10/28/04

LC041028

Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times --

Insuring the uninsured. Do Californians want employers to provide medical coverage or would it drive businesses out of the state?

Tony Palermo>> You can't generate enough money to cover the insurance, so I think what we really need to do is take care of healthcare. Work on the issue of nine dollars for an aspirin in a hospital.

Val>> And then, computers that used to fill a room now fit in your pocket, so what comes next? A man who helped develop the internet shares his vision.

It's all coming up next on tonight's Life and Times.

Life and Times is made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education.

And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.

Val>> It seems as though all the news coming out of the healthcare front these days is bad news. Emergency rooms closing, hospitals shutting down, the cost of drugs going up. And it always seems to go back to the same problem, the uninsured, the growing number of people and families without health insurance. Well, now a proposition on the November ballot would change that. Proposition 72 would require that certain companies provide health insurance for their workers. As Toni Guinyard tells us, it's a much-needed benefit that would come at a cost.

Toni Guinyard>> California is home to the majority of America's uninsured.

Dr. Richard Corlin>> We have approximately forty-three million people without health insurance in this country and that's a serious problem that we have to attack much more effectively than we have until now.

Toni Guinyard>> How best to provide healthcare coverage is at the heart of Proposition 72. It impacts both private and public employers and addresses the needs of everyone from school district staffs to city workers and restaurant employees.

Bob Stern>> It's a question of cost. It comes down to a question of money.

Toni Guinyard>> It is also a matter of numbers, says Bob Stern, President of the Center for Governmental Studies. Proposition 72 would require employers with 50 to 199 employees to provide healthcare coverage for each worker. Employers with more than two hundred employees would have to provide healthcare coverage for both workers and their dependents.

Bob Stern>> So here is the question we have to decide. Do we want to require major employers, two hundred or more for 2006, fifty to two hundred for 2007? Do we want them to have to pay health insurance for their employees or don't want that. The arguments? Of course, there are arguments on both sides.

Dr. Richard Corlin>> "We need to go in and go over this with Dana."

Toni Guinyard>> On one side is Santa Monica physician, Richard Corlin. He is the past President of both the California and American Medical Associations and has appeared in campaign ads supporting Proposition 72.

Dr. Richard Corlin>> What the businesses of fifty employees or more are doing is saying, "I'm not going to pay for health insurance for my employees. I'm going to let the taxpayers pay for it." That is simply not fair.

Toni Guinyard>> On the other side is restaurant owner, Tony Palermo.

Tony Palermo>> Everybody wants everyone to have healthcare, but this isn't the way to go about it.

Toni Guinyard>> If the referendum passes, Palermo is faced with providing medical insurance for all of his employees and he says that's something he can't afford.

Tony Palermo>> If we had a bucket outside that every person that came in put another five or eight dollars in the bucket, that wouldn't even be enough because then we'd have to pay taxes on that before we're able to pay for the healthcare. So it's really kind of what is the customer going to pay for a product?

Toni Guinyard>> Palermo's Marina del Rey restaurant, Tony P's Dockside Grill, has been open for business seven years. Tony Palermo says that, if Proposition 72 passes, it would dramatically change the way he does business. He predicts that he would be forced to raise prices and fears that would turn customers away.

Tony Palermo>> We have to raise five to six dollars per person coming in the door. That means a twelve dollar bowl of pasta is now going to cost seventeen. How often is that person willing to go out to eat? It's all going to be a numbers game.

Paul Macklin>> In this economy and especially in the restaurant business, it's an up and down. When it rains, you get no customers, as you can see. When it's sunny, you get customers, so it's an up and down business, so how are we going to pay for this in the long term? That's my concern.

Tony Palermo>> If you don't have the business, you don't need the employees, so employees will start to drop. Then the business will start to drop and we'll go into bankruptcy and we'll lose our houses. You know, it kind of sounds like you're saying the sky's going to fall, but in reality, what will happen?

Toni Guinyard>> Palermo says the restaurant has already taken a financial hit in recent years because of the energy crisis and workers' compensation costs. Like many other restaurateurs, he views Proposition 72 as a threat that could have a rippling effect on California's economy.

