Time USA – 19 January 2015

6 Editor’s Desk

8 Conversation

BRIEFING

13 Verbatim

14 LightBox

A capsizing cargo ship is run aground near the Isle of Wight

16 World

A deadly terrorist attack targets a satirical newspaper’s office in Paris

18 World

Foreign-affairs columnist Ian Bremmer maps global conflicts brewing for 2015

20 Nation

A new lawsuit revives a high-profile sexcrime case

22 Health

Is the prevention of most cancers out of our control?

25 Milestones

Bill Clinton remembers Mario Cuomo

COMMENTARY

30 Viewpoint

Walter Isaacson on building a safer Internet

on the cover:

Time photo-illustration. Medical tray: Fuse/ Getty Images

The U.S.’s total health care bill for 2014 was $3 trillion, bolstered by fees for MRIs, CT scans and X-rays. Photo-illustration by Ann Elliott Cutting

FEATURES

34 Fixing Obamacare

How letting hospitals run their own insurance companies can bring down health care costs for everyone by Steven Brill

44 Strange Bedfellows Instability across the Middle East has

prompted promising conversations among Israeli and Arab officials by Joe Klein

52 Marching On

A timely film brings Martin Luther King Jr.’s civil rights struggle in Alabama to the screen by Daniel D’Addario

Plus: A review of Selma by Richard Corliss

THE CULTURE

60 Books

A survey of the best young-adult

literature of all time, including Top 10 lists of the best books for preteens and tweens and recommendations from Gillian Flynn, Michael Lewis

and more

Plus, novelist Meg Wolitzer on taking inspiration from Sylvia Plath’s

The Bell Jar

68 The Awesome

Column

Joel Stein tries out hosting America’s Funniest Home Videos

David Oyelowo

as Martin

Luther King Jr. in

Selma, page 52

OY E L O W O: PA R A M O U N T P I C T U R E S

TIME (ISSN 0040-781X) is published weekly, except for two issues combined for one week in January, May, July, August, September and December, by Time Inc. Principal Office: Time & Life Building, Rockefeller Center, New York, NY 10020-1393. Periodicals postage paid at New York, NY, and at additional mailing offices. Canada Post Publications Mail Agreement No. 40110178. Return undeliverable Canada addresses to: Postal Stn A, P.O. Box 4322, Toronto, Ont., M5W 3G9. GST #888381621RT0001 © 2015 Time Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission is prohibited. TIME and the Red Border Design are protected through trademark registration in the United States and in the foreign countries where TIME magazine circulates. U.S. subscriptions: $49 for one year. Subscribers: If the Postal Service alerts us that your magazine is undeliverable, we have no further obligation unless we receive a corrected address within two years. Postmaster: Send address changes to P.O. Box 62120, Tampa, FL 33662-2120. CUSTOMER SERVICE AND SUBSCRIPTIONS—For 24/7 service, please use our website: time.com/customerservice. You can also call 1-800-843-TIME or write to TIME, P.O. Box 62120, Tampa, FL 33662-2120. Mailing list: We make a portion of our mailing list available to reputable firms. If you would prefer that we not include your name, please call, or write us at P.O. Box 62120, Tampa, FL 33662-2120, or send us an email at privacy@time.customersvc.com. Printed in the U.S.

America’s Bitter Pill

this week’s cover story marks the culmination of Steve Brill’s extraordinary journey through the landscape of American health care. He first launched this expedition for the 2013 story that became one of our best-

selling covers, “Bitter Pill,” a riveting and often infuriating autopsy of hospital costs. In subsequent stories, he explored the terrain as a reporter—but took a harrowing detour as a patient, winding up in New York–Presbyterian Hospital for open-heart surgery to correct a potentially deadly aneurysm.

Steve’s discoveries now come together in his new book, America’s Bitter Pill: Money, Politics, Backroom Deals, and the Fight to Fix Our Broken Healthcare System, from which this week’s story is adapted. The Affordable Care Act, he argues, is a case study of a dysfunctional government trying to take on a dysfunctional health care system. “The more I looked behind the point I made at the tail end of the first Time article— that Obamacare didn’t seem to do much about all the pricing abuses I had identified—the more I realized that this was the overarching story of how Washington really works,” he says. “We have become a country where money seems to govern almost everything in Washington, and those interests that enjoy the most power and money, often abusively, will be able to protect their positions.”

