- Coming up on "Austin InSight," we had record-setting warm weather this January.

What's going on with the climate in Central Texas?

Plus, it's a convenience store and a music venue: a local business that's definitely keeping Austin weird.

"Austin InSight" starts now.

- [Announcer] Support for "Austin InSight" comes from: Sally & James Gavin, and also from Daniel L. Skret.

(light music) (light music continues) - Hi there and thanks for joining us, I'm Laura Laughead.

First today, we're talking about healthcare.

For more than four million people in Texas, access to healthcare comes from health insurance that's available from the Affordable Care Act marketplace.

It's a cornerstone of a policy sometimes called Obamacare.

But this year, for many people, the cost of that insurance is going up by a lot, while the amount of things covered may go down.

Senior multimedia journalist Blair Waltman-Alexin reports on the local impact of the rising cost of healthcare.

- ACA open enrollment has just ended, and preliminary numbers show that Texans signed up in record numbers this year, despite cost increases for a lot of people.

Now, those final numbers might change once bills start coming in the mail with those new premiums.

The federal subsidies have changed, so what does that do to healthcare access in Central Texas and in Rundberg?

Let's get into it.

(audience applauding) (light music) Quick history lesson: The Affordable Care Act marketplace started with the passage of, you guessed it, the Affordable Care Act in 2010.

- Once this reform is implemented, health insurance exchanges will be created, a competitive marketplace where uninsured people and small businesses will finally be able to purchase affordable quality insurance.

They will be able to be part of a big pool and get the same good deal that members of Congress get.

(audience applauding) That's what's gonna happen under this reform.

(light music continues) - The idea was to help people who fell into a coverage gap.

People who made too much money to qualify for Medicaid or CHIP but didn't have insurance through a job could get affordable medical coverage through this new federal marketplace.

Tax subsidies were always part of the plan.

They calculate things like where you live, how much you make, how big your family is, and offer you a credit based on those things to bring down your overall healthcare costs.

The idea was to make healthcare plans more affordable for lower-income families.

But those were greatly expanded in 2021 as part of the pandemic relief legislation.

- The enhanced subsidies made it so that a lot more people enrolled.

- [Blair] Laura Dague is a researcher with Texas A&M University.

She says those changes led to a huge spike in enrollment.

- Since the enhanced subsidies, marketplace enrollment in Texas has more than tripled.

Last year, it was around four million people.

That's about as big as the state's Medicaid program, which covers kids and elderly folks.

- But those enhanced subsidies expired on December 31.

(sirens sounding) (light electronic music) Congress didn't vote to expand them.

Remember that whole government shutdown thing?

So for most of the open enrollment period, people didn't know if the cost was going to change.

- So open enrollment started November 1.

- [Blair] Ashleigh Alvarez is with Foundation Communities.

They've been helping people navigate the ACA marketplace for 13 years.

And she said this year's been a little different.

- This year, our goal was to enroll 4,000 residents.

We're over 3,600, so we're very close to our goal.

- Have a seat and we'll call your name, thank you.

- Reina?

- We kinda saw a decrease in appointments this year from last year.

There was just so much uncertainty.

(people conversing) - [Blair] So the expanded subsidies have expired, and ACA healthcare plan costs have skyrocketed.

A Kaiser Family Foundation study found that plans in Texas have increased by 35%, and researchers say middle-income families will be hit the hardest.

- Somebody with income on the higher end, so like just above that 400% line, is gonna have been paying around $450 a month with enhanced subsidies but is gonna be looking at 800 for a silver plan and 500 for a bronze plan.

Folks under 200% of the poverty line are still gonna have access to at least one zero-dollar bronze plan it looks like across the state, but it might not cover as much as it did before.

(somber music) - But Texans still enrolled in record numbers.

Data released from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services show that as of January 3, 4.11 million Texans had signed up for ACA marketplace plans.

That's up more than 6% from last year.

(somber music continues) All right, so even with costs going up, Texans have enrolled in the ACA marketplace in record numbers.

So what does that mean for Rundberg specifically?

(light electronic music) The 2026 enrollment snapshot doesn't break down numbers by ZIP code.

But mot recent numbers show that about 12% of Rundberg residents get healthcare through the ACA marketplace.

That's about 6,920 people.

(cash register ringing) On average, they saved about $543 through subsidies.

(buzzer ringing) That could go down now that those subsidies have expired.

But the big healthcare concern for Rundberg is how many people don't have insurance at all.

About 20% of residents are at the federal poverty level, and about 22% don't have health insurance, according to US census data.

- Yes, Rundberg is one of our busiest access points.

- [Blair] Nicholas Yagoda is CEO for CommUnity Care.

