Obamacare Exchanges, Dangerous Memes, War Memorial

Are Obamacare Exchanges in Trouble? Guest: Katherine Hempstead, Senior Adviser on Health Insurance Coverage at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation A central piece of the Affordable Care Act—also known as Obamacare—suffered a blow in the last week. The nation’s third largest health insurer, Aetna, announced it will withdraw from the insurance plan marketplaces in most states. Aetna is the largest insurer to withdraw in a big way, but UnitedHealth Group and Humana have also begun to retreat from the marketplaces—also known as “exchanges.”  The exchanges were created to help the “uninsurable” get coverage. So what now for those people? Can the exchanges survive without heavyweights like Aetna?  Adult Learners Still Not Being Taught Technology Guest: Iris Feinberg, PhD, Assistant Director of the Adult Literacy Research Center at Georgia State University A growing number of adults older than your typical college student are heading back to school in the US. Some are seeking to finish the college degree they need before applying to certain jobs. Others are feeling the disadvantage of not having grown up immersed in the technology today’s younger workers use so naturally.  But educational researcher Iris Feinberg finds that colleges aren’t teaching older adults the technical skills they need—in fact more than half of community college students say they’ve never taken a computer class while in school. Influence of Internet Memes Guests: Grant Kien, PhD, Associate Professor at California State East Bay Department of Communication; Amalia Alexandru, Digital Product Manager for BeMyApp The photo of a young Syrian boy pulled from the wreckage of a bomb, sitting dazed and bloody in an orange ambulance seat quickly went viral last week. He was photo shopped into pictures with world leaders, and rendered in sketch form by artists in shareable memes, a symbol of outrage and frustration over the response to Syria’s civil conflict.  Viral images and hashtags have the power to raise awareness of an issue and galvanize peo