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Don Benfield of Taylorsville, N.C., makes $11 an hour working for a mobile-home parts business, selling things like replacement doors and windows.

Benfield, 51, doesn't have health insurance.

"I haven't had health care insurance in years, simply because I haven't been able to afford it, especially with food prices, how they went up," he explains.

Benfield's employer does offer health insurance coverage, even though, with fewer than 50 employees, the business is not required to.

"The insurance here through work is $43 a week, which with my rent and other payments and everything, we haven't been able to afford," he says. "If I put my wife on the insurance, it shoots up to $120."

The Affordable Care Act is expected to provide around $10 billion in subsidies this year to make health insurance affordable for low- and middle-income people. But a quirk in the law is denying subsidies to a significant number of low-income people, especially those with families.

Benfield has run up against this quirk. To cover only himself, Benfield would have to pay a little more than $2,200 a year. He says he can't afford that, but that's an affordable amount, according to Obamacare regulations, and that means Benfield could not get subsidies if he tried to get coverage on the Obamacare exchange.

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The situation only gets worse if Benfield decided to add his wife to his employer policy. Adding her would nearly triple the annual cost, driving it up to $6,200 a year, almost a quarter of their family income.

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Benfield's situation illustrates a flaw in the Affordable Care Act, says Linda Blumberg, a health policy expert at the Urban Institute.

"A lot of people refer to this as the family affordability glitch," Blumberg says. "All of the assessment of whether or not employer-based coverage is affordable is based on worker-only coverage, and doesn't take the cost of family coverage into account."

That's remarkable, says Blumberg, since most people want to buy family coverage, not simply coverage for the family breadwinner.

Not getting subsidies makes a huge difference. Without them, the benchmark insurance plan on the Obamacare exchange would be more than $10,000 a year for Benfield and his wife. But if they were allowed to get Obamacare subsidies, they'd pay only around $1,200.

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Suzanne Shugart and her husband, who live in McPherson, Kan., don't qualify for subsidies under the Affordable Care Act. She lives "on hope and a prayer that nothing bad will happen." Courtesy of Suzanne Shugart hide caption

itoggle caption Courtesy of Suzanne Shugart

Suzanne Shugart and her husband, who live in McPherson, Kan., don't qualify for subsidies under the Affordable Care Act. She lives "on hope and a prayer that nothing bad will happen."

Courtesy of Suzanne Shugart

Suzanne Shugart and her family face a similar situation in McPherson, Kan. Her husband works for a cabinetmaker, earning around $32,000 a year. He can get health insurance through his employer for a little more than $50 a month, just for himself.

That's also affordable coverage, according to Obamacare rules, so Shugart's family isn't eligible for subsidies in the online marketplace. But the employer's family coverage is too expensive for them, says Shugart.

"If he were to increase it to a family plan, which would include me, it goes up to about $380 a month, which is nearly our mortgage payment," Shugart says.

She and her husband can't afford that, she says. Luckily, their children qualify for insurance through a state plan.

"That's how we've lived for the last eight years," Shugart says. "He has insurance through work and the kids have state insurance, and I just live on hope and a prayer that nothing bad will happen."

If Shugart's family could get subsidized coverage on the Obamacare exchange, the premium for a benchmark plan would be a little more than $200 a month, making coverage for her much more affordable.

Blumberg says it's likely that in a more amenable political environment, the family glitch would be fixed, with Congress adding more focus on the affordability of family coverage.

"But I think that because of the political volatility around this law, there was never an opportunity to sit down and say, 'OK, let's make a policy change here that takes this into account,' " she says.

Blumberg says Democrats have been hesitant to open debate on the law at all, because of fear it would be eviscerated during the legislative process. With the Republican takeover in Congress, the chance of eliminating the family glitch seems unlikely to improve anytime soon.

Affordable Care Act

Health Insurance

Many girls are beginning puberty at an early age, developing breasts sooner than girls of previous generations. But the physical changes don't mean the modern girls' emotional and intellectual development is keeping pace.

Two doctors have written a book called The New Puberty that looks at the percentage of girls who are going through early puberty, the environmental, biological and socioeconomic factors that influence when puberty begins, and whether early puberty is linked with an increased risk of breast cancer.

“ What I find concerning is that puberty is a process that's very sensitive to the environment and we can move the timing of puberty, unintentionally.

- Julianna Deardorff, co-author of The New Puberty

"It has been established that girls who enter puberty earlier are more likely to have symptoms of anxiety, higher levels of depression, initiate sex earlier and sexual behaviors earlier," Julianna Deardorff tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross.

Deardorff and Louise Greenspan are co-investigators in a long-term study of puberty. They've been following 444 girls from the San Francisco Bay area since 2005, when the girls were 6 to 8 years old. The study is funded by the National Cancer Institute and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.

Deardorff says that while early puberty could be hard on a young girl, family and school support matters.

"The family can serve as a huge buffer against some of those negative effects of early puberty," she says. "There's also been some research to show that certain aspects of the neighborhood context and also schools can be protective. ... It can completely mitigate the risk associated with early puberty on girls' emotional and behavioral functioning."

The New Puberty

How to Navigate Early Development in Today's Girls

by Louise, M.d. Greenspan and Julianna, Ph.d. Deardorff

Hardcover, 244 pages | purchase

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TitleThe New PubertySubtitleHow to Navigate Early Development in Today's GirlsAuthorLouise, M.d. Greenspan and Julianna, Ph.d. Deardorff

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Interview Highlights

On early puberty

Louise Greenspan: The evidence suggests that in the past, age 8 was the cut-off for normal puberty, so we thought that less than 5 percent of girls were going through puberty before the age of 8. I do want to define what we mean in the medical profession by "starting puberty." A lot of people in the lay public think that that means getting your period. What we're talking about is actually starting with breast development and pubic hair and what the research that we did with our colleagues found was that at age 7, 15 percent of girls had breast development, and at age 8, 27 percent had breast development. And in terms of pubic hair development, at age 7, 10 percent of girls had it and by 8, 19 percent had pubic hair development. That was significantly higher that what had been found in the past.

On how the numbers vary by race

Greenspan: At age 7, 25 percent of black girls have breast development, compared to 15 percent of Hispanic girls and only 10 percent of white girls and 2 percent of Asian girls. The same pattern can be seen for pubic hair development.

On separating puberty from sexuality

Greenspan: I think we do want to make sure we do separate puberty and sexuality. For these kids, they're used to their bodies changing: they're losing teeth, they have to get new shoes every six months because their feet are growing, so for them, if the adults in their lives don't put it into a sexual context, it's just sort of a different change that can be happening in their body. We have to be careful to [not] immediately leap to sexualizing 7-year-old girls.

On how early puberty could be linked environmental exposure

Julianna Deardorff: What I find concerning is that puberty is a process that's very sensitive to the environment and we can move the timing of puberty, unintentionally, vis-a-vis environmental exposures.

... Puberty in and of itself in starting early has a lot of disconcerting aspects ... [I wonder if] this [is] kind of a canary in a coal mine, or a barometer for other things that we're all being exposed to in our environments that may not be healthy for other reasons — we're just not seeing those as obviously.

On chemicals that are hormone mimickers

Deardorff: They're referred to endocrine disrupting chemicals, or EDCs, or another term for that is "hormone mimickers." That's because in the body, they mimic hormones and, in this case, when we're talking about girls' early puberty, estrogen is the hormone that we're most concerned about.

Greenspan: There [are] several chemicals that may mimic estrogen in the body. In animal studies, a big one that we're looking at — the culprit is called Bisphenol A, or BPA. BPA was actually invented as a medical estrogen, it's a weak estrogen, and it ended up becoming ubiquitous in plastics [and] ... it's also on paper, receipts and in other compounds. The concern is that it may leech out of those and into our bodies and may act like an estrogen.

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Julianna Deardorff (left) is a clinical psychologist and is on the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley School of Public Health. Louise Greenspan is a clinical pediatric endocrinologist and is on the faculty at University of California, San Francisco. Majed Abolfazli/Courtesy of Rodale Books hide caption

itoggle caption Majed Abolfazli/Courtesy of Rodale Books

Julianna Deardorff (left) is a clinical psychologist and is on the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley School of Public Health. Louise Greenspan is a clinical pediatric endocrinologist and is on the faculty at University of California, San Francisco.

Majed Abolfazli/Courtesy of Rodale Books

Our study has not yet demonstrated that this one, single chemical is causing early puberty, but it is one of the ones we're looking at. One of the problems with deciding which chemical is that there's no one single smoking gun. We live in a toxic milieu of many, many, many chemicals and it's actually becoming impossible to isolate the single one, so we're looking at the ones that may work together.

One of the reasons we were really motivated to get this book out there was so that folks could have some guidelines about how to use what many people call the "precautionary principle," which is — if you're not sure about it, find a safer alternative, because the science just isn't there yet.

On boys' puberty

Greenspan: The jury is still out on what's happening with boys' puberty. There is some evidence that boys' puberty may be starting earlier as well, but we don't have the definitive studies that demonstrate that yet. One of the concerns is that the hormones that are estrogen mimickers might actually delay boys' puberty because boys' puberty is not an estrogen-related process, it's more of a ... testosterone-related process. So the same chemical may have different effects in boys versus girls in terms of their pubertal development.

On how antibiotics in our food could be causing early puberty

Greenspan: The concern about antibiotics is that one of the reasons antibiotics are used in the food supply is not just to treat animals' infections, it's actually because when animals are given antibiotics they get fatter and they go through pubertal development earlier. So it speeds up the process of raising a young animal to an animal that's ready for slaughter. It makes them bigger, so it's more efficient. The concern is that if antibiotics are doing this to animals ... and they're not broken down in the intestinal system, in fact they're absorbed orally in the stomach when we eat them, could they be having a similar effect in kids?

On soy and its connection (or lack thereof) to breast cancer

Greenspan: We did look at soy intake, both by asking the girls what they ate and also the measuring the levels in the urine. And we found preliminary data that suggests that soy is actually protective and that higher soy intake may lead to later puberty, even when controlling for the differences in the families where there was a lot of soy intake because obviously there are differences in families that are giving their kids a lot of tofu.

“ We think that children should eat soy because that's when it trains their body to become resistant to estrogen.

- Louise Greenspan, co-author of The New Puberty

The theory would be that the estrogen mimicking effects of soy may actually cause the body to become resistant to estrogen — that it may down-regulate the estrogen receptor, so that later in life, your body doesn't perceive or see estrogen in quite the same way.

We think that soy may actually be protective. The data is now coming out that women shouldn't worry so much about their soy intake for breast cancer, but it does speak to another concept in environmental health, which is the window of susceptibility. That means the timing of when you are exposed to something does affect the outcome. We think that children should eat soy because that's when it trains their body to become resistant to estrogen.

Women's Health

Children's Health

NBC devotes all three hours of its prime-time lineup Thursday to a new production of the musical Peter Pan. It will be performed and broadcast live, nearly 60 years after the first live telecast.

Author J. M. Barrie created his classic characters — the ageless Peter Pan, the little girl Wendy whom he whisks away to Neverland and the villainous pirate Captain Hook — in short stories at the turn of the 20th century. Those stories led quickly to a play, then a book. But Peter Pan, in America, really took off in the '50s. Walt Disney's full-length animated Peter Pan movie came out in 1953, there was a Broadway musical production in 1954 and the first live telecast of that production aired in 1955 on NBC.

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On Dec. 7, 1960, when David Bianculli was 7 years old, he wrote in his diary how "tickled" he was that Peter Pan was going to be on TV. Courtesy of David Bianculli hide caption

itoggle caption Courtesy of David Bianculli

On Dec. 7, 1960, when David Bianculli was 7 years old, he wrote in his diary how "tickled" he was that Peter Pan was going to be on TV.

Courtesy of David Bianculli

That TV version, like the Broadway show, starred Mary Martin — Larry Hagman's mother — as Peter Pan. It was such a hit on TV that it was performed all over again the following year, a rare event for television. And then it was performed live once more, four years later, this time in color.

The date was Dec. 8, 1960 — and I know that because my diary entry for Dec. 7, 1960, when I was 7 years old, reads, "Today I am too tickled because tomorrow PETER PAN is on." And before I went to bed the following night, I wrote what I consider one of my earliest surviving pieces of writing as a TV critic: "Was PETER PAN good today."

And it was. Back then, NBC referred to its ambitious TV specials as "spectaculars." And that version of Peter Pan, with Martin suddenly lifted into the air by wires I never noticed, certainly qualified.

