Your Healthcare: What Happened?

Coming up on today’s show:

• At the end of September, Congress allowed the deadline for refunding the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) to expire. Nearly 9 million children rely on CHIP. Myra Gregory is a mother of three boys in St. Louis who are all on CHIP. Joan Alker is executive director of the Center for Children and Families (CCF) and a research professor at the Georgetown University McCourt School of Public Policy. They discuss the program, and the political fight over CHIP.

• Thousands of firefighters are continuing to battle wildfires in Southern California that are burning through tens of thousands of acres and destroying property and forcing thousands to evacuate. Fiorella Calderoni,communications manager at Visit Ventura in Ventura, California, and John Choi, a paramedic at North County Fire Protection District in San Diego County, weigh in on the blazes in The Golden State. 

• Tomorrow, voters in Alabama will head to the polls to settle a highly controversial special election between Roy Moore, a Republican who has been accused of sexual assaulting teenage girls, and Democrat Doug Jones. We go to Alabama Public Radio to speak with News Director Pat Duggins to find out how voters are feeling in the final hours of the campaign. 

• At least 14 U.N. peacekeepers were killed and dozens more were injured on Friday in an attack in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The U.N. Secretary General called it the worst attack on U.N. peacekeepers in recent history. Kevin Sieff, Africa bureau chief for The Washington Post, explains what you need to know. 

• Healthcare is the mess we keep failing to fix. But perhaps there’s a way to learn from our mistakes. “Your Healthcare: What Happened? “— a new series from WNYC’s Health Team and The Takeaway — travels to pivotal moments in the life of American healthcare to figure out where we went wrong, and we might get it right. Today we hear from Mary Harris, host and managing editor for WNYC’s health desk.

• As part of our series, “New Credentials: The Future of American Higher Education,” The Takeaway looks at the ways the for-profit college industry is continuing to thrive under Betsy DeVos’s education department with Eileen Conner, director of litigation at Harvard’s Project on Predatory Student Lending.

This episode is hosted by Todd Zwillich