JOHN YANG: Tonight on PBS News Weekend, how some Americans are paying each other's medical expenses through healthcare sharing plans, a popular but unregulated alternative to traditional insurance, then artificial intelligence on the battlefield and the challenges the U.S. military faces as it adopts this fast moving and fast growing technology.

And my conversation with the author of American Born Chinese on turning his acclaimed graphic novel into a TV series.

GENE LUEN YANG, Author, "American Born Chinese": For a lot of us were immigrants kids.

At first we're embarrassed of our parent's culture and the kids at our school that come from that culture.

But as we get older, we realize that our parent's culture is actually connected to something much deeper and much wider than we first imagined.

(BREAK) JOHN YANG: Good evening, I'm John Yang, as the leaders of NATO countries prepare for a summit later this week that will focus on Russia's war in Ukraine, Russia set had shopped at a cruise missile near the Crimean city of Kerch.

The 11 mile long Kerch Bridge is a key Russian supply line linking Russia and the illegally annexed Crimean peninsula.

Yesterday, Ukraine appeared to confirm the widely held assumption that they blew up the span last October leaving it out of commission for weeks.

The NATO Summit will also discuss Ukraine's bid to join the Alliance although there aren't enough votes to approve membership.

Today on ABC's this week, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that he wants at least security guarantees from NATO.

VOLODYMYR ZELENSKYY, Ukrainian President (through translator): It would be an important message to say that NATO is not afraid of Russia and I will be doing whatever I can in order to so to speak, expedite that solution to have an agreement with our partners.

JOHN YANG: President Biden who left today for Europe says Ukraine isn't ready for NATO membership.

He told CNN Fareed Zakaria that it shouldn't happen while the war is going on.

U.S. Central Command says it killed Islamic state leader Osama al-Muhajer in a drone strike on Friday in northwestern Syria near Aleppo.

Officials said the strike didn't appear to kill any civilians.

They also said the drone was harassed by Russian military jets.

The third straight day that Russian aircraft made close passes at U.S. drones.

Russia says its forces are in the midst of six days of joint military training with Syria.

And there are more excessive heat warnings and advisories across the country.

Millions of people from Southern California to Texas are affected.

In Phoenix, Arizona, it was the ninth straight day that the high was above 110.

In El Paso, Texas, the high has been over 100 every day for nearly a month.

There's no end in sight is extreme heat is in the forecast for at least another week.

Still to come on PBS News Weekend how the military is using artificial intelligence on and off the battlefield.

And a conversation with Gene Luen Yang creator of American Born Chinese.

(BREAK) JOHN YANG: We all know that navigating health insurance plans can be complicated, time consuming and frustrating.

But hundreds of thousands of Americans have enrolled in an alternative to treat National Insurance it's called Health Care sharing plans.

Members of these plans who often share similar religious beliefs agree to make monthly payments to help pay for other members medical expenses.

Unlike insurance, these plans are unregulated and they don't have to cover pre-existing conditions or meet the other minimum health benefits mandated by the Affordable Care Act.

Kate Harris is Chief Deputy Commissioner for Life and Health Policy at the Colorado Division of Insurance and Markian Hawryluk is the senior Colorado correspondent for KFF Health News.

Welcome to you both market.

Markian, let me start with you.

You've written about these plans across the country.

How widespread are they and who enrolls in it?

MARKIAN HAWRYLUK, KFF Health News: It's great question, John.

And until recently, we really didn't have a great answer.

Until Colorado surveyed 16 sharing plans in Colorado and across the nation, and found 1.7 million people had enrolled in these plans.

And that was more than even industry individuals had had realized.

These plans appealed to people who look for a low cost alternative to health care, insurance, and appeal, particularly to people with a particular religious viewpoint who want their health insurance to reflect their moral viewpoints.

And a lot of people like the fact that it's a sort of neighborly arrangement that you are helping your neighbor with their health care costs, and they will help you with your health care costs when you incur them.

JOHN YANG: The plan members you talk to, Markian, what complaints do they have?

What do they see is the downside?

