Top insurer retreats from Obamacare; Google takes on FaceTime, and more news.
Isabelle Roughol
Building news organisations where people love to work|Journalist & media executive|Public historian
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Aetna drops out of Obamacare. The insurer is pulling out of 11 of the 15 state exchanges where it was offering policies to "limit (its) financial exposure." It's joining other major insurers like UnitedHealth and Humana in arguing the Affordable Care Act just doesn't add up for them. At least one county in Arizona may find itself with no plan offered at all next year.
Comedy Central has canceled Larry Wilmore's Nightly Show. It won't be a drawn out affair; the last episode is to air Thursday and Wilmore won't get to cover the presidential election. The network pointed to Wilmore's poor ratings and, sign of the times, his inability — or unwillingness — to create viral social content, in the way that John Oliver has for HBO or Franchesca Ramsey (also a Nightly Show correspondent) for MTV. Writes Vox's Caroline Framke,
"The Nightly Show didn’t cater to 2016’s late-night TV standards, which made it both unique and doomed."
Google is taking on Apple's FaceTime. Its new app Duo is a Hangout spinoff or a cross-platform FaceTime: no text messaging, no stickers, no filters, no group conversations... Just one-to-one video chat and a phone number-based sign up. It's basic but most video chat apps are so buggy that if Duo works, it will have my undying loyalty. The Verge's Dieter Bohn nails it: "That effort is so single-minded I can't decide if it's timid or bold."
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Hamilton vs. the Bots. The Hamilton creator, Lin-Manuel Miranda, is pushing a federal bill that would fine ticket resellers who use online bots to snatch up show tickets by the thousands, depriving average fans of the opportunity. The fine would be up to $16,000 per ticket — which is about the rate for a Hamilton black market orchestra seat during Miranda's last few weeks on stage.
Peter Thiel speaks out. Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel penned a New York Times op-ed defending his fight against Gawker — which filed for bankruptcy under the weight of a $140 million judgment and ongoing legal battles funded by Thiel — as a battle for privacy and ethical journalism. Read the response here from Gawker founding editor Elizabeth Spiers. (She calls the editorial an "epic word salad of disingenuousness" so you know where she stands.)
Cover Photo: President Barack Obama (C) signs the Affordable Health Care for America Act during a ceremony in the East Room of the White House March 23, 2010 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)
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8 年Aetna is pulling out of ACA as retaliation for the Obama based Justice Department not approving its merger with Humana...is this a failure of the ACA or yet another corporate entity holding the citizens hostage until they get their way? I am not saying the ACA is the perfect solution, but let's call this what it is, blackmail where once again innocent citizens are the primary victims