Maine keeps coming up in health care reform discussions. Two moderate Republican Senators, Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, are thought to be key players in passing a health care reform bill. Snowe serves on the Senate Finance Committee, which has the monumental task of figuring out how to fund the system’s overall.

Snowe and Collins talk about fixing health care by expanding the employer-based system we currently have. Yet Maine has a large seasonal, independent workforce.

With Consumers Union, I traveled to Maine to find out how the state’s workers, including those who work in the robust fishing industry, got their health care (see above video).

The fisherman, small businessmen and ski instructors I met there struggle to find health care. They’re either priced out of the individual market, waiting for MaineCare, or just don’t qualify.

Watch more videos about consumer perspectives on health care.

This month, Consumer Reports Money published the eight-part video series I produced called “Faces of Foreclosure.” Seven of them were profiles of individuals who are either in the process of losing their homes, or have already lost them. Almost all of the borrowers we talked to were dealing with a crisis caused by an adjustable rate mortgage.

This video is a compilation of highlights from all of the stories, narrated by Norma Garcia, Senior Attorney at Consumers Union and manager of the mortgage video project. For individual stories, click here, and scroll through the bar on the right hand side.

Becca is my 31-year old roommate. We walked over to our neighborhood polling place together this morning, around 11:30am, getting in well before the lunch-time crowd and after-work crunch.

I grabbed my camera before we left, not planning on playing journalist today. But I couldn’t resist documenting the experience through this slideshow, just for fun (click below):

We were surrounded by the 30-something self-employed hipsters of our neighborhood, as well as other locals of all ages and ethnicities. Overall, our voting was pleasant and uneventful, not consuming more than an hour of our day. Pulling the lever of the ancient manually-controlled metal box felt like something out of Wizard of Oz.

Friends tell me they’re anxious about the outcome of today’s ballot-casting. To me, the musty air in Manhattan today felt serene. I’m hopeful for change, but only time will tell if it’s the “change we need.”

I miss being on the road. Well, not really. I miss the summer (already).

So in a fit of nostalgia, I put together a slide show of my favorite photographs I took while covering health care with a Consumer Reports Health project this summer. It’s not a story, rather, just a compilation of the people and places we saw in the lower 48. Click on the photo below:

You’ll see some landscapes sprinkled in there, a series of portraits of of people struggling with health care, and a whole lot of Meg and Blake. After all, I did live with them for 14 weeks in an RV.

Forgive me for not color correcting!

That’s the question that Peter in Carbondale had to ask himself, within just a few hours of an accident he had chopping wood. The small businessman can’t afford health insurance, and knew that the life-flight needed to reattach his thumb would cost him in the tens of thousands. Watch his story:

Check out some of the other videos I’ve produced lately for the Cover America Tour, a project of Consumer Reports Health. I’ll post the best stories to this blog.

It’s been on the road less than two-weeks, but the vehicle you see in the background already has a couple nicknames. “Aqua Box” is my favorite, coined by my co-worker Meg’s five year-old nephew, Kyle. Whatever you want to call it, it’s the class “C” RV I’m living in until mid-September.

I’m the video producer for a Consumer Reports Health project, The Cover America Tour. Three of us are traveling around the lower 48 for three and a half months, interviewing average Americans about their experience with the health care system.

And as you can tell from the videos, the system of taking care is not getting raving reviews.

We’ve met uninsured seniors with diabetes who can’t afford medication, patients who have received amputations after receiving bad care, and moms who say they their Visa card is their only insurance.

I can’t complain about the journey. We’ve been staying at beautiful New England campsites, where I’ve been going on long sweaty bike rides and taking swims in huge fresh water ponds. So far we’ve been through the town with the second best hot-wings, and the birthplace of the author of the Wizard of Oz. Exciting, huh?

I named my terrabyte hard drive Moldenke, after the one-eyed character in the science fiction cult book, Motorman. So far I’ve been producing about a video a day from my production studio, a 1′x3′ space on the RV kitchen table. I gotta reach 100 by the end of the trip, no small feat when you have to edit off a generator going down a bumpy highway at 60 miles an hour. Meantime, I can’t stop snapping photos. I’ll keep you posted.

The sound of a metal bat hitting concrete is constant on Sunday in Brooklyn’s McCarren park. On the first sunny weekend of the Greenpoint Neighborhood softball season, dozens gathered to play a little ball. Some have been coming since 1971, dressed in sweatpants and jerseys. But in recent years, some players have been showing up in formal black loafers, dress pants and white button-down shirts. They’re called the Stormers, a team of young, mostly Hasidic Jews.