They're one of several healthcare providers in Central Texas who provide healthcare to people without insurance.

He says their patient pool has already been growing, and now they're preparing for more.

- We've seen somewhere between seven and 10% population growth every year successively for at least eight years.

So our capacity expansion is still trying to catch up to what the demand in the region is.

- [Blair] Yagoda says they only see a small percentage of patients with ACA plans.

But he says folks may drop off those plans once the new bills come in.

- Once the subsidy rolls off, we may find that those are individuals who can no longer find afford ACA plans and also don't meet requirements for Medicaid.

We expect that to be part of a transition, which we have historically worked with our partners, our close partners at Central Health, to ensure access to other support services.

- [Blair] Researchers say that transition will tell us a lot more about who exactly has healthcare access in Texas.

Early enrollment data doesn't show if people downgraded their ACA plans or if they were automatically re-enrolled without knowing about the price increase.

What we do know, though, is how many uninsured people are in Texas.

(somber music) - Yeah, we definitely are still have the highest nationwide rate of uninsured folks, unfortunately.

So that's something that hopefully we can continue to make good progress on.

- [Blair] Subsidies could be put back in place by Congress, but Alvarez says the impact would be felt way down the road.

- Basically, there's a credit people would receive.

So it's not like they're gonna get a check in the mail.

- Marketplace enrollment won't open up again until 2027.

But if you're uninsured, there are local programs that are available to you, like Lone Star Circle of Care, CommUnity Care clinics, and the MAP program in Travis County.

Alvarez says most important is know what your healthcare needs are.

- [Ashleigh] It's better again to know your options, to make an educated decision, as opposed to just rolling the dice and saying like, "Oh, I'll deal with that if I have to deal with that."

That's a very risky gamble.

(gentle music) (gentle music continues) (gentle music continues) - Meanwhile, you may have noticed we're almost done with January and outside it's just now feeling like winter.

And we could even have freezing precipitation this weekend.

But in fact, we had record high temperatures in December and early January that included 19 days in the 70s and seven days in the 80s.

And this comes after the last few years of Texans living through severe heat, drought, devastating ice and snowstorms, worsening hurricanes, and deadly flooding.

The experts say it's thanks to climate change, and it could get worse.

For a look at what's next in our Texas weather, we have Dr.

Kerry Cook, a climate systems science professor at the University of Texas.

Dr.

Cook, thanks so much for being with us.

- Well, thanks for having me.

- So Dr.

Cook, data shows that the Earth's surface temperature is increasing.

What does that mean for us in terms of severe weather events?

- Well, it means we're going to have more severe weather events.

If you think about the temperature rising, everyone probably understands that, on a warmer surface, there's more evaporation.

- Sure.

- And this loads more water vapor into the atmosphere.

And so when storms occur, they tend to be more intense.

And there'll be even more frequent intense storms, but what we define as an intense storm will get more frequent.

And the strongest storms will get even stronger.

- And that is not something we want (laughing) to see more of, for sure.

And with these scientific models predicting more warming, how much warmer are we talking?

And apparently, that's getting harder to predict.

- Well, it's not that it's getting harder to predict.

Our climate models are improving all the time.

But there are a number of climate models that are run around the world, and they give, say, for example, for the year 2100 is a good benchmark to think about, they give predictions of somewhere between eight and 12, maybe 14 degrees Fahrenheit warming for the globe at that time.

They give a range.

None of them say there's gonna be no warming.

All of them say the warming is going to be significant, but they may differ by a few degrees.

But on top of that is another big uncertainty, and that is in how much the greenhouse gas concentration in the atmosphere is going to increase.

You know, our climate models are based on the laws of physics, you know?

But trying to predict human behavior for how much, you know, CO2 is gonna be released into the atmosphere is much more difficult.

How is this all gonna play out through the century?

And so not knowing how much CO2 will be in the atmosphere by 2100 is the biggest source of uncertainty in our predictions.

- And that's a scary prospect.

And it may seem obvious to some, but let's have a quick science lesson refresher.

Can you reiterate the impact of burning fossil fuel and adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere and why that is so harmful?

- So when we burn fossil fuels, we add CO2 and other greenhouse gases, for example, methane, into the atmosphere.

Now, what happens with those greenhouse gases, the surface of the Earth is emitting radiation to cool itself, but the greenhouse gases absorb that radiation and turn some of it back down toward the surface.

If we had no greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the average surface temperature of the Earth would be negative 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit.

It'd be a frozen Earth.

We know that's not the case.

There's a natural greenhouse effect, mostly caused by water vapor in the atmosphere.

But what we're doing now is ratcheting up that greenhouse effect, that the surface temperature's very sensitive to.