NBC, the network that presented the original live Peter Pan musical telecast, is about to do it again. NBC is still flying high from last year's live telecast of The Sound of Music, an experiment that drew mixed reviews for Carrie Underwood in the central role, but was an unqualified success at attracting viewers. An estimated 22 million people watched that production, which was overseen by Craig Zadan and Neil Meron. They've already had a hand in reviving the movie musical, thanks to Chicago in 2002 and the big-screen version of Into the Woods coming later this month. But on TV, what they and NBC are doing isn't just reviving the form — it's reviving the medium.

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Allison Williams, who has fans who watch her on HBO's Girls, plays Peter Pan in the new live version. Virginia Sherwood/NBC hide caption

itoggle caption Virginia Sherwood/NBC

Allison Williams, who has fans who watch her on HBO's Girls, plays Peter Pan in the new live version.

Virginia Sherwood/NBC

Casting Christopher Walken as Captain Hook in this new Peter Pan is a genius move. Relatively few people know him as a song-and-dance man, or saw him in the film version of the musical drama Pennies from Heaven — but he has the kind of credibility and audience base that should draw people to this live telecast. And in the title role Allison Williams should, too, not because of her ability to carry the leading role in a musical, which at this point is a question mark, but because she has fans who watch her on HBO's Girls. Add in the pre-teens, who should be excited about watching Peter Pan fly through the air, and you have three generations of viewers with good reasons to tune in.

And it's live. When I was a kid, if you missed Peter Pan on TV, you really missed it. No DVDs or home-video, no cable marathons, and — for those first few telecasts — no reruns. That's why it was so diary-worthy.

In 2014, things are different. Record it yourself, or watch highlights on the Internet or the eventual home-video release, and you can enjoy this new Peter Pan whenever, and these days wherever, you want. But there's something extra special about watching live TV, knowing that millions of others are doing the same thing at the exact same time. In the '40s and '50s, TV had to broadcast live. Today, except for sports, news, award shows and late-night comedy shows, it's a rarity. And the success of The Sound of Music last year suggests there's an appetite for more.

I can't wait to see this new Peter Pan. But I'll have to, because it's live. New songs are being added to the familiar ones, and the script is being adapted somewhat for modern times — but the magic is in the pixie dust, and that ought to be as potent in 2014 as when NBC first broadcast Peter Pan in 1955 and when I watched it in 1960. "Dear Diary, PETER PAN is coming on TV again... and I'm still tickled."

David Bianculli is founder and editor of the website TV Worth Watching.

With his coalition government splintering, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has sacked two senior Cabinet ministers, said parliament should be dissolved and called for early elections.

The Israeli media reported that new elections could be held as early as March.

Netanyahu has been prime minister for the past five years — an extremely long tenure in a country marked by fractious politics and unstable coalition governments. He has more than two years left in his current term before new elections are required in 2017.

However, his five-party coalition, made up mostly of conservatives, had become increasingly unwieldy and could not carry on given the current divisions.

In a televised speech Tuesday, the prime minister said, "I turn to you, the citizens of Israel, this evening because under the current situation, from within the current government, it is impossible to lead a state."

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The prime minister added: "Swift elections must be held, and a new, united and strong government must be formed."

Before the speech, Netanyahu dismissed Finance Minister Yair Lapid and Justice Minister Tzipi Livni. Both are political centrists who have been openly critical of the prime minister.

"I will not tolerate any opposition in my government," Netanyahu said.

Israelis have been waging a heated debate in recent weeks over a controversial "Jewish nation-state" law. Supporters say it would codify and strengthen the Jewish character of Israel, while critics argue that it will weaken the country's democracy and could harm minorities.

As NPR Jerusalem correspondent Emily Harris told Morning Edition:

"The main point in Netanyahu's proposal is that while individuals retain their individual rights, only Jewish people have the right to national self-determination in Israel. This means things like the state valuing and preserving the heritage of Jewish residents, not others. Muslims, or Christians, or Arab speakers, would not have collective, community rights on the national level."

Netanyahu's coalition has run into sharp differences on issues that range from economic policy to housing bills.

In addition, Israel's relations with the United States, Israel's most important ally, have been rocky. Peace talks with the Palestinians collapsed earlier this year and Israel fought with Hamas in the the Gaza Strip for seven weeks this summer.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu

Israel