MARKIAN HAWRYLUK: Yeah, everybody really has to sort of read the fine print of what's covered and what's not covered.

And sometimes you have to jump through a lot of hoops to get your health care costs reimbursed by the plan.

Lots of these plans also require members to first ask the hospital or a government agency to cover this health care as charity care before they get their bills submitted.

So just more hoops than a traditional health insurance might have.

JOHN YANG: Kate Harris, does your office or any other office in the state government of Colorado have oversight of any of these plans in Colorado?

KATE HARRIS, Colorado Division of Insurance: So what we've done in Colorado is we started collecting data from these plans to learn more about them and what they offer.

We also take complaints from consumers directly, who have perhaps struggled to get their care covered by these plants.

JOHN YANG: What are the complaints you hear?

What are the most common complaints you hear?

KATE HARRIS: Yeah, so it's really twofold.

The first we hear is that what they thought they were buying was insurance.

And then the second thing we hear most often is that even if they knew that it wasn't insurance, they thought it would guarantee coverage of their medical bills.

And what we find is that's just often sometimes not the case.

JOHN YANG: We reached out to the Alliance for Health Care Sharing Ministries, which represents the five largest and longest operating programs.

They gave us a statement from Katy Talento, their executive director.

She says the purpose of Health Care Sharing Ministries is to provide Christian individuals and families with the freedom to choose the health care program that best suits their needs.

The Alliance for Health Care Sharing Ministries strives for open, honest communication with its members, and only accepts ministries that are dedicated to becoming accredited through the newly formed independent Health Care Sharing accreditation board.

They are transparent with their members every single month about how much money has been shared between the membership and how much the organization is used for overhead expenses.

Markian, the people you've talked to the plans you've looked at, does that ring true to you?

MARKIAN HAWRYLUK: They do claim that their members understand that this isn't traditional health insurance that the rules are a little bit different.

But we also hear from consumers that they don't necessarily understand what is being covered.

For example, the report from Colorado, members had in 2021 submitted $362 million of health care bills that they wanted covered.

Yet, the Health Care Sharing plans only covered about 132 million of that.

Well, that's because, you know, not everything on a single bill is covered.

And people understand that, sometimes there's duplicative things.

There may be things that that we have arranged that we weren't going to cover.

And you have to remember that these won't cover pre-existing conditions.

There are moral clauses in here, for example, they won't cover things like abortion, birth control, often mental health care.

They won't cover chronic medications.

They won't cover out of wedlock births.

Or if you have an injury due to alcohol use or drug use, illegal drug use, they're not going to cover those things as well.

JOHN YANG: Kate, is there any effort at all in Colorado or anywhere else to have some oversight to have agencies sort of regulate these plans?

KATE HARRIS: So right now what we're focused on is collecting more data from these plans to understand, you know, what they do and don't cover and what their, you know, financial vulnerabilities may potentially be for Coloradans.

And then we're working to educate consumers, you know, really provide them the tools so that they can make the best decisions about whether they should purchase one of these or whether they should purchase something that's, you know, under the Affordable Care Act with federal and state subsidies that is often quite affordable.

JOHN YANG: A lot of these people are people without insurance who sort of maybe don't qualify for the subsidies in the exchanges.

KATE HARRIS: You know, what we hear is that often, you know, maybe they checked a few years ago, and they didn't qualify for subsidies.

But there's been new subsidies at the federal and state level that have passed recently with the Inflation Reduction Act.

And then with some of our local laws here in Colorado, that what we hear most often is that when somebody actually does go back to check what they're eligible for under the Affordable Care Act marketplace, that they are eligible for savings.

JOHN YANG: And Markian, and are there people -- kinds of people that this is a good thing for them, this is a good fit?

MARKIAN HAWRYLUK: We have to remember that a lot of these plans have annual or lifetime caps, and a single catastrophic accident that, you know, you could be in a car accident and end up in a hospital and easily rack up millions in health care costs.

And that health care sharing arrangement might not be able to cover all those costs for you.

So there's a trade-off there.

