Marketplace - American Public Media

A lot of us like our television on demand. But when you're also an avid Twitter user, that can reveal a whole boatload of spoilers about your favorite shows. 

Enter Jennie Lamere. She loves shows like "Dance Moms" and "Pretty Little Liars," but couldn't always watch live. And people she followed on Twitter kept spoiling key plot points. So the 18-year-old high school senior did something about it. After a brainstorm and a hackathon, she came up with 150 or so lines of code, an app, called Twivo.

The aim is two-fold: block spoilers, and recreate the live tweet experience when you watch the show later. Let's say you love the ABC drama, "Scandal," starring Kerry Washington as political fixer Olivia Pope. 

"If you were on Twitter, into the bar I add onto Twitter, you would just type in 'Scandal,'" Lamere said. "It would block out all tweets that were talking about 'Scandal.'"

A green bar blocks out the tweets, so you know they're there, among all the other links and personal updates, but not visible. Once you're ready to watch, you'd hit play on Twivo, like you would on a DVR. 

"And the tweets would stream down. So you would get the experience of live tweeting without being live," Lamere said. 

She's developed other programs, but this is her first solo project. What's the appeal of coding? 

"The cool thing is if I think, 'Oh man, I really wish someone made an app that, say, blocks spoilers on Twitter,' I just could be like, 'Oh, I could do that. I'll make it myself.'"

Lamere expects that Twivo will be ready for the general public in a couple of weeks. And will be free to download. 

"I just want to get the app out there. I want people to get to use the product," said Lamere. "I think one of the main markets will be teens, and like, I wouldn't want to pay for it."

Look, we know it's a Hallmark fabricated holiday and all that, but the numbers don't lie -- plenty of you are celebrating Mother's Day this weekend. The National Retail Federation says consumers will spend $20.7 billion on Mother's Day gifts this year, an average of $169 per mom.

iCharts

That makes Mother's Day one of top spending holidays of the year -- it's tied with Valentine's Day for third place.

iCharts

We asked you what sort of mother's day gifts all that money buys, and you said everything from a vacuum to a chainsaw and an iPad.

Terri Mead from Redwood City, Calif., wrote in to say she's giving her mom a helicopter ride for Mother's Day. She owns an IT consulting company and is a licensed helicopter pilot. She says the hour-long flight will probably cost around $275, but says for her family, it isn't really about the money. "We're not big on exchanging gifts on these holidays that you go and purchase. It's really all about spending time," she says.

Paula Poundstone, comedian and mom of three, agrees. Poundstone joined in our studios to discuss the value of Mother's Day.

She said her family isn't big on exchanging gifts either, but she did like the idea of taking your mom for a ride to show your appreciation. "None of my kids drive, but if they did, I think they would gladly drag me behind the car," she joked.

When we asked her to share any motherly advice she's given her children about finances, she was a bit more serious.

"I've encouraged them to work for their money, to save their money and to save the rewards for after the basics are paid," said Poundstone. "I've also encouraged them to wait to start a family until they've enjoyed those years when you can sleep on anyone's couch and it doesn't matter, because you don't have to get up and rush home to take care of someone."

To hear more of Poundstone's interview, click the audio player above. Plus, follow her on Twitter, like her on Facebook, visit her website, and check out her latest CD.

See financial tips from other moms out there:

[View the story "Your mom's money advice" on Storify]

Rep. Frank Lucas, (R-OK) chairman of the House Agriculture Committee says the House bill seeks to eliminate a policy called "broad-based categorical eligibility," which has been in place since the mid-1990s. The policy is designed to make eligible for food stamps some who might otherwise not have been, due to savings or income exceeding the poverty line.

"The idea is to make sure that people are relying on what they have first, before turning to government assistance," said Rachel Sheffield, an analyst with the Heritage Foundation, a conservative research think tank.

Supporters of the policy say it benefits low-income individuals and families.

"At the state level, there's no ideology involved in this," said Jim Weill, President of the non-profit Food Research and Action Center. "Almost everybody recognizes that this is an important way to meet the basic needs of struggling families."

 

Saturday is graduation day at Georgia State University. And more than half the students who came in as freshmen will walk the stage for their diplomas.  

A decade ago, that number would have been about one student out of three.

Here’s the thing about graduation rates. The calculation starts the second a student steps foot in class. And it doesn’t matter if that student drops out on day one, or one day before graduation.

When you’re talking numbers, it’s all the same.

“I am the definition of a non-traditional student, from age to being a mother,” says Lucille McGee, a GSU student who was on the fast-track to becoming  a drop-out statistic

Two years ago, Lucille moved from New Jersey to Atlanta to attend Georgia State.

She was 24, the first in her family to go to college, and she had a new baby. But when she showed up on campus, the tuition money she thought would be there wasn’t. Lucille was about $3,000 short with no way to pay.

