insurance

"If people think about how they might want to create something that isn't just me me me, that could be revolutionary," says musician and performance artist Laurie Anderson. Anderson has crossed genres, created new instruments, performed in "audio drag" and even created some comics, but she's best known for her experimental violin playing. Laurie joins Laura in studio for a feature-length interview on art, electronics, making music for fish, and why Homeland Security still has one of her instruments. "I'd like my title to be 'explorer,' but on my passport it just says 'artist,'" she says. You may be familiar with Annie Leonard's The Story of Stuff Project, the illustrated, animated explainers that break down progressive issues in easy, fun ways. In the same style, she explains the story of Cap & Trade--how it works, who would benefit, who would suffer, and why real solutions to climate change are necessary. And finally, Vermont is nearly all the way to single-payer health care, but Laura warns not to forget the fight the insurance companies will put up. Distributed by Tubemogul.

Peaceful protest brought down Mubarak in Egypt, but while the world is watching, other countries across the world are fighting their own struggles for freedom. In Western Sahara, the Sahrawi people have been leading nonviolent protests for their own right to self-determination, as they remain occupied by Morocco. Aminatou Haidar, referred to as the "Sahrawi Gandhi", has been honored by the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice & Human Rights, who are supporting her work as well as the work of human rights activists in Mexico and across the world.Monika Kalra Varma is the Director of the RFK Center, and she joins Laura in studio to discuss the Center's work in Western Sahara, Mexico, and around the world.The celebrations in Egypt are still ongoing and probably will be for a while. After 18 days of peaceful protest across the country, Hosni Mubarak left Egypt and resigned as presidency, leaving control in the hands of the army. We bring you footage from the past few days to mark this historic occasion.As doctors marched in Cairo, nurses marched in California this week, protesting Blue Cross Blue Shield's latest insurance rate hikes. Said National Nurses Union president, RoseAnn DeMoro, "We can learn a lesson from the streets of Egypt... Public pressure is essential to confront tyranny, whether you are faced with political repression or corporate control of our health. There are lives in the balance."Blue Cross Blue Shield announced increases of 60% on individual premiums recently, but by the end of their demonstration, the insurance company agreed to delay action on the hike for 60 days. Stay tuned for more on this campaign in future weeks.Finally, Amanda Marcotte keeps us up-to-date on the ongoing attacks in Congress on the right to abortion care.

As Republican freshmen head to Congress, many of them are riding a wave of promises to repeal "Obamacare." As Jamie Court noted on our show last week, one of the most unpopular elements of the bill is the mandate that Americans purchase private health insurance. But Wendell Potter, former health insurance industry insider, notes that that is the part of the bill that is most popular with the insurance companies that bankrolled those same Republicans.Donna Smith of National Nurses United (and of Michael Moore's health care film Sicko) asks, meanwhile, if there's any value at all created by the private health care industry. We try to answer that question with Donna and Wendell in our studio, as well as the question of what luck Republicans will have with repeal, and what can be done on a state level.Hope is in short supply these days, particularly for those in America's packed prison system. California incarcerates more women than any other state, and when those women get out of jail they often have nothing more than $200 in their pockets and hope to go on. Susan Burton was one of those women once, and now she's founder and executive director of A New Way of Life Reentry Project, a nonprofit organization that helps formerly incarcerated women get their lives back together.Susan has been named one of CNN's ten Heroes this year, and is in the running for the top spot, and she joins us via Skype, along with Kimberle Crenshaw, who explains just why Susan's nomination gives her hope in a bleak time.

The most asked question after the historic passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, commonly referred to as the health care bill, is "How does this affect me?" While we can't answer all your individual questions in a 30-minute show (or a week of 30-minute shows), we thought we'd pull in some experts to lay out what's in the new law. Jacob Hacker, Yale professor, is known as "The Father of the Public Option," and Maggie Mahar is the author of Money-Driven Medicine and editor of HealthBeatBlog.org, and they join us to break down the pluses and minuses of the biggest social reform legislation since the Johnson era.