Palmdale FAA Radio System Failure; King Drew Could Lose Its Accreditation; Orange County Journalists' Round Table; A Comparison of the Bush and Kerry Health Care Plan; What JPL is Learning From This Season’s Hurricanes
Palmdale FAA Radio System Failure
On Tuesday, the FAA radio communication system, based in Palmdale, shut down for three hours. This caused delays at all of Southern California’s major airports and several incidents of unsafe distances between planes. Ruth Marlin, Executive Vice President for the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, and Tom Brantley, president of Professional Airways Systems Specialists, a labor union representing the technicians and aviation safety inspectors working for the FAA, join Host Larry Mantle to discuss what happened.
King Drew Could Lose Its Accreditation
Larry Mantle discusses the announcement by the national Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations that they may recommend pulling the hospital’s accreditation that would also threaten its training programs and insurance contracts. Joining Larry to talk about this latest news is Dr. Thomas Garthwaite, Director, Department of Health Services for L.A. County, and Los Angeles County Supervisor, Zev Yaroslavsky.
Orange County Journalists' Round Table
Larry Mantle talks with Orange County journalists Chris Reed, Orange County Register op-ed column editor, Jean Pasco, Los Angeles Times staff writer and Gustavo Arellano, Staff Writer for the OC Weekly, about the latest news events and developments in Orange County.
A Comparison of the Bush and Kerry Health Care Plan
Both the Bush and the Kerry campaigns have plans to “fix” America’s ailing health care system. Both candidates want to cut costs and insure the uninsured, but their approaches are very different. Bush looks to market-oriented solutions that are consumer-oriented and consumer-directed, like a network of small businesses linked to buy health insurance and health savings accounts. Kerry wants to open up the federal employee health care plan to the uninsured and create a wider safety net for the poor. Additionally, Kerry’s health care plan would pay insurance companies for ¾ of any costs over fifty thousand dollars per patient. He would pay for it by rolling back the Bush tax cut for people earning over two hundred thousand dollars per year. Host Larry Mantle to discuss the plans with Nick Littlefield, former staff director for the US Senate Committee on Health and Education for Senator Ted Kennedy for 10 years, and an advisor to John Kerry on health care policy, and Colin Roskey, a health care lawyer by training, and an unofficial advisor to the Bush-Cheney campaign and a former counsel to the Senate Finance Committee.
What JPL is Learning From This Season’s Hurricanes
Hurricane Ivan, the third in a series of devastating hurricanes to hit the southeastern United States, is scheduled to hit the Gulf Coast sometime after midnight on Thursday. Larry Mantle talks with hurricane and weather experts about what can be learned from this unusually strong hurricane season. Joining Larry are Dr. Randy Friedl, Chief Scientist, Earth Science & Technology Directorate at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Dr. Eric Fetzer, Atmospheric Infrared Sounder validation scientist and member of the technical staff, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory.