Jill Ellis Is Stepping Down As U.S. Women’s Soccer Coach

U.S. Women’s National Team coach Jill Ellis celebrates after the American squad defeated the Netherlands on July 7 in France to win the FIFA Women’s World Cup.

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Updated at 3:07 p.m. ET

Jill Ellis, who won back-to-back World Cup titles with the U.S. Women’s National Team, is stepping down as its coach, U.S. Soccer announced Tuesday. Ellis will make her official exit in October, after winning 102 games and losing only seven.

“When I accepted the head coaching position, this was the timeframe I envisioned,” Ellis, 52, said in a statement from U.S. Soccer.

“The timing is right to move on and the program is positioned to remain at the pinnacle of women’s soccer,” she said. “Change is something I have always embraced in my life, and for me and my family, this is the right moment.”

During the recent FIFA Women’s World Cup, Ellis set a new mark by having coached the national team for 127 matches, surpassing former coach April Heinrichs.

For everything she has done and everything she has meant to this program we say, THANK YOU ??

Jill Ellis will step down as #USWNT head coach in October.#ThankYouJill: https://t.co/5I3dwtQXIo pic.twitter.com/QkCAkMItQj

— U.S. Soccer WNT (@USWNT) July 30, 2019

“The U.S. Soccer Federation and the sport in general owes Jill a debt of gratitude,” U.S. Soccer President Carlos Cordeiro said. “Jill was always extremely passionate about this team, analytical, tremendously focused and not afraid to make tough decisions while giving her players the freedom to play to their strengths.”

“The opportunity to coach this team and work with these amazing women has been the honor of a lifetime,” Ellis said. “I want to thank and praise them for their commitment and passion to not only win championships but also raise the profile of this sport globally while being an inspiration to those who will follow them.

Ellis is fresh off an undefeated run in the Women’s World Cup, in which the U.S. team defeated the Netherlands 2-0 in the final July 7 in Lyon, France.

During the World Cup, Ellis guided her squad through a gantlet of challenges, pulling off tense wins against physical opponents who were not cowed by the Americans’ elite standing. Before the title match, the U.S. won three straight knockout phase by 2-1 margins, beating talented sides from host country France, as well as England and Spain.

Along the way to clinching the title, Ellis also helped the team overcome an injury to star player Megan Rapinoe, in addition to keeping them focused on their opponents on the field, rather than on critical remarks President Trump made about Rapinoe.

According to U.S. Soccer, Ellis will transition to being an “ambassador” for the sporting federation after she leaves the coach’s post.

U.S. Soccer also announced the “imminent” hiring of a first-ever general manager for the women’s team. Once that position is formally filled, the federation said, the search for a new head coach will begin.

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In Wake of Abuse Scandals, Bill Would Hold U.S. Olympic Organizations Accountable

Olympic gold medalist Aly Raisman talks with Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., following a 2018 Senate subcommittee hearing on keeping athletes safe from abuse.

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Over the past 18 months, Sens. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., and Jerry Moran, R-Kan., have investigated how a now-convicted child molester like Larry Nassar was able to serve as team doctor to the USA Gymnastics team for nearly two decades.

The result of their efforts is the Empowering Olympic and Amateur Athletes Sports Act of 2019, which would ratchet up oversight, increase athlete representation within the Olympic movement and provide more resources to the organization charged with investigating sexual abuse within Olympic sports.

Sarah Hirshland, CEO of the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee, said the legislation continues the work the committee has been doing since early last year.

“Improving athlete safety and voice in our country’s Olympic and Paralympic community, and increasing accountability for the organizations that make up that community, are central to the initiatives and reform that we began, in February 2018,” she said. “We applaud Congress for their continued work on this critically important issue.”

The legislation would boost the number of athletes involved in the administration of Olympic sports. Right now, athletes make up 20 percent of the boards of the USOPC and the national governing bodies. That number would rise to 33 percent.

Advocates for stronger protections for athletes within the Olympic Movement, like Nancy Hogshead-Makar, a gold medalist in swimming and head of the organization Champion Women, have pushed for this change because they believe it will lead to older, more experienced individuals serving as athlete representatives, which in turn could foster change within sports organizations.

The legislation would increase funding for U.S. Center for SafeSport, an independent organization charged with investigating sexual abuse in the Olympic Movement, by requiring $20 million in funding from the Olympic committee.

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Watch U.K. Jazz Group Sons Of Kemet Deliver An Explosive Midnight Set

“Jazz built for arenas.”