- For you and your colleagues in climate science, this connection between human activity that adds carbon dioxide to the air and global warming, it's settled science, it's not debated.

But in other circles, it seems to cause a lot of debate, perhaps, in political ones.

What's your reaction to that as a scientist?

- Well, it's kind of hard to deal with, you know?

You know, I'm not an expert in everything, maybe not in very many things, but climate, I'm an expert.

(Laura laughing) I've been studying this for decades, you know?

And it's very disconcerting when you start speaking to someone who says, "No, that's not correct," when you know they're, you know, they're not in the field.

- They're an armchair expert.

- Yes, exactly.

And so very few people now deny the fact that climate change is going on.

The observations are completely irrefutable.

It's getting warmer, everyone knows.

We can even feel it.

And it's getting warmer at a rate that was predicted by the climate models.

- And what do you think are gonna be the consequences of people not only not understanding, but not taking seriously the science you've explained?

- I think the consequences of that will be and are inaction on climate.

The argument is that the cost of changing our energy systems to reduce CO2 emissions is more expensive than just dealing with the climate change that comes along.

And so if you sort of ignore the fact that we're having more intense storms and more flooding and heat and heat stress, and you know, people dying of heat stress, then you start not putting money and effort into switching our energy systems into renewables.

- And so for the people at home that are concerned by this, what needs to happen to ensure that this pattern doesn't continue or to help us as much as we can contribute to not continuing this pattern?

- Well, it's a matter of, I believe, government priorities and where attention and money is spent.

We can make individual small efforts for sure, but we really need to really shift our energy systems.

And right now, the burden of doing that is on the states and on the cities.

The federal government is not interested in doing that now, and that's not really sustainable.

- Dr.

Cook, we appreciate you sharing your expertise with us.

Dr.

Kerry Cook, climate science professor at the University of Texas.

- Thank you.

(light music) (light music continues) - Speaking of extreme weather, this next story takes us to the most extreme weather location on Earth: Antarctica.

Did you know Austin has a connection to the frozen continent?

A UT Austin professor is a world-leading expert on Antarctica and was awarded the United Kingdom's highest honor for polar exploration in 2023.

Exactly two years ago, I was actually in Antarctica myself on a photography trip.

So I'm excited to share some of what I saw as we highlight UT geologist Ian Dalziel.

(wind whooshing) (ethereal music) (water sloshing) Now this is Antarctica, the iconic frozen landscape.

(ethereal music continues) Antarctica: a continent where the conditions want to kill you.

(wind whooshing) It's the coldest, windiest, and driest place on the planet, a frozen desert with no trees, no land mammals, so no, no polar bears, and no people, unless you're one of the few researchers exploring Earth's final frontier, like University of Texas professor Ian Dalziel.

He's been to this great white alone about 50 times.

- Just the complete serenity of the place, apart from the raucous penguins when you get in amongst them.

(penguins calling) - Penguins may be the best-dressed colleagues, even if they're a bit, well, (penguins continue calling) chatty.

By the way, the brown here is all, you know, penguin poo.

- The penguins are always fascinating, of course.

- [Laura] But they smell kinda bad?

- In their thousands, they smell bad together.

They're all right when they come back from sea.

- [Laura] The UT geologist is studying how continents and oceans have changed over time.

- You were over here.

Being a British kid, I grew up on a diet of Captain Scott and Ernest Shackleton.

- [Laura] Scott and Shackleton were British explorers who led historic expeditions in Antarctica.

The Scotland native's findings have improved our understanding of Antarctica's history and the current fragility of its ice sheet.

- The Antarctic ice cap has been moving, losing ice much faster than any of us would've thought.

And we can make a difference.

We know how to change this.

By using renewable sources of energy.

But we, at the moment, we lack the willpower to, as a race, the human race, to do this.

- [Laura] Dalziel has been studying the continent since the 1960s, before satellite navigation.

- Went the wrong way for a day and a half before we realized that we were going the wrong way and retreated.

So we didn't always, in those days, know where we were.

- [Laura] On trips, he camped on the ice for months at a time in tents or stayed on ships, sometimes landing in boats like these Zodiacs.

- I remember going out one time to relieve myself and coming back, realizing that I couldn't see my tent.

For a few minutes there, I couldn't see anything.

It was just whiteout.

- In Antarctic summer, the sun never sets.

And in winter, it never rises.

Six months of night.

(wind howling) Dalziel also did research on nearby South Georgia Island.

The rain feels a little bit like tiny little bullets hitting your face.

One of the most remote and inhospitable islands in the world, where Shackleton is buried.

Behind me, you can see and hear a colony of both king penguins and gentoo penguins, along with some really adorable, though surprisingly aggressive, fur seals.

- I find them fascinating.

I like watching them.

