for all the majority of physicians support it eighty percent of democrats supported it president obama had gone this this way he wouldn't be in the trouble is in now with his base. but ultimately it comes down to it's not about who's in power it's what the people do what the people and who. was i going to give you the last question and i'm going to give it to you cause i know you've lived abroad you've lived in europe before so i want to put some numbers up in terms of health care expenditures per capita by country we have some information the u.s. actually per capita spends nearly eight thousand dollars per person canada spends more than four thousand germany also more than four thousand france about four thousand and the united kingdom about thirty four hundred per person let me get your take on why you think that is and also what you think sort of people around the world people in canada in europe think about you know all this discussion that's been made about. you know obama's health care plan well let me let me take the first question first i mean i think that people overseas generally don't understand why health care is as contentious an issue as it is here and why we

don't have more government involvement in it that being said i'm not sure that that's particularly relevant to the question of what we should be doing policy wise as somebody who's lived in the u.k. lived there for about ten years lived in france also you know each system has its pluses and minuses my firm belief is that the us system is preferable to what you find in the u.k. france is a little bit more debatable but one of the reasons why i believe things cost more here is because we actually do have. quality of care on the whole particularly if you're able to pay for it i mean there are numerous personal examples that i could cite to testify to that but you do find when you're looking at the u.k. system you have something called nice basically dictates what prescriptions are available to people whether they're getting them through the n.h.s. or whether they want to buy them privately in the primary consideration there is cost not actually the effectiveness of the drug and so something that you encounter we have let me get let me give you thirty seconds dr flowers to respond to that so

i mean actually nice actually is based on what's effective as well in the united states the reason we have higher prices here is because we don't have a system that negotiates for a fair set of prices it's really about what can each company get away with charging and so if we had one set of rules a publicly accountable and transparent system then we could actually bring our health care costs down we're already spending enough to cover every person in this country we just need to adopt him but medicare is a little i agree there's an element of that but having personally been in a position of having been told that i would be denied treatment that was readily available here purely due to cost considerations i don't agree that that's the only thing that happens in the n.h.s. nice actually does make a lot of decisions that impact treatment and it's not about effectiveness it is about cost well at least some of the yes some interesting perspectives here neither of you very happy or excited today by what happened really interesting perspective though dr margaret flowers congressional fellow for physicians for a national health program also liz mair former online communications strategist governor scott walker rick perry and many many more thanks for coming on the show

ladies. all right we've got to take a quick break but up next andrew blakers going to talk back to me i'll explain when we come back. i. want of american power. might be time. very true you are very good dog all right. you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so you think you understand it and then something else here sees some other part of it and realize everything you saw or you don't know i'm sorry welcome to the big picture.

here is what i. like and they alone are still they'll get the real headline with none of them are the problem with the mainstream media today is that they're completely disconnected from the viewers and what actually matters to those viewers and so that's why young people just don't watch t.v. anymore if they want news they go online and read it but we're trying to take those stories that people actually care about and transfer them back in t.v. .

i'm lauren lyster. well today we're going to does a new segment called talk tech to me the idea here is to give you all a better understanding of some of the top tech related stories of the week a closer look into what's going on in the tech world as well as well why it matters so they will be focusing on a possible paula policy change by the obama administration aimed at stopping online piracy will also discuss the latest news about mega upload founder kim dot com the u.s. government wants an extra day here but it's looking far less likely that that will happen now plus the great majority of data you transmit isn't really private so do you want it to be if there's an app for that we break it all down and joining me to help me do that is our two web producer blake andrew let's start first with what

the obama administration is possibly trying to do regarding online piracy a lot of news came out this week and if you ask me kind of being put out proportion there are a couple stories it's already starting to spiral out of control pretty much. the government said on tuesday that they were accepting submissions because every time they've tried and tried and tried to do something about intellectual property the internet the world the public even in the united states who uses a computer eventually catches on that these policies aren't completely right well so congress already started a. file an on line piracy the protect ip act and they wouldn't and they weren't successful no and by february of this year the obama administration came out and said the stop online piracy act to protect ip act they did they pushed them aside and said that these are things that in theory work very well i dearly.

