Transcripts For KQED PBS NewsHour 20131202 : comparemela.com

Fact, he admits he is working as he can on a wide variety of projects. Ifill those are just some of the stories were covering on tonights pbs newshour. Major funding for the pbs newshour has been provided by and by the alfred p. Sloan foundation. Supporting science, technology, and improved Economic Performance and Financial Literacy in the 21st century. And with the ongoing support of these institutions and foundations. And. This program was made possible by the corporation for public broadcasting. And by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. Thank you. Woodruff this was touted as the biggest day of the year for Online Shopping, as hundreds of retailers tried to lure millions of Holiday Shoppers on cyber monday. Early numbers suggested a sharp increase over last year, after a fourday Holiday Weekend that turned out to be disappointing. In a few minutes, well take a deeper look at the numbers and retailers prospects. The u. S. Supreme court declined today to decide whether big online retailers have to collect state sales taxes. The justices turned away appeals from amazon and overstock. Com after they lost a case in new york state. In the absence of a national ruling, more states may try to tax sales on the internet. A new york commuter train was doing 82 miles an hour when it hit a sharp curve and derailed sunday, killing four people. The speed limit there is 30 miles an hour. Investigators from the National Transportation safety board announced the findings today from the trains two data recorders. They said its clear what the train was doing, but not why. The locomotive had an event recorder, the cab car had an at in point in time it is preliminary but we can say heres what happened. We know speeds and positions, power settings and brake application. We dont know whether the brakes went to zero pressure because of a valve change or because of the train breakup. Woodruff the wreckage on the track meant some 26,000 commuters had to find alternative routes today. The Governments Health care website is hitting on more cylinders. White house Officials Say it handled 375,000 customers by midday. Thats after weeks of work to fix the sites disastrous rollout two months ago. Well get the details on that effort and what lies ahead right after the news summary. A medical technician faces 39 years in prison, in new hampshire, for infecting at least 46 people with hepatitis c. David kwiatkowski was sentenced today. He admitted stealing painkillers and replacing them with syringes of saline, tainted with his own, infected blood. His victims were spread across four states. In thailand, the embattled Prime Minister pledged to do anything it takes to end days of violent protests, except give up power. But thousands of demonstrators demanded just that. Jonathan sparks of independent Television News has this report. Reporter it was supposed to be peaceful. A Nonviolent Campaign against the thai government. But its turned into a bare knuckle battle for power. Parts of bangkok streaked with teargas and rubble bullets today as protesters tried to seize government ministries from the police. Many here are driven by hatred for the countrys Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra and those seen to support her. A man who looks like hes a we watched as protesters crept up to the barricades around the Prime Ministers office with an assortment of homemade weaponry. But several rounds of teargas saw them off. The protesters cant take it. The protest leader a fiery politician called Suthep Thaugsuban told euphoric supporters that the government would soon fall. The Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra also offering to hold talks. But mr. Suthep refuses to negotiate. Its a problem i put to her foreign minister today. He said hes not negotiating . I dont know. Thats the way suthep is thinking. Maybe hes thinking right now hes a god. He can do anything. Reporter as evening approached, police lines were rammed with a rubbish truck. They responded with a scorching mix of water and pepper spray. The police won themselves a few minutes. But the protesters returned. Theyll be there tomorrow as well. Woodruff protests also raged for another day in ukraines capital city. Thousands of demonstrators stormed government buildings in kiev to demand integration with the European Union. In turn, the countrys president asked to renew talks with the e. U. And he appealed for calm. Well have a full report from kiev and analysis from a former u. S. Ambassador later in the program. China launched its first Robotic Mission to the moon early this morning. The jade rabbit rover aboard a Landing Craft blasted off atop an unmanned rocket at 1 30 a. M. The rover is expected to land on the lunar surface in mid december. If successful, china will become the third country to softland a spacecraft on the moon. Wall street retreated today after retailers got off to a disappointing start for the Holiday Season. The Dow Jones Industrial average lost 77 points to close at 16,008. The nasdaq fell 14 points to close at 4,045. Woodruff still to come on the newshour fixing the glitches plaguing healthcare. Gov will the Holiday Season bring cheer to retailers . David hockney on painting with an ipad; thousands of protesters take to the streets of kiev and this years winner of the National Book award for fiction. Ifill this week marks the beginning of an important Enrollment Period for the healthcare law and its battlescarred federal website. But, for now, the Obama Administration