You really get what you pay for and health insurance.

So, you know, if you want to take that risk and save yourself some money on the front lot aside, that's a decision some people will make.

JOHN YANG: Markian Hawryluk of KFF Health News and Kate Harris of the Colorado Division of Insurance.

Thank you both very much.

MARKIAN HAWRYLUK: Thank you.

John.

JOHN YANG: Artificial intelligence has been a crucial tool for many nation's militaries for years.

Now the war in Ukraine is driving innovation.

And as that conflict drags on, AI is rolling it is likely to grow.

Ali Rogin looks at how militaries are using AI today, and ahead to how it might be used in the future.

ALI ROGIN: More artificial intelligence on the battlefield carries great potential, but also higher risk.

Right now Congress is pressing the Pentagon through legislation to invest further and move faster on AI to avoid falling behind on this nimble but critical technology.

Paul Scharre is the Vice President and Director of Studies at the Center for a New American Security.

He's also a former Army Ranger, Pentagon official and the author of "Four Battlegrounds: Power in the Age of Artificial Intelligence."

Paul, thank you so much for joining us.

Artificial Intelligence is already used to some extent on the battlefield, but we're not talking about completely autonomous technology, what is available currently, what are warfighters already using?

And then where do you see the technology going in the near future?

PAUL SCHARRE, Vice President, Center For A New American Security: That's right, we're already seeing AI being used on the battlefield in Ukraine.

Now, humans are still in control of the fighting.

But one of the things that AI is doing is helping to process information faster.

AI is being used to sift through satellite images and drone video feeds, and that helps militaries then better understand what's happening on the battlefield, make decisions faster, and then target the enemy faster and more accurately.

ALI ROGIN: So what happens when we do consider having humans not be at all in control when these systems are fully automated?

What are the pros and cons of that?

PAUL SCHARRE: Well, we're already seeing drones being used in Ukraine that have all of the components needed to build fully autonomous weapons that can go out over the battlefield, find their own targets, and then all on their own attack those targets without any further human intervention.

And that raises very challenging legal, and moral and ethical questions about human control over the use of force of war.

ALI ROGIN: Now we're seeing Ukraine sort of lead the conversation in the application of using these fully autonomous devices.

Do you think we're going to see more of that?

And is there concern about how they might be used by differently by state actors and non-state actors like terrorist organizations?

PAUL SCHARRE: Well, war is an accelerant of innovation.

So the longer that this war goes on, the more that we're going to see more innovation on the battlefield.

We're already seeing innovative uses of drones and counter drone technologies, things like electronic warfare systems that can target drone operators, and then call it artillery strikes on the drone operator.

And that kind of technology pushes militaries towards more autonomy, but it's not just confined to nation states.

ISIS actually had a pretty sophisticated drone army a few years ago, and they were carrying out drone attacks against Iraqi troops are pretty effective.

ALI ROGIN: And now we've talked about how AI is used in weapons, but how about systems off the battlefield?

PAUL SCHARRE: Well, most of what militaries do is not actually right at the tip of the spear fighting.

It's logistics, personnel, maintenance, it's moving people pulling things from one place to another, on a day to day basis, it looks a lot like what Walmart or Amazon do.

It's what happens at the end, it's different.

And so AI has advantages and all of those other non-combat functions that are critical how to how militaries operate.

And if militaries can make their maintenance and logistics, and personnel and finance functions, just 10 percent better, that's going to have huge impacts for militaries on ultimately, their capability at the military's edge on the battlefield.

ALI ROGIN: Now, some of what we're seeing in Ukraine is employing commercially available technology that can simply be purchased for a couple $1,000.

How is the U.S. Department of Defense, dealing with keeping up with that sort of competition that exists?

How is that playing out?

PAUL SCHARRE: Well, they're not keeping up.

That's the short version, they're woefully behind because the culture is so radically different.

And the bottom line is, you can't buy AI the same way that you might buy an aircraft carrier.

The military is moving too slow.

It's mired in cumbersome bureaucracy.