“I am older, so maybe I’ll just have to go back to work and save my money,” she told herself.

But, really, Lucille knew better.

“I knew in the back of my mind I wouldn’t be returning,” she says.

Georgia State saw this pattern over and over: bright, capable students walking away because they just didn’t have the money.

“A number of the students we were dropping were short by $300, by $400,” says Tim Renick, Vice Provost and Chief Enrollment Officer at Georgia State.

“When I sometimes present this account to outside audiences, they say ‘Well, why didn’t they go to their parents to get the money, why didn’t they get a loan from a bank to get that money or some other kind of loan,’” he says. “And the reality is a lot of these students are maxed out.”

So a few years ago, the university instituted what’s called a bridge grant.

The administration flagged students who were automatically dropped for non-payment. Those who owed the least got their grants first, and it went on down the line until the pot ran out.

Georgia State University president Mark Becker provided the initial seed money out of his own pocket -- about $40,000.  

 “Higher education was transformational in my life,” says Becker. “I was a first-generation college student, and saw the life I was able to live because of a college education.”

The bridge fund is now worth a couple million dollars.

But it’s just one way the school keeps students on track to graduate from the minute they arrive on campus.

Another is data.

GSU found that students often get  derailed because they take classes that don’t count toward graduation. With 32,000 students, it’s not like staffers can check every registration.

But a computer can.  

Now the school “flags” students if they’re  headed for trouble.

“I think it’s definitely a notable increase,” says the Brooking Institution’s Matthew Chingos of GSU’s progress.  

Chingos says colleges often pour tons of money into improving graduation percentages.  

“Colleges spend money on lots of different things -- on research, on teaching, on student support,” he says. 

Chingos adds more money isn’t necessarily better.

“And in general, there isn’t that much of a correlation once you take into account student characteristics,” he says.  

In other words, things like SAT scores and socioeconomic status play a bigger role in getting students across the finish line than the amount of cash a school throws at the problem.

But studies show a little help can go a long way in creating success stories like Lucille McGee’s.

“I plan to go to medical school upon graduation,” she says, adding that she has just two semesters to go.

As far as Saturday’s graduation, Georgia State will hand out a record 4,000 diplomas. That includes to some 300 to students who might not have made it a decade ago.

You’ve been there, right? Streaming music or video on your smartphone when you realize that is using up a lot of data and your phone bill is going to be huge.

Except for those lucky souls who have been grandfathered in, unlimited data plans are a thing of the past. Which is, it turns out, a big concern for content providers -- the companies that make whatever you are watching or listening to. So, they’re thinking about helping consumers cut their data costs.

The entertainment ecosystem is crowded and competitive, and David Finke, who heads the digital transformation practice at Russell Reynolds Associates, says smartphones are a big part of that.

“Everyone is looking to increase revenue and profitability, and everybody is looking for a way to leverage other parts of the ecosystem in order to do that.”

This week, Daniel Mead, the CEO of Verizon Wireless, said the company is looking at a new business model. Advertisers and content providers would subsidize consumers by paying for part of their data plan.

That’d be good news for media companies. They’d get viewers.

“The reason you want to deliver your content is so you can get valuable advertising dollars,” Finke says.

It’d be good news for consumers. They’d save money. And it’d be good news for wireless companies. They’d continue making money off all that data.

Rob Frieden, a  professor of telecommunications and law at Penn State, says watching shows on smartphones gets us one step closer to “the end of appointment television as we know it.”

According to Frieden, no one wants to set a clock anymore, to watch one show on one channel on one platform.

“People are expecting anytime, anywhere, over any device access to content,” he says.

More Americans are spending more time watching video on smartphones -- on average, about five and a half hours a month.

If data plans are subsidized, chances are there would be more demand.

Weston Henderek, with telecom and software research firm Current Analysis, says wireless companies have to be cautious. A surge in demand could clog their networks.

“As much as carriers like the additional data revenue, they have to be very careful in terms of their network planning and how quickly they can add additional capacity.”

They’ll have to move fast. According to Cisco, by 2017, two-thirds of the world’s mobile data traffic will be video.

British sailor Andrew Simpson died yesterday when his AC72 yacht capsized during training for the America's Cup in San Francisco. Now, many are questioning the safety of these racing boats.

A high-performance yacht these days doesn't so much sail as it hovers, says Ben Farnborough, associate publisher of Boat International Media.

"None of it is in the water other than the rudder and a daggerboard, so it's essentially flying," he says.

Flying faster than ever before. And Farnborough says because the yachts move at such high speeds, we're seeing new safety precautions. 

"The guys on the AC72's are wearing crash helmets, which is something that we've not seen before in sailboat racing," he says. 

Lee Tawney is the executive director of the National Sailing Hall of Fame. He says say events like the America's Cup need yachts that are at the forefront technologically. And that comes with risk. "Safely one could ask the same kinds of questions when you fly a new kind of airplane, or test anything that's on the edge," he says.