A friend and former rock critic shared this admiring assessment of Sons of Kemet, after seeing the band for the first time at this year’s Big Ears Festival. There’s obviously truth in it: Over the last eight years, Sons of Kemet has not only fueled the fires of a raging London jazz scene; it has also scaled up the pyrotechnics, in strictly musical terms.

With Shabaka Hutchings on tenor saxophone, Theon Cross on tuba, and Eddie Hick and Tom Skinner on drums, it’s a hardy combustion engine that also feels like a breathing organism. Arenas, sure, but this is also jazz built for street parties. And certain proudly eclectic fests.

At Big Ears in Knoxville, Tenn., Sons of Kemet brought its exultant blend of carnival rhythm, club abandon and jazz improv to a midnight show that packed The Mill & Mine, a cavernous room that once housed the Industrial Belting and Supply Company. The set drew from a knockout recent album, Your Queen Is a Reptile, but with a spirit of freedom in the moment — whatever setting you think suits it best, it’s music made for a perpetual now.

PERFORMERS
Shabaka Hutchings: saxophone; Theon Cross: tuba; Tom Skinner: drums; Eddie Hick: drums

CREDITS
Producers: Sarah Geledi, Colin Marshall, Katie Simon; Head of Recording: Matt Honkonen; Lead Recording Engineer: Jonathan Maness; Assistant Recording Engineer: Ryan Bear; Concert Audio Mix: David Tallacksen, Josh Rogosin; Concert Video Director: Colin Marshall; Videographers: Tsering Bista, Annabel Edwards, Nickolai Hammar, Kimani Oletu; Editor: Maia Stern; Project Manager: Suraya Mohamed; Senior Producers: Colin Marshall, Katie Simon; Supervising Editors: Keith Jenkins, Lauren Onkey; Executive Producers: Gabrielle Armand, Anya Grundman, Amy Niles; Funded in Part By: The Argus Fund, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The Ella Fitzgerald Charitable Fund, The National Endowment for the Arts, Wyncote Foundation

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Seizures Of Methamphetamine Are Surging In The U.S.

A rock of crystal methamphetamine lifted from a suspect in Orange County, Calif. This fall, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention expects to begin collecting more local information about the rising use of meth, cocaine and other stimulants.

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Methamphetamine, an illegal drug that sends the body into overdrive, is surging through the United States. Federal drug data provided exclusively to NPR show seizures of meth by authorities have spiked, rising 142% between 2017 and 2018.

“Seizures indicate increasing trafficking in these drugs,” says John Eadie, public health coordinator for the federal government’s National Emerging Threats Initiative, part of the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas program. “So if seizures have more than doubled, it probably means more than double trafficking in methamphetamines. And with that go additional deaths.”

Overdose deaths involving meth and other psychostimulants did rise last year — by 21% (to 12,987 from 10,749 in 2017) — according to provisional data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Deaths from cocaine and fentanyl were up too. But overdose deaths dropped overall because of a decline in the number of fatalities tied to pain pills.

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For decades, meth has been associated with working-class Americans trying to hold down two or more jobs and has been popular in some gay communities, but it hasn’t been widely available in every region of the country. Now that’s changing too. Seizures of meth are up, sometimes dramatically, in pockets of nearly every state in the U.S., based on data collected in 32 High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas.

“It was all about the meth”

There are many paths to meth use. Some drug users say they take it to pick themselves up after taking downers: heroin or fentanyl. Those on the streets say they take it to stay awake at night and avoid rape or robbery. Meth offers a relatively cheap high that can last days. That means fewer injections and less worry about finding money for the next hit. And some drug users pick up meth because they are terrified of fentanyl, the opioid that can shut down breathing in seconds.

Mike Leslie, in Falmouth, Mass., no longer uses any drugs to get high. But he says that of all the opioids and stimulants he has used, meth wrecked his life so fast that he hardly knew what was happening.

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“I knew if I went back to using fentanyl, I would likely overdose and die,” says Mike Leslie, 37, who has overdosed on fentanyl twice.

Leslie found his way to meth after more than 20 years of drug use that started with marijuana and alcohol, progressed to cocaine and then led to opioids: pain pills, heroin and fentanyl. Leslie had been off fentanyl for about four years last fall when he ran into an old acquaintance on the streets of Boston and that urge to get high took over.

“He was selling meth. It was basically the one thing out there that I hadn’t tried,” Leslie says. “Now it was readily available. So I tried it.”

Leslie says meth wrecked his life so fast that he hardly knew what was happening. He’d kept working while on heroin, but four months after his first hit of meth, he had lost his job as a recovery outreach worker, had dropped out of graduate school and was sleeping on the floor of a train station.