says it has good news. Although performance can still be spotty, things are better than they were. The white house and the nations top Health Agency say users shopping for insurance on healthcare. Gov are having far more success today than a month ago. The troubled site, officials said, is working nearly 90 percent of the time for consumers, and that today, there were 375,000 people visits by noon. We believe we made the important progress that we set out to make by november 30 but as we said in november, and as i said just now, the work continues to make improvements that still need to be made to the website. Ifill Officials Say the site can handle 50,000 users at one time, and up to 800,000 each day. The health and Human Services Department Also said the sites socalled back end, which delivers information to insurers, had been largely repaired. But problems remain. Insurance Companies Remain unhappy. And increased volume could provide new tests as a december 23 deadline for enrollment nears. Tennessee republican senator bob corker said sunday even if the site gets fixed, the law that spawned it remains deeply flawed. The fundamentals of this, to me, were done in a way, a chaotic way much like were seeing the rollout. It was done in a way that really there wasnt a vision at the end, it was just an amalgamation of legislation that didnt have a central focus. Ifill meanwhile, the cost of fixing healthcare. Gov has reached 600 million and counting. We get more information on all this from two people watching the rollout from behind the scenes. Mary agnes carey of Kaiser Health news, an independent news organization. John engates, the chief Technology Officer at rackgates, a server and software company. Hes been inside the government websites command center. Welcome to you both. Mary agnes carey. 750now, well on its way to the 800,000 number National White house was talking about today, by 5 30 p. M. Eastern. How is that different from what we saw a month ago . They say that its more than double the usual traffic for a monday. And of course there has been a lot of News Coverage of the changes they made on the web site. So maybe they are getting some people back who had some problems before. Ifill but there are still problems. I want you to explain what people mean when they say the front end and back end. The front end is the consumer experience. Consumers logging on to heldcare. Gov, and back end is information that goes to the Health Insurers, how many people are enrolled, do they have a subsidy, how much and so on. Ifill so the back end is the remaining problem right now, even though we assume that the patches that are made today will hold at the front end, 9 back end is where the insurers are not so happy. They are very unhappy. They say they are not getting accurate enrollment information. They dont know if someone qualifies for a subsidy, how much of a subsidy. Consumers are calling Health Insurers asking if they are enrolled. Insurers are saying they dont have any record of this. And even with the fixes announced today the Insurance Industry was telling me tonight that they still see significant enrollment challenges the way theyre getting data right now. Ifill and yesterday today and yet today on this call, that the health and Human Services officials gave they say 80 of that backend insurers problem had been improved but they didnt say over what. Exactly right. Theyre not giving the error rate, reporters kept asking repeatedly how many of these forms sent to the insurers had bad information. Theyre not answering that question. And insurers are saying tonight even the fix that was proposed today hasnt been tested. They dont know whether its going to work on not. Ifill what was it fixing . What is the source of the problem. 80 of the problem dealt with a snafu that on Social Security number, entering that into the form and that created part of the problem. Ifill and are the fixes youre talking about whether on the front end or back end, are they permanent fixes they are putting in place or are these just bandaids to get us over this deadline. The assumption is that they are perm innocent fixes but they made it very clear as jay carney said they need to do more and monitor and do more work as they need to going along. Ifill john engates, you are from i want to start by asking you what you saw when you went backstage, tas were, at the command center . Sure, so we got a peek behind the curtain last monday, invited up to washington d. C. To go to the Exchange Operation center where these fixes are being orchestrated. And they have a team of people up there that sit in a command center. Everybodys got computers on their desk. Everybody has got a phone. And there is sort of this air of sort of a, you know, kind of like a control room you would think of at nasa or some sort of launch center. Much smaller, certainly. But they are monitoring the site very carefully. They have screens on the wall with, you know, data about how the web site is performing. They have people in the front of the room that are sort of bringing together all of the different vendors and contractors to make sure that theyre on the same page when they institute these fixes and upgrades. Ifill is the problem, as you see it, about scale, the volume of people who are trying to get on the site or is it about the performance of the site itself . Well, i mean, those are two sides of the same coin. If the site is designed to perform at a certain level, and you have too many users, the site falls over. I mean basically has a real problem performing. On the flip