And the leadership of the Pentagon has tried to shake things up.

They had a major reorganization last year of the people working AI and data and software inside the Defense Department.

But we haven't seen a lot of changes since then.

And so the Pentagon is going to have to find ways to cut through the red tape and move faster if they're going to stay on top of this very important technology.

ALI ROGIN: And Paul, lastly, on the global level as this technology continues to proliferate, some countries are calling for the establishment of some general rules of the road.

What does that conversation look like?

What are some of the contours of that debate?

PAUL SCHARRE: Well, we've certainly seen debates over the last several years, all the way back to 2014.

About lethal autonomous weapons, there's a pretty wide range of views on this.

And the United States, as well as other countries like Russia, have said that we have existing rules, we have the laws of war.

The laws of war apply to autonomous weapons, just like any other weapon, and we need to focus on adhering to those and making sure that any use of these weapons is consistent with the law of war.

ALI ROGIN: And what about the other side of that those who say we need additional rules and that the existing rules don't fully apply here?

PAUL SCHARRE: That's right.

So there's about 30 countries that have said that they'd like to see a preemptive legally binding treaty that would ban autonomous weapons before they can be built.

But right now, none of the leading military powers of robotics developers are part of that group.

And so it hasn't yet had the political heft to get to a treaty.

That could change as we see the technology advance.

And as we see, of course, more broadly, concerns about AI growth (ph), as we're seeing AI technology advanced and there's more calls for global regulation of AI.

ALI ROGIN: Paul Scharre with the Center for a New American Security.

Thank you so much for joining us.

PAUL SCHARRE: Thank you.

Thanks for having me.

JOHN YANG: American Born Chinese is not a typical coming of age story.

The new Disney Plus streaming series follows teenager Jin Huang as he tries to balance his life at a predominantly white high school, with his life at home with his Chinese immigrant parents, and even more worlds collide when he becomes entangled in a battle of mythological Chinese gods.

The series which features this year's Academy Award winners Michelle Yeoh, and Ke Huy Quan is loosely based on the groundbreaking graphic novel of the same name.

Gene Luen Yang is the author of that book and he's one of the show's executive producers.

Gene, first of all, I as far as I can tell, we're not related.

GENE LUEN YANG: Yeah.

Yeah, I think ancient Yang's are just very good at having families.

JOHN YANG: That's it.

But we are both American born children of Chinese immigrants.

GENE LUEN YANG: That's right.

JOHN YANG: This series plays a lot on self-identity on self-assimilation, how much of that it comes from your own life?

GENE LUEN YANG: Well, the book which came out in 2006, it's fiction.

But I pulled very, very heavily from my own life experience.

I never met a magic monkey.

But I did grow up in a neighborhood that was predominantly not the same as me.

You know, I grew up in a predominantly white neighborhood.

I went to a predominantly white school.

And I did go through a period of time, when I felt embarrassed of all of the things about myself that made me different from the people around me, that carried on into the show.

I think the book is just from me, but the show is from a whole bunch of us.

And many, many of the folks who worked on the show, both in front of and behind the camera, had that same experience of going through a period of their life where they weren't settled about who they are.

JOHN YANG: Along those lines.

I want to play a clip from the show.

It's where the main character meets a new student at his high school right now.

MAN: I'm really sorry.

My Chinese isn't super good.

WOMAN: Well, this is Wayne Chang.

He's a new student and he's Chinese like you.

MAN: Okay.

WOMAN: I thought that you could show him around since you two have so much in common.

MAN: We do.

WOMAN: So for the rest of the day, he's going to be your shadow.

MAN: Sorry, my what?

WOMAN: He's going to tag along with you to all of your classes except English, because he's ESL and math.

He's way ahead of you in math.

JOHN YANG: It's a funny scene, but there's a lot going on there.

What were you trying to show there?

GENE LUEN YANG: That scene was written by Kelvin Yu who came from Bob's Burgers, that's where a lot of the humor comes from.

And in that scene, there are these two boys, Jen, who is an ABC and American Born Chinese, and Wei-Chen, who comes from Asia.