“As soon as I tried it, I was no longer functioning,” Leslie says. “It was all about the meth.”

Leslie sets out books for a 12-step meeting at Saint Patrick’s Church in Falmouth. Federal tracking data have shown an increase in prescribed stimulants like ADHD meds, as well as in authorities’ seizures of meth.

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Leslie had tried a weaker drug in the same class as meth a few years ago — Adderall, the medication for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. He persuaded a doctor that he needed the pills to concentrate but says he just used them for a mild high and rush of energy while he was recovering from heroin and fentanyl. But Leslie’s deception might be a window into an even bigger problem when it comes to stimulants.

An emerging stimulant epidemic?

Eadie, who tracks the country’s prescription drug monitoring programs, says the data from the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas show an increase in prescribed stimulants like ADHD meds. They show that seizures of cocaine are rising too, though not as fast as meth. Combine the legal and illegal stimulants, with meth leading the way, and Eadie says it looks like there’s an emerging stimulant epidemic, entwined with the opioid crisis.

“We’re seeing almost as many people starting up methamphetamines and cocaine and prescription stimulants as are abusing the opioids,” Eadie says. “So the problem is getting worse at the moment, and it’s getting more complicated to deal with.”

Half of the people who died after a meth overdose in 2017 also had an opioid in their system, according to an analysis that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released in May. That same report showed 73% of cocaine deaths included opioids. The CDC is stepping up prevention and surveillance efforts to get a better understanding of what’s happening with stimulants. In September, it expects to begin collecting more local information about meth, cocaine and other stimulants, as it does now with opioids.

“We know that the relationship between stimulants and cocaine is a growing problem, and it requires an increase in public health and data collection efforts so that we can implement effective and comprehensive drug overdose prevention,” says Mbabazi Kariisa, a health scientist at the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control at the CDC.

Meth means new problems and dangers for first responders

The complications are not news to Bradley Osgood, the chief of police in Concord, N.H., which has one of the highest opioid overdose death rates in the United States.

“Methamphetamine just presents a whole new issue for us,” says Osgood, “and our officers are getting hurt. We’ve had concussions. We’ve had broken hands.”

He says officers may need to run through traffic after someone who is high and leaping between cars. Sometimes most of the nine Concord officers on duty at any one time are needed to restrain one person thrashing about on meth. Concord police get crisis intervention training and know how to calm residents who have uncontrolled mental health issues, but Osgood says those same techniques don’t seem to work with people high on meth.

Osgood says calls to reverse an opioid overdose have started to drop in Concord because more people have the opioid-reversal drug naloxone, brand name Narcan, and use it themselves. But meth is more than filling that gap.

“It’s surpassed what we’re seeing from heroin and fentanyl,” Osgood says. “The rise in meth has just been unbelievable.”

There is no drug like naloxone that police officers or family members can use to reverse an overdose from meth or other stimulant — a racing heart, dangerously high blood pressure and extreme sweats. Deaths involve a heart attack or stroke.

Dr. Melisa Lai-Becker, chief of emergency medicine, stands in one of the resuscitation rooms in the emergency ward at CHA Everett Hospital, near Boston. In the past 10 years, Lai-Becker says, she hardly saw any stimulant overdoses. These days, there are about four a week.

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Dr. Melisa Lai-Becker, who runs the emergency department at CHA Everett Hospital outside Boston, says she and her staff often get hurt, as Osgood’s officers do, before they can inject a sedative, typically a benzodiazepine, to calm someone down. Figuring out how much of which benzo to give is an art, Lai-Becker says, because she doesn’t know how much of what kind of stimulant the person took.

“You’re looking at the speedometer, and you’re trying to get them down from going 148 miles per hour down to 60 miles per hour,” she says. “You want to get them to right around the speed limit, but you don’t want to bring them all the way to a full stop.”

In that case, doctors have to restart breathing and maybe the patient’s heart. For the past 10 years, Lai-Becker says, she hardly saw any stimulant overdoses. These days, there are about four a week.

Meth’s path into the U.S.

If a person is on meth, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration says it more than likely came into the U.S. from Mexico. Jon DeLena, associate special agent in charge for the New England Field Division, recently toured a crystal meth lab in a Mexican jungle that the Mexican military said was producing 7 tons every three days.

A Sinaloa state police officer works during the dismantling of one of three clandestine laboratories that were producing synthetic drugs, mainly methamphetamine, in Eldorado, Mexico.

