CMYK
Yxxx,2016-08-13,A,001,Bs-4C,E2
VOL. CLXV . . . No. 57,323
SATURDAY, AUGUST 13, 2016
© 2016 The New York Times Company
Health Insurers TRUMP’S REMARKS
Lose as Clients CUT INTO SUPPORT
Focus on Costs
IN SWING STATES
The Young and Fit Opt
for What’s Cheap
UNABLE TO CRACK 45%
By REED ABELSON
MALACANANG PHOTO BUREAU, VIA EUROPEAN PRESSPHOTO AGENCY
President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, center, at a military hospital in Quezon City this month. He took office six weeks ago.
President of Philippines Shifts Fox News, in Naming Leaders,
War Against Drugs to Officials Sends Signal: ‘Stay the Course’
By RICHARD C. PADDOCK
MANILA — Samsudin Dimaukom, the mayor of a town in
the southern Philippines, was
watching television last Sunday
after midnight when he was startled to hear the country’s new
president call out his name.
It was no honor. President Rodrigo Duterte was reading a list of
more than 150 officials he said
were involved in the illegal drug
trade. He ordered Mr. Dimaukom
and the others to turn themselves
in within 24 hours or be hunted
down.
“We were really surprised
when the president came out to
announce it,” Mr. Dimaukom, the
mayor of Datu Saudi-Ampatuan,
said by email. “Not once were we
involved in drugs. In fact, we were
fighting drugs. I support the president’s drug war.”
Since he took office six weeks
ago, Mr. Duterte, 71, has roiled the
nation with a violent war on drugs
that has left hundreds dead, most
of them poor and powerless.
This week, in what seemed to be
a new phase, he took on judges
and police generals, military officials, more than 50 mayors and lo-
Charging Over 150,
Including Mayors,
Police and Judges
cal officials, and three men said to
be current or former members of
Congress. He stripped them of
their weapons permits and, in
some cases, their government security details, potentially leaving
them vulnerable to vigilantes.
The escalation provoked a clash
with the Supreme Court, nearly
causing a constitutional crisis before Mr. Duterte backed down,
and it has raised questions about
the list, a McCarthyesque device
of uncertain origin and unencumbered by evidence.
“How are the lists being prepared?” asked Senator Leila de
Lima, a former justice secretary
and former chairwoman of the
Philippine Commission on Human
Rights. “Who are the sources? If
they have evidence, they should
file charges, and that’s the only
time they should disclose the
name.”
Continued on Page A7
By JOHN KOBLIN
and MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUM
In assuming the leadership of
Fox News last month, Rupert
Murdoch pledged a fresh start at a
network reeling from accusations
that its longtime chairman, Roger
Ailes, had overseen a culture of
harassment and intimidation.
But on Friday, Mr. Murdoch
made clear that — for now at least
— Fox’s new era will be led by its
old guard.
Two veteran executives with
deep ties to Mr. Ailes were named
co-presidents of Fox News, the
network announced, a nod toward
corporate stability that was also
taken as a sign that Mr. Murdoch
was not yet prepared to fully overhaul management at one of his
most profitable franchises.
Bill Shine, an affable Ailes loyalist who is well liked by some of
the network’s longest-serving anchors, like Sean Hannity, will oversee programming at Fox News
and Fox Business Network. Jack
Abernethy, a trusted Murdoch
hand who runs Fox’s television
station group, was placed in
charge of business operations, including finance and advertising
Veteran Insiders Take
Over an Unsettled
Newsroom
sales.
The appointments are Mr. Murdoch’s first major personnel
moves at the network since the
ouster of Mr. Ailes, whose 20-year
tenure was upturned by sexual
harassment allegations by a former anchor, Gretchen Carlson.
And it suggested that Mr. Murdoch and his sons, James and
Lachlan, are now focused on calming an unsettled newsroom, even
as more women come forward
with troubling stories about the
network’s culture under Mr. Ailes.
“Anybody who expected seismic changes was wrong,” said Andrew Heyward, a former president of CBS News. “This sends a
strong signal to a jittery, shaken
staff that Fox News plans to stay
the course.”
Mr. Murdoch, 85, who named
himself executive chairman of
Fox News on Friday, is expected
to take a hands-on role there at
Continued on Page B5
It is all about the price.