And in a lot of ways, their relationship kind of symbolizes Jin's own relationship with his cultural heritage.

Like at first, he's really embarrassed by this new friend.

Right.

But as the friendship progresses, he realizes that that that friend, Wei-Chen is actually connected to a much wider and much deeper world.

For a lot of us were immigrants kids.

At first, we're embarrassed of our parent's culture, and of the kids at our school that comes from that culture.

But as we get older, we realize that our parent's culture is actually connected to something much deeper and much wider than we first imagined.

JOHN YANG: And the character getting involved or getting caught up in the mythological story of the Monkey King, is that sort of him re engaging with his heritage.

GENE LUEN YANG: Oh, absolutely.

Monkey King is arguably the most important figure in Chinese mythology.

If you go to China, if you go to Japan, you'll see Monkey King all over the place.

He's on lunchboxes and T-shirts.

And he's also part of classic literature.

So, in this -- in the story that we tell both in the book and in the show, the Monkey King kind of symbolizes all of that, it symbolizes this wider world of Chinese mythology and Chinese wisdom that the main character learns about and gets to know.

JOHN YANG: The last time you were on the show that you talked about how you liked graphic novels, because of the interplay between pictures and words.

And when the graphic novel came out in 2006, it was notable, in part because of the way he told the story, sort of three separate stories that get seemingly unrelated that get wrapped up at the end, when you brought it from the page to the screen did you have to lose some of that?

GENE LUEN YANG: Because it's a television series, because we're doing eight episodes in the first season.

The collisions happen differently, the world of Jin Huang is normal, high school life, it collides with the world of the mythological gods right at the end of the very first episode.

And then we do have this third world, this world of a sitcom that stars a character who is kind of like an embodiment of all of the Chinese and Chinese American stereotypes that haunted so many of us, when we were growing up, that world collides, I think in a really beautiful way, in episode seven of the first season.

JOHN YANG: I want to talk about that character, because in the book, you call him Chin T, which is obviously, you know, playing off the racial slur that has been applied to Chinese.

And I've read that you will fear that because of that character, this would never be adapted for the screen.

How did you solve that problem?

GENE LUEN YANG: Well, I kind of didn't want it to be adapted, you know, not directly from the book, because I was always worried that that cousin character that you're talking about, would if it ever got adapted, he would show up on YouTube as these disembodied clips, you know, decontextualized.

And that would be the exact opposite of what I was trying to do in the book.

They took that fear that I had, and they made it a plot point in the very first episode.

So in the very first episode, we see the main character being haunted by these clips on social media, of this character who kind of embodies all these negative Chinese and Chinese American stereotypes?

And in doing that, I think Kelvin in his writer's room, teach the viewer how to think about that character.

JOHN YANG: Are there things in this television adaptation that you admire that you wish you had thought of when you when you wrote the graphic novel?

GENE LUEN YANG: Well, I mean, the big thing is that it's in television, right?

It's a totally different medium from the comic book or the graphic novel.

And I think the team that created this television series, they are experts at what they do.

One of the things that I admire the most is actually the way they choreograph the action.

There's no -- you can have action in a comic book, but nothing's actually moving.

It's all still, still images.

It's not really fun to look at.

It also expresses character.

They were so careful about all of the fight choreography, and about making sure that the fights the punches, and the kicks actually express something about the inner motivations of all the characters that I deeply admire.

JOHN YANG: Gene Luen Yang is the author of the graphic novel American Born Chinese and one of the executive producers of the streaming series American Born Chinese.

Gene, thank you very much.

GENE LUEN YANG: Thank you.

Thank you so much, John.

JOHN YANG: And online right now how parents struggle with job stability as child care costs climb higher and higher.

All that and more is on our website pbs.org/news hour.

And that is PBS News Weekend for this Sunday.

On Monday, a conversation with the U.S. ambassador to NATO Julie Smith, on the eve of the Alliance's crucial summit in Lithuania.

I'm John Yang.

For all of my colleagues, thanks for joining us.

Have a good week.