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“It was enormous. It was incredible,” DeLena says. “Those are the drugs that are coming into the United States and ultimately up into our region.”

DeLena says the Mexican cartels put almost all U.S. domestic meth producers out of business several years ago with a cheaper, more potent version of the drug that travels into the U.S. through the same channels as fentanyl and cocaine. He says cartel leaders realized that drug users would want an alternative to fentanyl.

“They study the trends just like people here study the stock market,” DeLena says. “They know what the next trend is going to be, and sometimes they force that trend upon people. And that’s exactly what they’re doing in this case.”

Some doctors, researchers and recovery program leaders worry that growing attention to meth might slow the expansion of medication-assisted treatment and other efforts to reduce opioid overdose deaths.

“That’s the real focus nationally,” says Traci Green, deputy director of the Injury Prevention Center at Boston Medical Center. But “we need to start paying a lot more attention to stimulants, quickly.”

Mike Leslie says he worries that other drug users aren’t taking meth seriously because they don’t think that it, like fentanyl, will kill them.

“Meth is extremely dangerous, but the chance of overdose is not as great as it is with opiates, so people, from my experience, have less of a desire to get clean from the meth,” he says.

With the help of 12-step meetings, Leslie says, he has begun to reconnect with his family. But he worries that other meth and stimulant users don’t take the risk of overdose seriously enough.

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Leslie says he’s no longer using any drugs. And with the help of 12-step meetings, he’s reconnecting with his family.

“I’ve put my family and my parents especially through hell and back,” he says. Now, “the way my parents put it, for me to give them their son back is the best thing I could do.”

But the rising drug-seizure numbers suggest there’s more hell ahead for communities across the country facing a new or renewed wave of meth.

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Bill Of The Month Update On Story Involving Kidney Dialysis

The medical bill of the month story that Morning Edition brought you last Monday — half a million dollars for kidney dialysis — has been reduced to zero by the company that owns the dialysis center.



STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

All right. We told you one week ago about a Montana man, Sov Valentine, who received a bill of more than half a million dollars for 14 weeks of kidney dialysis. His bill was reduced by half by the time of our broadcast. Now he’s received even more good news. Kevin Trevellyan of Montana Public Radio has the story.

KEVIN TREVELLYAN, BYLINE: Late last week, after reports on NPR and CBS, Fresenius, the dialysis company that sent Sov Valentine the bill, said they would waive it. He owes nothing. Valentine is a 50-year-old personal trainer who suddenly developed kidney failure in January. He said he felt relief at the news.

SOV VALENTINE: It felt like a victory. You know? It felt righteous.

TREVELLYAN: But there was also frustration that he had to face potential bankruptcy while fighting a life-threatening disease.

VALENTINE: So it just felt really wrong from the very beginning. You know, like, when people – when there’s a hurricane, and they try to sell water for $10 a gallon and this kind of stuff?

TREVELLYAN: The huge bill stemmed from treatment Valentine got at an out-of-network Fresenius clinic in Missoula, 70 miles from his home in rural Montana. He and his wife, Jessica, who is a doctor, said they had been told by their insurer that there were no in-network clinics in the entire state. The insurer now says that was a misunderstanding. The Valentines were bracing for a bill, but no one could tell them how much it would cost. Then the bills came.

VALENTINE: It was just boom – $140,000, $145,000. And then a month and a half or so later, boom – $540,000. And they wanted it in 10 days and had already started sending us collection notices.

TREVELLYAN: A Fresenius spokesman said the company waved Valentine’s bill because he should have been treated as in-network from the beginning, and it is negotiating with Valentine’s insurance company now. But Valentine says that’s backpedaling.

VALENTINE: You know, it’s a slap in the face ’cause we were doing research and talking with them, and Jessica would be on the phone for four hours at a time on her days off.

TREVELLYAN: Now Valentine is preparing for a kidney transplant. There’s not much he would do differently following his billing ordeal. He felt he dotted all his i’s and crossed all his t’s from the beginning. For NPR News, I’m Kevin Trevellyan in Missoula, Mont.

INSKEEP: Our Bill of the Month segment is produced in collaboration with Kaiser Health News.

Copyright © 2019 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

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Kamala Harris Releases ‘Medicare For All’ Plan With A Role For Private Insurers

Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., cosponsored Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ “Medicare for All” bill, along with several other 2020 candidates, when it was released in 2017. Her plan has some key differences with Sanders, including a larger role for private insurance and a higher threshold for taxing household income.