Millions of people buying insurance in the marketplaces created
by the federal health care law
have one feature in mind. It is not
finding a favorite doctor, or even a
trusted company. It is how much
— or, more precisely, how little —
they can pay in premiums each
month.
And for many of them, especially those who are healthy, all
the prices are too high.
The unexpected laser focus on
price has contributed to hundreds
of millions of dollars in losses
among the country’s top insurers,
as fewer healthy people than expected have signed up. And that
has created two vexing questions:
Will the major insurance companies stay in the marketplaces?
And if they do, will the public have
a wide array of plans to choose
from — a central tenet of the 2010
Affordable Care Act?
“The marketplace has been and
continues to be unsustainable,”
said Joseph R. Swedish, chief executive of Anthem, one of the nation’s largest insurers.
Most Americans with health insurance get it through their
employers or from government
programs like Medicare and Medicaid. The marketplaces were created under the health care law to
give the millions of people not covered in those ways a way to buy
health plans.
While major insurers continue
to make profits over all, they say
that the economics of the marketplaces do not work for them.
Insurers can offer marketplace
plans at four different coverage
tiers, and the government subsidizes the premiums for millions of
people. The thinking was that
enough healthy people would buy
insurance to balance out the costs
for the not-so-healthy.
But things are not going exactly
as envisioned.
People shopping in the marketplaces are overwhelmingly choosing the cheapest plans they can
find, according to a federal analysis. In 2014, two-thirds of people
went for the lowest- or secondlowest-priced plans in each of the
tiers. In 2015, about half chose the
cheapest plans.
The pricing pressure is playing
out on multiple fronts. People with
expensive medical conditions,
Continued on Page B5
After Series of Missteps,
Some G.O.P. Voters
Say ‘Enough’
By PATRICK HEALY
DOYLESTOWN, Pa. — Donald
J. Trump has been waiting for
months for a poll in which he
cracks 50 percent of the vote
against Hillary Clinton in any of
his top battleground states:
Florida, New Hampshire, Ohio or
Pennsylvania.
“It’ll happen after the conventions,” he said in a July 6 interview. “Believe me.”
But in the last two weeks, instead of attracting a surge of new
admirers, Mr. Trump has been
hemorrhaging support among
loyal Republicans, anti-establishment independents, Clintonloathing Democrats and others,
according to polls and 30 interviews with a cross-section of
voters. His dispute with the parents of a Muslim Army captain
who was killed in action in Iraq,
and his suggestion that “Second
Amendment people” could somehow stop Mrs. Clinton, have intensified doubts about Mr. Trump
even among Americans who were
initially attracted to his frank and
freewheeling style.
For a candidate who once
seemed like an electoral phenomenon, with an unshakable following and a celebrity appeal that
crossed party lines, Mr. Trump
now faces the possibility that his
missteps have erected a ceiling
over his support among some
demographic groups and in several swing states. He has been
stuck under 45 percent of the vote
in Ohio and Pennsylvania for
weeks, polls show, while Mrs. Clinton has gained support.
Several Republican voters say
they grow leery every time Mr.
Trump speaks these days, for fear
he will embarrass them, and feel
increasingly repelled just when
they hoped he might adjust his
message to try to draw more peoContinued on Page A10
War of Tax Returns
Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine
released more tax returns, putting
pressure on Donald J. Trump to reveal his own. Page A11.
A Rio Lament: That’s the Way the Ball Crumples Vain, Rich and a Trump. To Donald, He Was Dad.
By ANDREW KEH
By JASON HOROWITZ
RIO DE JANEIRO — The relics
were arranged in a sphinxlike
configuration, as in some type of
ancient burial ground. Massimo
Costantini, the coach of the United
States table tennis team, called
the formation “a sort of homage to
the fallen.”
They appeared on the first day
of the Olympics, in a far corner of
the table tennis pavilion: 18 white
balls, all of them crumpled or
cracked, arranged ceremoniously
in the center of a quartet of water
bottles. It was a fitting symbol of
the frustration that has festered at
the tables this week at the Rio
Games, where the table tennis
balls are giving players fits.
They do not bounce true, the
players said. Their flight paths are
unpredictable. And they frequently break.
“I think this ball is very bad,” Li
Ping of Qatar said after losing a
match. The player who beat him,
Dimitrij Ovtcharov of Germany,
fumed that the official competition ball “makes it almost impossible to compete.”