Bob Stern>> The real question will be will new employers move into California or will they go elsewhere? That's the ultimate question. The argument in favor for Proposition 72 is that healthcare insurance is essential for all of us, that we all should have healthcare insurance, and California would be sending a signal to the rest of the country that its voters say healthcare insurance should be paid by employers and then Congress will respond and pass something nationally.

Toni Guinyard>> Proposition 72 supporter, Dr. Richard Corlin, believes the issue of insuring the millions of uninsured must be addressed now at the state level.

Dr. Richard Corlin>> Anybody who advocates that we need one big program to solve the whole problem, they're part of the problem because that's never going to happen. We need to, million by million by million, chop that number down until we provide health insurance for everybody and this is one of the ways to do it.

Toni Guinyard>> This way to address the problem, Proposition 72, is actually a referendum of Senate Bill 2. That law was passed in 2003 by the legislature and signed by then Governor Gray Davis just days before he was recalled.

Bob Stern>> McDonalds and Chambers of Commerce and retailers got very upset with this bill, so they circulated a petition to stop this bill from going into effect. So California voters will have a chance to say, yes, they want the bill, SB2, to go into effect or, no, they don't.

Toni Guinyard>> That decision will be made at the ballot box, but not before both sides engage in a verbal tug-of-war. Do you offer any health insurance to your employees right now?

Tony Palermo>> No.

Toni Guinyard>> And they're fine with that?

Tony Palermo>> Well, you know, I mean, they know the situation we're in.

Wendy Recht>> I've gone out on my own to get medical insurance which, of course, is definitely a cut on the student loans I'm paying and everything else. So it's another bill for me to pay, but I need to have my tush covered.

Toni Guinyard>> Yet she understands how Proposition 72 could impact her employer and her job.

Tony Palermo>> We're in hock up to our ears. It's America (laughter). We have the houses invested into this, everything that we ever worked for. So what does happen? You know, if we go under, the ninety employees and their families go under with us.

Toni Guinyard>> Supporters of Proposition 72 would say you're part of the problem. You need to provide your employees health insurance. You should already be doing so.

Tony Palermo>> Well, I think that different business's profit margin is different, so they can afford to do different things.

Toni Guinyard>> Palermo estimates that it would cost him $233,000 a year to provide his employees with healthcare insurance, money that supporters of Proposition 72 say is money well spent.

Dr. Richard Corlin>> We need SB2. We need Proposition 72. The lack of health insurance has been identified as a risk factor for disease and most of the people in the state of California who are uninsured are low-income workers and their dependents. Over eighty percent of them are. These are people who need all the help they can get.

Bob Stern>> California will be on the cutting edge and the question will be looked at across the country. People will be looking at this vote. In my view, Proposition 72 is the most important proposition on the ballot.

Toni Guinyard>> Proposition 72, a ballot measure that will determine if employers with more than fifty workers will pay the price for a healthier workforce. Toni Guinyard for Life and Times.

Kcet.org is the place to look for the very latest on Life and Times. You'll find previews of upcoming stories, transcripts and audio of past episodes and links to some of our most interesting features. Just go to kcet.org and click on "Life and Times".


Val>> Tomorrow marks the thirty-fifth anniversary of an event that changed forever the way we live and work. It was the first time an electronic message was sent between two computers, one at UCLA and the other in Palo Alto. It was the birth of the internet. One of the fathers of the internet is mathematician, Leonard Kleinrock. He's a Professor at UCLA's Computer Science Department. He foresaw early on the incredible potential of computers talking to each other. I asked him what he sees as he gazes into the future of computing in the twenty-first century.

So when you first envisioned the internet -- and you really did envision it as a utility that it's become -- but did you envision all the kinds of things that people are using it for? Everything from, you know, romantic hookups, to pornography, to business, to e-commerce. Did you see all that?