His experience as a patient brought the vast, submerged forces in this debate to the surface: namely the power of fear and emotion when it comes to a health crisis. You can have a deep belief in the efficiency of markets and still doubt whether your own health, or the health of someone you love, is suited to negotiation or bargain hunting. Steve proposes a solution that does not require a change in human nature or the current state of U.S. democracy. Let that be the start of the next national conversation: Now that coverage has been expanded, what

would it really take to control the costs?

What You Said About ...

TWIN SPACE PIONEERS “A guy’s

gonna go up in space for a year— why?” asked Joe Scarborough on Morning Joe in a discussion of Time’s Dec. 29–Jan. 5 cover story on an upcoming NASA mission that will send Scott Kelly into space for a year—the

longest period ever for an American—while his identical twin Mark is monitored at home on Earth. On Chicago radio, writer Jeffrey Kluger addressed the experiment’s possible physical and mental strain, including “third-quarter effect,” or the fatigue and depression that can set in before the end of such an arduous period of relative isolation. Readers were impressed. “I salute both of these intrepid men,” wrote Mike Moore of Warsaw, Mo. But Thomas McGugan of Jacksonville Beach, Fla., thought NASA could do better by the astronaut: “I was shocked and a bit saddened to see the condition of Scott Kelly’s suit, including rust on the helmet lock ring and connectors that belong on a ’63 Rambler.”

RAND PAUL ON CUBA The Kentucky Senator’s

Time.com essay celebrating the Obama Administration’s recent moves toward engagement with Cuba sparked heated debate—not least between Paul and fellow GOP star Marco Rubio, who cri-

tiqued Paul as a “cheerleader for Obama’s foreign policy.” On Time.com, commenter MatthewKilburn supported incremental steps toward engagement but wrote that “the manner in which the President—and

apparently, Rand Paul—is so willing to wash away any restriction on that country, and in doing so enrich the current authorities while emptying our current tool kit of any future available carrots, is foolish.” RicardoRivera disagreed: “We must move away from outdated policy that harms the Cuban people more than it will harm those in charge of Cuban politics.”

THE TEDDY AWARDS Joe Klein’s annual shout-outs for the politicians who showed the most courage

included President Obama for his “moderate, sane and humane” policies (despite some considerable missteps). Critics pounced. “What an ugly 8 years this will have been!” wrote D. Wymard of Fort Lauderdale, Fla. “In his own words (‘needless unforced errors,’

‘negligent foreign policy’) Klein castigates Obama, and yet turns around and awards the Teddy. Rather hypocritical!”

THE TOP 100 PHOTOS OF 2014 TIME’s picks reflected a “wide spectrum of emotion,” according to Today.com, including Derek Jeter’s jubilant leap after his game-winning last at bat at Yankee Stadium against the Baltimore Orioles (second row, right) and a haunting closeup of a young Afghan refugee (second

row, left). BBC News, in particular, was taken by Massimo Sestini’s “astonishing” aerial photo of migrants crossing the Mediterranean Sea in a jam-packed boat (top left): “From a distance it looks like a fish, with colorful scales. But look closely and you see that it is a boat—packed so tightly with people looking up that you cannot actually see the boat ... like when a child sprinkles a piece of cardboard with glitter.” Meanwhile, on MSNBC, panelist Ayman Mohyeldin called out a lighter entry—the now famous Oscar selfie—and debated the merits of selfies with TIME’s Belinda Luscombe. “Is it cheating to use a selfie stick?” he asked. To see the full list, visit time.com/photos2014

S E G A M I Y T T E G S: R E M M I W S LT, E V E S O O R , L U PA ; P A : E E G U F E R , E I F L E S N E L L E , R E T E J S; R E T U E R : N O S U G R E F , A M A B O S; I R A L O P OAT: B

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