Table tennis balls are capricious
little things. Infinitesimal var-
The throngs of New Yorkers
who poured into Coney Island on a
sweltering Sunday in July 1939 —
shuffling past the rides, hot dog
stands and freak shows — confronted one last spectacle blaring
just beyond the surf.
At 65 feet and outfitted with
enormous Trump signs, the yacht
called the Trump Show Boat was
hard to miss. And that was the
point.
Its
loudspeakers
blasted
recordings of “The Star-Spangled
Banner” and “God Bless America” over and over, compelling
many sunbathers, reluctant to be
seen as unpatriotic, to stand and
salute each time. When the boat
floated swordfish-shaped balloons — redeemable for $25 or
$250 toward a new Trump Home
— toward the shore, bathers
nearly rioted as they raced to
snatch them up.
Fred C. Trump, the owner of the
boat and the master builder of
solid homes in Brooklyn and
Queens, is often considered a
point of contrast to his flashy son
Donald, the brash developer who
built gilded towers in Manhattan,
CHANG W. LEE/THE NEW YORK TIMES
Ding Ning of China won an Olympic title in table tennis this
week. Many players say the balls move oddly and break easily.
LEDECKY SMASHES RECORD
Katie Ledecky dominated in her final swim, and Michael Phelps
added a silver medal. Page B10.
iations in size and imperceptible
deviations in construction can
have considerable ramifications
for how they spin, fly and bounce.
Casual players — people in subur-
ban garages or fraternity houses
— tend not to notice such details.
But professionals obsess over
them.
The balls at the Olympics, then,
are not the ones you find, cobwebbed, under the basement
couch. They are not even the same
balls used at the last Summer
Games.
Continued on Page B13
DENNIS CARUSO/NY DAILY NEWS ARCHIVE VIA GETTY IMAGES
Donald J. Trump and his father, Fred C. Trump, a home builder
in New York, at Wollman Rink in Central Park in 1987.
and became a tabloid fixture, television personality and now, Republican presidential nominee.
But Donald J. Trump inherited
more than just a real estate empire from his father. As a salesman, competitor, courter of politicians and controversy and,
above all, as a showboating selfpromoter, Fred Trump was the
Donald Trump of his day.
NATIONAL A9-13
BUSINESS DAY B1-7
More Democrats’ Files Leaked
A Growing Risk in China
A hacker believed to be tied to Russia
disclosed more Democratic Party documents, including phone numbers and
email addresses of lawmakers. PAGE A12
Chinese have poured $2.8 trillion into
investments long on promises and short
on details, posing a threat to the nation’s economy.
PAGE B1
To demonstrate to potential
homeowners the futility of renting, Fred wallpapered a model
home in rent receipts. In newspaper advertisements for his Shore
Haven apartments in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, he referred to
himself under an illustration of the
Statue of Liberty as “Fred C.
Trump, acting as a free and rugContinued on Page A12
INTERNATIONAL A3-8
A Dimmer Switch for the Sky
ARTS C1-6
SPORTSSATURDAY B9-16
THIS WEEKEND
Ben-Gurion’s Lost Interview
As light pollution changes night skies,
two Colorado towns preserve a diminishing resource: darkness.
PAGE A9
The Stories Behind the Songs
Alex Rodriguez’s Next Act
Fractured Lands
Barbra Streisand connects with a hometown crowd on the East Coast leg of her
PAGE C1
concert tour. A review.
As he was ending his playing career,
Alex Rodriguez discussed how he made
the transition from baseball pariah to
special adviser to the Yankees. PAGE B16
How lives have been changed forever
by more than a decade of war and
uprising in the Mideast. THE MAGAZINE
Israel’s founding prime minister spoke
of state-building, prophets who guided
him and the quest for security. PAGE A6
NEW YORK A15, 18
Africa Responds to Polio Threat
Zika and a Message on Sex
A Legacy of Fusion
To contain the virus, a first round of
vaccinations are set to start in Nigeria
PAGE A3
as early as next week.
Health officials say the virus’s spread
through sex is little understood, and
aim to relay the rising threat. PAGE A15
Herbie Hancock, 76, flexed fresh power
in pop, jazz-funk and R&B at a concert
in New York. A review.
PAGE C1
EDITORIAL, OP-ED A16-17
Doug Glanville
PAGE A17
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