Leonard Kleinrock>> Well, I saw the first part. You're quite right. I saw this would be a computer utility that people could access from their homes and their offices. It would be invisible like electricity. They wouldn't have to think about it. What I missed was that my ninety-seven year old mother would be on the internet today. I missed just what you said, that it would permeate society and there'd be pornography and romantic issues and dating and communities talking to each other.

I first realized it had that component in 1972 when e-mail was introduced onto the internet and it took over the network. I said, ah, this is not about computers talking to each other. It's about people, communities forming and organizing, and that's when I realized it would have an enormous impact.

Val>> So the internet has changed our culture, changed our lives, but it's also brought in a lot of good stuff and a lot of bad stuff. We've got spam, we've got security issues, we've got, you know, children being solicited by perverts. I mean, it's also being used for some pretty negative things. Did you foresee that or is that just part of society?

Leonard Kleinrock>> That's a great question. The culture of the internet when we formed it was one of an open culture. We trusted everybody in our community. We shared everything we did. It was open research. We published everything we did. We shared in the protocol and the software development. It was a well-trusted community. And the internet would never have gotten to where it is today if we had put a fence around it and put restrictions and proprietary aspects and patents. It was open.

It was easy to reach many people with little effort in cost or in time. That turned out to be a formula for allowing the dark side to enter because anybody in the environment of their basement at a keyboard could reach out to millions of people instantaneously and render whatever evil they were after. So you're right. There is a dark side. We did not anticipate it. We didn't put controls in to prevent it, but had we done that, the internet would never have blossomed the way it did. So there's always a yin and a yang here.

Val>> The future of it? Is it impossible to predict because we could never have predicted what came to be? Or do you actually foresee some specific things?

Leonard Kleinrock>> To predict the future a few years ahead, only an idiot would do that -- and I'm going to try (laughter) -- because some parts of it you can predict. The applications are the hard part. The web was an application. E-mail was an application. ebay is an application. But the technology, yes, and the way people will interact with the network.

There are three components of what I see in the future. The first part is what I call "nomadic computing". People no longer sit at their desks to gain access to the internet. They lift up their laptop, they travel to a hotel, an airport, another office, a friend's home or they just go home.

Val>> Wireless?

Leonard Kleinrock>> No, not necessarily wireless. Just another location. Wireless is another piece of it. You go someplace and you arrive there with your laptop which is used to being in your office. The laptop says, "Where am I?" And the new location says, "Who the heck are you?" So the capability to accept mobile uses was not built into the internet. That's the field that I call "nomadic computing" where you can go anywhere and, with no problem, get easy access to the same sort of services you had back in your office where you had all the support.

You had the high-speed access, you had a high-performance workstation and you had a network administrator who loaded the software into this new hardware, kept the network running, configured your machine. That's gone when you travel. So the idea is providing a portable network administrator to make all that happen and, to do that, you need to put the intelligence at the edge of the network. Every edge you might come to, every place that you may arrive, wants to have that capability.

So the second component besides the ability to go from one place to another and gain access, "nomadic computing", brings along with it ubiquity, the second component, which means wherever I go I should have this capability. Not just in three or four locations, but everywhere.

And the third component is a rather interesting one. It's what I like to call "smart spaces" or "imbeddedness". Right now, people believe that cyber space lives behind the screen on their computer and that's where it is.

Val>> I wondered where it was.

Leonard Kleinrock>> Have you ever looked behind your screen (laughter)? Well, the point is, we'd like to bring cyber space out from that screen into your physical world. It should be in the walls of this room, in my desk, in my shoes, on my body, in my fingernails, in my eyeglasses, in my car. So when I walk into a room or any other environment, it knows I'm there and I should be able to ask the room, "Where's a book about Life and Times?" or "Where's the latest program?" and it should pop up on a display on a computer.

Val>> So are you talking about like implanting computer chips under our skin, cyber space being everywhere?

Leonard Kleinrock>> That's certainly part of it. Imbedded technology on our body, in our body. A pacemaker, for example. An insulin distributor in our body, in the walls, on our desk, in our machines, in our laptops, in our cars, in our shoes, in my eyeglasses. A display in the lens of my eyeglasses. Bring that cyber space out so that I can interact with it, first of all, in an easy way, in a comfortable way.

