Season 2 opens on the most underrated piece of health infrastructure in America: the public library. Every quote below plays the exact moment from the broadcast — just tap it.
The utility argument, again
Dr. Rob joins from central Pennsylvania and reframes E-rate the way he reframed the digital divide in the premiere.
My contention is that broadband is just as important a utility as electrification and running water for the health, safety, and success of our residents of our country, frankly, the world. So broadband is and should be a publicly available utility at reasonable cost for everyone to thrive.
Fifty years, and $1.83 billion
Kelly Mukherjee introduces the episode's headliner — Mala Muralidharan, E-rate administrator for the Arizona State Library and an AZBSN co-founder with a fifty-year library career.
For more than five decades, Mala Muralidharan has been a driving force behind expanding broadband access, strengthening our libraries, and ensuring that communities across our state are not left behind in the digital age.
Mala explains E-rate from the ground up — the Universal Service Fund fee on your phone bill, the Telecommunications Act of 1996, the FCC and USAC — and then lands the number.
So far, as far as Arizona is concerned, we have received about $1.83 billion from 1998. We receive about an average of about $70 million each year for our schools and libraries.
Having once worked at a paid, four-book-limit British Council Library in Bombay, she does not take the American public library for granted.
Libraries are trusted places. So you could go to a library, for example, and be sure to get information that is trustworthy, apolitical, that is community-sensitive, community-friendly places.
Tuba City: the backpack, the scan, the line out the door
This is the story of the episode. A liver-scan telehealth event on the Navajo Nation at Tuba City, run with NAU and University of Arizona nursing students on an NIH grant. Library-supplied backpack screening kits — blood pressure cuff, thermometer, pulse oximeter, glucometer. Door-hanger flyers. Radiology reads sent in real time to NAU over the library's broadband line. They planned for twenty-five to thirty people. More than a hundred and twenty showed up, ages six months to their nineties, and the doctors gave up their Memorial Day weekend to finish.
The ability to have an anchor location with some trained staff to facilitate is very valuable. It becomes an oasis is the analogy I would give.
The dream, in three words
Steve asks Mala what she actually wants. She does not need long.
I think I can sum it up in three words: broadband for all.
Steve names the thing that gets in the way — and it isn't money.
The biggest challenge, however, is letting people know what's going on. When we started AZBSN years ago, I used to hear from people, well, Arizona's not doing anything. And even today, I hear that because they're not involved.
But for those of you listening, thank you. And just know you are in reach of access, if only you start at your local library.