Don Lemon
, CNN Newsroom Anchor
Don Lemon anchors CNN Newsroom during weekend prime-time and serves as a correspondent across CNN/U.S. programming. Based in the network’s New York bureau, Lemon joined CNN in September 2006.
A news veteran of Chicago, Lemon reported from Chicago in the days leading up to the 2008 presidential election, including an interview with then-Rep. Rahm Emanuel on the day he accepted the position of Chief of Staff for President-elect Barack Obama. He also interviewed Anne Cooper, the 106-year old voter President-elect Obama highlighted in his election night acceptance speech after he had seen Lemon’s interview with Cooper on CNN.
Lemon has reported and anchored on-the-scene for CNN from many breaking news stories, including the George Zimmerman trial (2013), the Boston marathon bombing (2013), the Philadelphia building collapse (2013), the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting (2012), the Colorado Theater Shooting (2012), the death of Whitney Houston, the Inaugural of the 44th President in Washington, D.C., the death of Michael Jackson (2009), Hurricane Gustav in Louisiana (2008) and the Minneapolis bridge collapse (2007).
Lemon has also anchored the network's breaking news coverage of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, the Arab Spring, the death of Osama Bin Laden and Joplin tornado. Lemon reported for CNN’s documentary Race and Rage: The Beating of Rodney King, which aired 20 years to the day of the beating. He is also known for holding politicians and public officials accountable in his "No Talking Points" segment.
Lemon joined CNN after serving as a co-anchor for the 5 p.m. newscast for NBC5 News in Chicago. He joined the station in August 2003 as an anchor and reporter after working in New York as a correspondent for NBC News, The Today Show and NBC Nightly News. In addition to his reporting in New York, Lemon worked as an anchor on Weekend Today and on MSNBC. While at NBC, Lemon covered the explosion of Space Shuttle Columbia, SARS in Canada and numerous other stories of national and global importance.
In addition to NBC5 and NBC News, Lemon has served as a weekend anchor and general assignment reporter for WCAU-TV, an NBC affiliate in Philadelphia, an anchor and investigative reporter for KTVI-TV in St. Louis and an anchor for WBRC-TV in Birmingham. He began his career at WNYW in New York City as a news assistant while still in college.
In 2009, Ebony named him as one of the Ebony Power 150: the most influential Blacks in America. He has won an Edward R. Murrow award for his coverage of the capture of the Washington, D.C. snipers. He won an Emmy for a special report on real estate in Chicagoland and various other awards for his reporting on the AIDS epidemic in Africa and Hurricane Katrina. In 2006, he won three more local Emmys for his reporting in Africa and a business feature about Craigslist, an online community.
Lemon serves as an adjunct professor at Brooklyn College, teaching and participating in curriculum designed around new media. He earned a degree in broadcast journalism from Brooklyn College and also attended Louisiana State University.
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What’s the truth about Obamacare?
Is it a success or not?
Those are good questions considering the deadline to sign up without penalty ran out at midnight. So let’s remove the partisan posturing and bias and just stick to the facts when it comes to “The Affordable Care Act.” The facts are the program started in 2010. But the sale of insurance on the exchange, a key component of the law, got off to a rough start because the website kept crashing.
I think it’s accurate to say it was a disaster in the initial days.
It took the administration months to finally get it working properly enough to start signing up a substantial number of people. And just hours before the deadline to sign up at midnight on April 1, the sight, overloaded again because of volume, experienced more technical problems which prevented users from picking plans.
Those who tried and failed will be given a grace period to complete the process with their coverage now beginning on May 1st. The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office’s initial projection for nationwide users was 7 million people. As of midnight April 1st the administration reports more than 6 million people have enrolled.
So the truth is that Obamacare will likely approach it’s intended, initial goal.
According to CNNMoney.com, on Monday Health Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said that insurers are reporting between 80 to 90 percent of those who signed up have paid. 85% of those 6 million adds up to 5 point 1 million enrollees; still close to the intended goal.
And what about all those young and healthy people who needed to sign up to make the program work; the ones needed to offset higher claims from older, less healthy policy holders?
Again, according to CNNMoney.com, as of February, 25% of applicants were between the ages of 18 and 34. That means insurers’ projections could go up in 2015 if they in fact misjudged the market and the ratio of young to old signing up. Bottom line is Obamacare needs more young people to sign up to keep premium costs down.
Now to the infamous, “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.” Turns out, that’s not entirely true. Most insurers have purposely limited the number of doctors in their plans to keep premium costs down. Is Obamacare costing jobs? Research shows the jury is out on that, again according to CNN.
So, is Obamacare a success?
Here’s the best way to judge that:
The whole point of it is to reduce the number of uninsured people in this country and that won’t be determined until next year when the data is collected from this year.
The honest best answer yet is, we’ll see.
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