If I walk up to a machine, it should suddenly become my machine with my profiles, my privileges, my preferences, my authentication and it should be invisible. The cyber space should disappear from the machine into our infrastructure just like electricity is there. You plug it into the wall, you expect it to work. You don't care how it happens and it's everywhere. Invisible, ubiquity, nomadic capability.

Once you have that, I like to talk about invisible global infrastructure, but you need more. That's just infrastructure. That's just parts. Then you need services that people provide to you and you need applications. The problem then is that you've got this enormous world of very fast, backbone networks with enormous amounts of processors, with data coming from many processors on the edge, vast amounts of data moving around very quickly. You need automated capability to deal with that data. Intelligence agents and these imbedded devices.

Those are the things that will generate most of the data on the internet, not you and me. Humans will be too slow. They'll be mining the data, they'll be deciding what it's good for, they'll be checking for articles of interest to deliver to you, they'll be watching the economic forecast for you, they'll be making national decisions perhaps with a human in the loop, but not the details. So that's the vision I foresee, basically a global nervous system.

Val>> That exists even beyond our body?

Leonard Kleinrock>> Well beyond our bodies. In our environment. In everything we touch. That's a little ways down the pike, but that's the vision I see coming.

Val>> Leonard Kleinrock from UCLA Computer Science Department, thank you for your part in giving us an incredible technology.

Leonard Kleinrock>> My pleasure, and thanks for inviting me.

Val>> UCLA is marking the anniversary of the internet with an all-day symposium. It's tomorrow, and if you'd like more information, go to internetanniversary.com.

To send a comment or a question to our program, you can reach us by mail at this address:

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Larry Mantle>> Welcome to FilmWeek on Life and Times. I'm Larry Mantle of 89.3 KPCC. Our first film is the bio-pick, "Ray", starring Jamie Foxx as the great singer and pianist, Ray Charles. Taylor Hackford directed the film.

[Film Clip]

Larry Mantle>> I'm joined this week by film critics Scott Foundas of Variety and the L.A. Weekly, and Henry Sheehan of henrysheehan.com. Scott, please start us off on "Ray".

Scott Foundas>> Well, you know, Larry, this is one of the most anticipated films of the fall season. There's been tremendous buzz around Jamie Foxx's performance as Ray Charles and it really is a wonderful performance. You sort of believe him instantly as Ray Charles. He has all the mannerisms down. He does his own piano playing and most of the singing is actual Ray Charles recordings.

But beyond that, I was terribly disappointed with this film. I think it's incredibly creaky, way over-long biography that sort of deals in the general rather than the specific so that, many times while you're watching it, you sort of feel like you're watching a movie about an entertainer who was like Ray Charles rather than the real Ray Charles.

So many of the supporting characters from Ray Charles's neglected wife to his manager to the record company executives are these cardboard characters that feel like they've been taken out of any other movie you've ever seen about the music business, and you really leave the film without much of a sense of why Ray Charles was the legendary musical figure that he was.

Larry Mantle>> What do you think, Henry Sheehan?

Henry Sheehan>> Well, I would have to dissent just a bit on Jamie Foxx's performance because I thought, while he got all the surface gestures and the speaking voice just right, it was a little too much of an impersonation rather than a performance. I wouldn't say entire. I mean, once in a while, there was some depth there that he seemed to express, but the film is working against that anyway because essentially the film says here is this great man and great musician who had a few faults, but he overcame them. You know, they kind of gloss over the real issues in his life like when he left Atlantic Records and went to ABC and he started doing far more middle of the road music. So it's a film that kind of glosses over the more interesting things because they're not entirely praiseworthy.

Larry Mantle>> Our second film this week, "Birth", stars Nicole Kidman, Anne Heche and Lauren Bacall.

[Film Clip]

Larry Mantle>> Henry Sheehan, your thoughts on "Birth"?