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California Sen. Kamala Harris has released a health care plan just in time for the second Democratic debate, offering a role for private insurance in a “Medicare for All” system and outlining new taxes to pay for it.

The plan comes after months of questions about whether she supports scrapping private insurance — and as former Vice President Joe Biden appears to be gearing up to attack her at the upcoming debate on her support for Medicare for All.

To review, Bernie Sanders’ single-payer health plan is called “Medicare for All,” and Kamala Harris is a cosponsor on that plan (along with several other presidential candidates, including N.J. Sen. Cory Booker, N.Y. Sen. Kirsten Gilibrand, and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren). His plan would cover all Americans with a government-administered healthcare plan.

While Harris has cosponsored Sanders’ plan, she has also diverged from Sanders’ vision on the campaign trail, most notably on the role of private insurance.

Here are how some key elements of the Harris proposal match up.

Private insurance: Under Harris’ plan, private insurance would have a bigger role than under Sanders’ plan. Harris envisions a system like the current Medicare system, in which people can either purchase government-administrated Medicare plans or buy Medicare plans from private companies — an option known as Medicare Advantage.

That’s a big difference from Sanders’ plan, under which any insurance that duplicates the coverage provided by his Medicare for All system would be banned. As his version of Medicare for All is very expansive (covering dental and vision, for example, in addition to more basic medical care), that would mean a tiny role for private insurance.

Harris says there would still be room for employer-sponsored coverage under her plan. After a 10-year transition period (more on that below), employers could still offer insurance, according to her campaign. They would, however, have to get those plans certified as Medicare plans through the government to meet certain standards, including cost and quality of coverage.

New taxes: One key revenue-raiser Sanders has proposed for Medicare for All is what his plan calls a 4-percent “premium” on household income over $29,000. Harris’ plan would only impose that tax on households over $100,000, and would also raise even that threshold for households in “high-cost areas.”

To add to that revenue, Harris proposes taxes on financial transactions like stock and bond trades.

Transition time: Bernie Sanders’ plan calls for a four-year transition to his single-payer system. Harris would have a 10-year transition, and both would allow a public option, where Americans below age 65 could buy into the government’s Medicare program, in the first year.

This comes with costs and benefits — on the one hand, it’s a more extended time to make a big transition in how America does health care.

On the other hand, a 10-year phase-in window necessarily means counting on the transition to continue smoothly under the next president — whichever party he or she might come from.

Details: Sanders already has legislation introduced on Capitol Hill, whereas Harris has here released a broad outline of her plan. Key details — like, for example, more exact information on that what that 10-year transition would look like — still don’t exist. (That said, Sanders’ plan

Questions left to answer

One area that will most definitely get plenty of scrutiny is costs, both in the aggregate and individually. Among the unanswered questions in Harris’s plan: How much will the plan ultimately cost, and will those tax hikes cover it? And would this bring American health costs down overall? Harris says it would, but her initial plan did not offer detailed figures to explain how.

On top of that, individuals are going to want to know if their total health care costs — counting any premiums and taxes — under this plan would be greater or less than their current health care costs. And healthcare providers are similarly going to wonder how much they will be paid through the plan — one of the biggest questions surrounding Sanders’ Medicare for All plan.

And then there are the political questions Harris’ plan raises: Were she the nominee, would her plan — not exactly a single-payer plan — satisfy single-payer purists? Would it be too big of a change for people who favor a more moderate approach? And, of course: could it pass Congress?

Setting up the next debate

The new Harris plan at least partially answers one question that has been looming over her campaign for months: How much of a role should private insurance have? In January, in response to a question at a CNN town hall about private insurance, she said she wanted to “eliminate all of that.” But then, she later said she would favor some form of “supplemental” private insurance.

Similarly, in the last Democratic debate, she raised her hand to a question about whether she would support the elimination of private insurance, but then later said she thought the question referred to her own personal insurance.

This plan also places Harris in the spectrum of policy reforms that Democratic candidates have put forward. Her plan is less drastic (and with a less drastic timeline) than Sanders’ plan, but could mean much bigger changes than, for example, a public option plan like those that Biden, South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg, and former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke favor.

It also tees up a debate with Biden over how to pay for her plan. He had indirectly swiped at Harris over the idea of implementing Medicare for All without raising taxes on the middle class: “Come on! What is this, is this a fantasy world here?”

In their last debate match up, Harris attacked Biden harshly over his past opposition to federally mandated busing. The two will share the stage again on Wednesday night, the second night of this week’s debate. Biden has promised he’s “not going to be as polite” this time.

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