side of that, if the site was designed for an extraordinarily large number of visitors, then the traffic that were seeing today or previously wouldnt be a problem. Ifill is what you saw in washington that part of the tech surge that we heard about right after the first problems were discovered . We did. We saw the people that were part of that surge. And the surge was basically an addition of more contractors to do sort of these fixes. But it was also an infusion of outside expertise. And so they brought in a gentleman that is on leave from google. Hes now leading he is leading the way when i was there that day last week. He was in the front of the room sort of running the Conference Call in the morning. They have a twice daily Conference Call to sort of decides whats going right, whats going wrong, what they need to do for that day. And so some of the surge is basically enhancing the level of expertise, bringing in outsiders. But also just ramping up the number of people that are on board from the contractors. Ifill is that getting too technical . Are the problems that you have seen hardware problems or Software Problems . Its actually been both. I mean we did talk about some of the things that they had done. They did upgrade hardware. They added more hardware. They made settings, changes to the settings on certain pieces of hardware that were potentially misconfigured. Then they also made Software Upgrades to help streamline the system. There are elements of this web site that, you know, prior to the surge, prior to the fixes, they were doing some complex database lookups that would take an extraordinarily long period of time on a peruser basis. Some of the changes they made will allow for some of that data to be stored locally, cashed, if you will, and make the lookups a lot faster and make the streamline essentially streamlining the process that a user goes through as theyre looking at the site. Ifill finally i want to you ask you this and then i will ask mary agnes. What is the next big problem that they need to solve . Assuming that the problems that they have already fixed hold. Right. So you eluded to this in the beginning of the chat here. The front end is what theyve been focused on. The front end is what the user experiences when theyre browsing the site or filling out information on the site. The back end is soft of the completion of that transaction to take the signup process to completion and sort of feed that data over to the insurance carriers. I think that part of it is sort of remains to be seen whether they fixed that, whether its working well. Theres another aspect of this that seems to come up from time to time on conversations that ive heard, is the security aspect. It sort of again remains to be seen whether thats with a big element of the focus. Or whether that got sort of pushed aside as they were working on the performance. Ifill mary agnes, they say they put in a shopping winnow feature. All these little bells an whistles. Is that the problem that they are facing in the next month or so. They have to make sure they can handle the demand. They say they will decide to handle 800,000 people in one day. People need to have a good experience, especially people who have stayed away, are now coming back to be able to process their application, there was mixed experience today on twitter, some had a good experience, some did not. They also have to fix this problem with Health Insurers. Coverage starts january 1st. People have until december 23rd to enroll. If insurers dont know that youre in the system, imagine whats going happen when you go to the doctor or month and they have no record of your insurance coverage. Ifill a big challenge still ahead, mary agnes carey, Kaiser Health news, and john engates, thank you so much. Thank you woodruff now, cash registers are ringing and merchants are singing online and in the mall, but hows the economy really doing this Holiday Season . Jeffrey brown explores that question. Brown 131 million americans more than a third of the country are expected to shop online before this day is out. Thats according to the National Retail federation. And brad wilson at the coupon site bradsdeals. Com, says a lot is riding on that prediction. This day is the single largest ecommerce day all year round. Its so important for the retailers to be competitive. Brown in fact, holiday Cyber Shopping is already well under way. The analytic firm comscore says online sales for thanksgiving weekend were up 17 from last year, helped by greater use of mobile devices. At the same time, the Retail Federation estimates that total spending over the weekend, including brickandmortar stores, was actually down nearly 3 from last year. A record 141 Million People went shopping, but the average shopper spent nearly 4 less than a year ago, partly due to deep discounts. Some big retailers walmart and macys, for example say theyre not expecting any growth this Holiday Season, with six fewer days between thanksgiving and christmas. Some perspective on these early reports and what it says about the Economic Health of the american consumer. Jerry storch has his own advisory firm. Hes a veteran of the retail industry, including a former chief executive of toysrus. Welcome to you. So even as we await for firmer numbers, what are you seeing so far in terms of just how tough a season this will be . Well, theres no doubt that it started off slow. Whether it is up a few points or down a few points, itological wasnt as good over the weekend as people had hoped. Well get final numbers later. But theres no doubt the