They used to chase us occasionally.

- [Laura] A fur seal chased one woman on our trip at Shackleton's grave until our guide scared it off.

- [Guide] They'll actually come up and bite you.

These bites can get very septic.

- [Laura] Hard to believe, since their babies are so cute.

They make new friends, (playful music) they want their mom, (seal calling) they pose for the camera, (camera clicking) all while their penguin neighbors get in collisions on the penguin highways and look for love.

Rejection hits the same across species.

(ethereal music) Helping us appreciate Antarctica has been Dalziel's life's work.

In 2023 at 85, he received the prestigious Polar Medal, the United Kingdom's highest award for polar exploration, presented by Princess Anne of the British royal family.

- And she asked me where I lived and I said Austin, Texas.

"Oh," she said.

She said, "But you still have a Scottish accent."

(laughing) I feel very honored to have received it.

You always appreciated the opportunity that you had to be in this wild, solitary place.

(wind howling) - We are so lucky to have Professor Dalziel at UT.

Going to Antarctica was truly a top life experience, and those penguins, they are so cute.

But it's true, they do smell pretty bad.

(laughing) Before we go today, if you've ever thought Austin was losing its unique quirky character, we have a story about a local business that's doing its part to keep Austin as weird as ever.

And it comes to us from one of our production interns, Christopher.

Take a look at convenience store and music venue Rio Market.

- Yeah, my name is M-U, Mu, and I'm just a co-owner, manager of this place.

(cars whooshing) I joined the team about few years ago, five years ago.

And I joined the team because I saw that there was a potential in this place.

It's close to the campus.

Kids are coming.

So the crowd is there.

The intent was to build a community.

So if there's a crowd, then you can build one, but if there's no crowd, it's very hard.

Customers started coming in, they said, "Hey, oh, we're musicians.

We don't have a place to play music."

And somebody came in, "Hey, we are standup comedians.

We don't have a place to do comedy.

Everything is so expensive.

And we don't have any experience.

Nobody will take us."

So I said, "Okay, you know, we need to make a space."

(cars whooshing) (drumsticks clicking) (rock music) (rock music continues) We don't advertise much.

It's like a private party.

People come in, they do their show, they call their friends and family, they do their thing, and they go.

(rock music continues) - I'm Annika.

- And I'm Lalena.

And then the band is called The Mothermold.

(rock music continues) - Well, our friends invited us actually.

Our friend's in Slip Winder, John Foxworthy.

He was actually a colleague of mine at "The Daily Texan" years ago.

- [Lalena] How many convenience stores are there that like have like bands?

- Yeah, it's so convenient, for sure.

And it's so colorful.

Because there's so many, you know, objects around.

You could just like, we're playing next to the soy sauce and the Cocoa Puffs.

And so there's things to look at too.

- And it's like, people might have to maneuver around us to get something.

- Yeah.

(rock music continues) In here, we're just like right on the floor with everybody else and it's so comfortable and friendly and nice.

- I feel like it's like very casual.

Like a sorta- - Yeah.

- [Lalena] Walk in, walk out kinda thing.

- Yeah.

- [Lalena] And it's not like super like serious or whatever.

(rock music) - I mean, I would just consider the neighbors, and let's not go too far, you know?

Let's consider neighbors, and I would say, from our feedback that we have gotten, people say, "Hey, we were bored at home with nothing to do and we came here."

Yeah, it's a great thing.

People come and play video games.

"Oh, there's a show going on.

Let's listen to the show."

So it's free.

It's a concept of community.

Community is a place, you know?

It's not a space.

It's sorta people's space and then people come in and it becomes a community.

(rock music continues) I mean, we have now, we have built up a local community who come here like every show, kind of deal.

We've built that up now.

And then, of course, you know, lots of kids come in, stop in to dance and then go out.

It's a great ice breaker for them, stress reliever.

They dance for a song and go.

This is like a, convenience store's like a facade.

You know, most convenience stores are convenience stores.

Here it's a facade, you know?

It's like, hey, people are coming in.

If it was empty, people would not come in.

So they come in for the stuff, then they stay for the music and they become a community.

So it's not really a business, per se.

We're not competing.

They're doing the thing everyone's doing also.

(rock music continues) - I really feel like we're part of like kind of a weird Austin tradition.

They seem really into it.

(rock music fades out) (audience applauding) - It doesn't get more Austin than that.

Thank you again to our intern, Christopher Tamer, for that story.

That's our show, thanks so much for watching.

You can watch "Austin InSight" in the PBS app and the Austin PBS YouTube channel.

We'll see you next time.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) - [Announcer] Support for "Austin InSight" comes from: Sally & James Gavin, and also from Daniel L. Skret.

(bright flute music)