there's too many risk there's too many infringements upon americans privacy what their personal debt is we don't really need all this information so they shut those two down and yet this week they actually they said that the are asking for written submissions from the public about what they think i think. it's a good i mean it's kind of good yeah i mean ideally that would work out great where they're out they're actually going to do it that's fine but they actually have things already there that the went over this you know years ago right now our laws about copyright infringement are a bit antiquated however they still are good for what they are like the digital millennium copyright act was passed under clinton and under that there are a couple provisions that pretty much say you know if you own this material and you find someone sharing it on line just just ask and then they're supposed to comply they're supposed to get rid of it so as to death has to be it and that's what's happened in many cases but you know the m.p.a. in our aid these big hollywood energies that have

a bunch of money involved and think that they're losing money through copyright infringement and internet sharing and all that they want stricter ip laws so whether or not that's actually what happened in this administration powerful they were incredibly powerful but keep in mind that these organizations also were pushing for sopa and they were also the. for the project those went nowhere so you know this year we actually saw a bunch of victories about the focused on the people you know the citizens actually getting together online and in real life as they say in the internets. they got together and actually fought these you know big hollywood guys like lamar smith right from congress and you know all these supporters who were rooting for so they killed it so i i understand our of the people exactly i don't think they're going to get anything done this administration which the right so you don't think obama's going to issue any of that use his executive now he's already noticed so. people

are worried about. this but it's a horse of another color and also you know there's a big thing last year he said no to the end. the obviously just disregarded the right to veto and he signed it last year so let's talk about the upload founder kim dotcom this is a really interesting story this is he's a new new zealand resident he headed. one of the largest networks of for people to use one of the most popular websites in the world and he was running so crazy so we remember the story in january his house was raided i think ninety officers came in there and took all this material and shut down well guess what a judge in new zealand just ruled that that was an illegal search and seizure. the u.s. wants to extradite him here how big of a deal is this i mean it's a pretty big deal but when this when this all started a couple of months ago right from the get go people were saying there had to be flaws here it was just too sensational to be true like a hundred guys swarming around his mansion steal every computer he has no warrant

no no and all of here only they had war rinse but what this judge in new zealand is saying now is that the police definitely exceeded what they were supposed to do they acted on lawfully their warrants were actually too broad to just let them take whatever they wanted. and they've been the f.b.i. now it's been incredibly uncooperative but actually handling this whole thing and it's been months and this is gone nowhere kim dotcom start a couple of days in jail he got out he was under house arrest and you know last week he started going on twitter and just pretty much mocking the f.b.i. . so this is really great but in new zealand at least where this thing actually should stay because it was a guy in new zealand living in new zealand operating in new zealand so they're saying the u.s. doesn't have any sort of power over a foreign company no no i mean will that's what they say u.s. is also trying to get hackers from england extradited over here and we're going to want to start talking. yeah this is this is great for the whether or not it

actually means mega uploads going to get its servers back and people going to be able to access their content that's a whole other story but it's definitely a step forward definitely and you know what i was talk about earlier with the digital millennium copyright act one of those safe harbor positions are provisions to say that you know if you're caught with the things that you shouldn't have just just delete it just get rid of it and that's fine you know organizations like that if they see them say the recording industry association of america if they catch you sharing something you're not supposed to be sharing they complain then the f.b.i. can go and say hey take this offline you know maybe upload should have been protected after that a lot of places should have protection of that but when you have the right kind of money the very kind of power of the right kind of people sometimes you get to circumvent these kind of laws and just very fortunate for some but unfortunate for many more really are almost out of time but i want to talk really quick about the new app it's called wicker worker's motto is the internet is forever your private conversations don't need to be this is an app that actually makes it so you can secretly and secure my can and tax i you download it i don't look at it this is you

know it's made me think of this and as i thought you can send pictures securely and secretly text it made me think anthony weiner where was this when he was around that's good this could this could have saved it's going on today to something this isn't the military is this is the i use this well what happens now. with with any sort of this online digital communications you know you take something it gets sent somewhere that you get somewhere else ok this is great but like much like any other sort of. program it's going it's going to take forever to do anything with it ok what happens is you type a message you take a picture you send it to someone you can pretty much say i want this gone in five minutes and it gets encrypted into recruited and sent and salt and hash and all these fancy words and they kind of hide it for you and then you can control what you want to happen with it to try to make a bunch of advances and it came out this week i'm trying it honestly i'm not

digging it but that's just me i'm getting it through slow i mean i'm looking on your phone right now and it says no conversation so i'm wondering if that's because they're all headed in the hall no i have. asked the rest of the web department been sending messages trying to make sense of the think it's a great idea i'm sure it will go far we really need to have some we have like a line for encrypting conversations of the tor project this is great for i phones it's definitely needed but right now not sure if i would recommend going out and getting it in its current form right leg thanks for talking tac to me absolutely time now for another break but we're going to tell you about a project to revitalize one of america's cities and one of the biggest offenders when it comes to employee mistreatment in the food chain industry you might want to watch our next segment for your next.