Henry Sheehan>> Well, you know, "Birth" is about a rich woman, a widow who's about to get married after ten years, who suddenly encounters a ten year old boy named Sean who insists that he's her long-dead husband also named Sean. The problem with the movie is that that setup is the entire movie. I mean, just at the moment where it should move on, it stops and in fact it's kind of like the end of the first act is the end of the movie. So there's no real investigation here of any, you know, possible supernatural or perhaps just psychological issues. The movie plays cute for a long time on exactly whether it is a supernatural or merely psychological effect that the woman is undergoing. The director, Jonathan Glazer, who did "Sexy Beast" relied very heavily on close-ups, so this is a movie that tried to be a Neil Jordan movie and doesn't work.

Larry Mantle>> What did you think, Scott?

Scott Foundas>> I kind of liked this movie a little bit more than Henry. Actually, the director that I think is most consciously emulated stylistically is Stanley Kubrick from this opening shot that looks like an outtake from "The Shining" through this sort of moodily-lit apartment interior that could have come out of "Eyes Wide Shut". The pace of the film, the editing rhythms, the sort of solemnity of it, is very Kubrickian.

Unfortunately, I do agree with Henry that the movie sort of never really gets past being an intriguing premise. It never completely sells you on the fact that this woman would believe what this boy is telling her to the extent that she does. But I still think it's pretty absorbing for a lot of the way. I mean, sort of at the end of the film, it falls apart, but it creates a mood, it casts a spell, that I found myself taken by.

Larry Mantle>> Finally this week, the British drama, "Enduring Love".

[Film Clip]

Larry Mantle>> "Enduring Love", Scott?

Scott Foundas>> Well, this is a movie that begins with what has to be one of the most arresting opening sequences in any movie this year. It's a hot air balloon accident and when have you ever seen that in a movie before? Basically, the rest of the movie goes on to be about the various people who come together to attempt to rescue the man and his boy who are involved in this accident and then the way in which they're affected by this death that occurs during the rescue process.

The film focuses on a university professor very well played by Daniel Craig from "Sylvia" and "The Road to Perdition" and another man from that incident played by Rhys Ifans who becomes obsessed with Daniel Craig who tells him that God's love passed between them that day and begins stalking him and interfering in his own relationship with his wife played by Samantha Morton. Like "Birth", this movie mixes genres, thriller and psychological drama, but as a thriller, it's very effective and very unconventional and the performances are some of the strongest ensembles that I think you'll see in any movie this fall.

Larry Mantle>> Henry?

Henry Sheehan>> Well, this movie is directed by Roger Michell, who I think directed the best of the Jane Austin films of the last few years and that was "Persuasion". I liked the film very much. It's very compelling. He comes up with a couple of extreme devices that I think are effective for a while, but then begin to get in the way of the film. One is that he shoots every scene in establishing shots. Similarly, the professor is someone who believes in bio-mechanics as opposed to real spirituality while Rhys Ifans's character is, you know, totally sold on this metaphysical view of life. I think that becomes a little too extreme as well, but still it's an interesting and very compelling movie and Ifans as well as Craig gives a very good performance.

Larry Mantle>> Thanks for joining us for another edition of FilmWeek on Life and Times. I'm Larry Mantle of 89.3 KPCC joined by critics Henry Sheehan of henrysheehan.com and Scott Foundas of Variety and the L.A. Weekly. Please join us again next week for another edition of FilmWeek on Life and Times.

Val>> And remember that you can hear a full hour of FilmWeek every Friday morning at 11:00 a.m. on KPCC 89.3. And that's our program. I'm Val Zavala. For everyone at Life and Times, thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

Life and Times was made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education.

And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.

Val>> Next time on Life and Times --

Is it designed to save small businesses or protect corporate coffers? The pros and cons of Proposition 64.

>> If Proposition 63 succeeds, public interest groups can't stop the polluters, the cheaters, the privacy violators.

>> Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has recently endorsed the initiative and you know that his action plan is jobs, jobs, jobs.

Val>> That's next time on Life and Times.