I’m doing a series of stories on the team. A radio feature aired on the local NPR station, WNYC this past weekend:

This year’s International Landmine Awareness Day was especially significant to Colombians. In 2007, the South American country reported the highest number of mine and explosive remnants of war casualties in the world. On April 4th, Colombia’s major weekly paper, Semana, published part of my documentary web project, Remnants of War. Last year, I produced a series of black and white photo-slideshows, interactive graphics and timelines to help understand how the country’s rapidly increasing landmine problem affects innocent civilians. I traveled all over Colombia with a Human Rights Watch researcher to gather the material for the multimedia presentation, and later produced a bi-lingual version for their website.

That’s Andres, an 18-year-old survivor of an explosive remnant of war. He picked up what looked like a battery attached to a cable, and the device went off in his hand. Now he has difficulty cultivating coffee and hasn’t returned to school.

His story is all too common. The landmine victims I talked to all faced difficulties returning to a normal life after their accident. Many of them were without adequate medical and financial assistance, unable to continue agricultural work, or were forced to flee from the countryside. Take Manuel, for instance, in this picture to the right. He has to take an all night bus to see his doctor in Medellin, and agricultural work now gives him pain.

Here are the 2006 statistics from the Landmine Monitor report on Colombia:

Mine/ERW casualties in 2006	Total: 1,106 (2005: 1,112)
Casualty analysis	Killed: 226 (169 military, 44 civilians, 12 children, 1 civilian age-unknown) (2005: 282) Injured: 880 (623 military, 198 civilians, 54 children; 5 civilians age-unknown) (2005: 830)
Estimated mine/ERW survivors	4,681
Availability of services in 2006	Unchanged-inadequate
Progress towards survivor assistance aims	Slow (VA24)

Let’s just hope next year’s numbers will be different.

It’s over – my three-month production gig at National Public Radio’s The Bryant Park Project. It came and went like a storm. I barely remember the day-to-day, but my web traces say it was productive.

Here’s a little round up of the multimedia moments:

My first week was the holiday break, when I attended a festivus party and experienced the traditional “Feats of Strength” from a 200-pound guy named Harsh. I caught the moment in photos and audio and told all on the radio show.

My favorite slideshow was about the graphic novel American Born Chinese. The multimedia piece was on the front page of NPR.org and was top three most emailed the entire weekend.

Equally as sophisticated but perhaps more cryptic was the fine art of Iranian-American Shirin Neshat. I created a sort of multimedia artist notebook while her work was on display at the Gladstone Gallery in New York.

I enjoyed collaborating with a couple of Alaskan reporters to create a slideshow about the Rebels to the Pebble, a group of native seventh graders protesting the development of one of the largest gold mines in world. The mining company executive and the rebels’ teacher hashed out some of the issues on the air for 14 minutes.

Then there were the St. Mary’s College students who stripped down to their skivies for a “Polar Bear Splash” during a national week of campus teach-ins about global warming.

Oh, and I got to exercise at least some of my flash skills when I blogged about “Yo” a new gender-neutral pronoun being used in Baltimore schools.

My video debut was about the furor that became of the 42nd street Modell’s sporting goods store the morning after the Giants won the Super Bowl.

Then, the videos about the Project Runway reject who found vindication at Fashion Week and the wake for love on Valentine’s Day eve.

Don’t forget Jake Sasseville, the 22-year old from Maine who’s producing a night show about producing a night show.

And perhaps my favorite video piece, the Brit artists who turned a sweaty nightmare into an installation at Rockefellar Center plaza.

My last slideshow at NPR was about an Anglican-priest hopeful and graphic artist who made a comic book out of the bible.

I might have missed something. But I didn’t even delve into all the radio pieces I produced at the Bryant Park Project, which was my main job. I’m most proud of the Valentine’s Day piece about an evangelical Christian woman who started a sin-free sex toy business. It was number one most emailed on NPR.org for a week straight. The blog post got over a hundred comments. Religion and sex, go figure.

I was put up to it, I swear.

Right before I moved to New York, my video producer friend Charlotte Buchen asked me to be the on-camera reporter for a Current TV piece on ‘eye gazing’ parties. Basically it’s like speed dating, except the flirting happens non-verbally. Rules are simple: Lock eyes with someone for three straight minutes, then move onto the next person. It’s pretty intense. I assure you, my flirting was purely part of the reporting process.