Tawney says the race does need to be safe. Unfortunately, slower yachts just aren't as exciting to watch. Stuart Streuli,senior editor at Sailing World Magazine, says these high-speed yachts are meant to draw a crowd.

"They want the competition to be exciting enough and easy enough to comprehend, so that non-sailors who saw it on TV would stop and watch and not turn away," Tawney says.  "And in the past, that's been a big problem."

And sailors in the America's Cup can use all the advertising dollars they can get. After all, these boats can cost more than $10 million each.

By now, you've heard about a global ATM heist for the ages; this complicated operation did $45 million worth of withdrawals.

The high-tech part involved hacking into financial accounts. The low-tech part: making homemade debit cards that get away with it in one important country: ours.

To simplify, this was a two-part crime. The bad guys stole debit card information online, and then pasted that info onto magnetic stripe debit cards. The kind you and I use.

Easy peasy, says fraud analyst Julie Conroy at the Aite Group. You can buy the equipment to do it for $25.

"So you can take any ordinary plastic card," Conroy says. "It can be an old gift card you've gotten. Create your own magnetic stripe. And then use it like any other ATM card."

This magnetic stripe technology is older than the Ford Pinto. Its vulnerabilities let the presumed crooks in this case make duplicate debit cards to use all at once.

"It was really choreographed," says financial researcher Brian Riley with CEB Tower Group. "Within the course of ten hours, thousands of transactions passed through. And if you saw the map that was released, it showed a map going straight down Broadway."

The U.S. is the world's only advanced economy using magnetic stripes. Every other member of the G20 group of industrialized countries uses a newer technology.

"That puts a chip on the cards," says fraud consultant Jerry Silva. "And now you had kind of a double layer of security."

Cards with chips embedded are harder to copy. And they generate a unique code for each transaction, for additional security.

Ideally, American consumers and banks want that.

"But the cost of replacing all of the plastic in this country, the cost of upgrading every ATM to date has exceeded the cost of the fraud itself," says Silva.

By one estimate, the hardware upgrade would cost around $4 billion. That puts this $45 million case in some perspective.

One reason Americans are in this situation is, we invented credit cards. So we have old infrastructure, a bit like the New York City subway system.

"A lot of times the early adopters are stuck with a generation 1.0 system," says cybersecurity analyst Chris Wysopal of Veracode. "And I think that's what we have here."

Still, higher-tech cards are coming to the U.S. in the next few years, analysts say. They've started to hit the market for global travelers, though financial firms still have to work out details of the chip format.

When the new cards do come, no one in the industry believes our fraud problems will be resolved. The hackers will just need to get a little more creative.

How do you waste money? We heard from a lot of you about your morning lattes, lottery tickets and lunch dates. One listener said she buys far too much chocolate. But "waste" is subjective. Here's a fact about personal finance though: you have to plug the leaky holes in your spending to stick to a budget.

If you can learn to do that, Paula Pant says you can eventually buy whatever you need -- and want, too. She is a personal finance journalist and author of the aptly named blog, Afford Anything. Pant joins us to talk about spending habits and answer some of your questions about waste.

We all waste money, one way or another. So how should people think about where to draw the line on their budget leaks?

"There's a difference between wasting money and using money in ways that you enjoy," says Pant. "Don't fall into the trap of thinking that any money that you spend on fun or entertainment is necessarily a waste. I mean, those are the memories you're creating that you'll look back on 20 years from now and think, wow, I really enjoyed those times in my life. That's not a waste at all, in fact, it's arguably some of the highest and best use of your money, as long as you do it in a constrained, judicious fashion."

One of the trickiest aspects of budgeting is separating your wants from needs. To help make it easier for you, we created a simple three-step guide.

Several Marketplace Money listeners wrote in to ask for advice about how to get their spending under control:

• Kari, an orchestral musician in Charleston, S.C., wants to know how she can curb her social spending. As someone who spends a lot of time practicing alone at home, Kari enjoys going out with friends but often comes home with a bar tab of $100 or more.
• Seth is based in Houston, Texas, but as a management consultant, he spends long stretches away from home. He likes to unwind by watching newly released movies in his hotel room, but they cost him $20 a pop, and often he falls asleep on the first-run films after working a long day.  He wants to know if his hotel movie habit is a waste of money.

"As a general rule... there's nothing wrong with spending money on entertainment," says Pant. "And in fact, there's a rule if thumb that says that you should spend roughly 50 percent of your money on necessities, another 30 percent on discretionary spending and then 20 percent on savings.  If that entertainment is contained within that 30 percent portion, then generally speaking -- assuming you don't have any huge credit card debt or anything like that, that should be addressed first, and assuming that you're saving enough for retirement and taking care of all of those things -- then there's nothing wrong with spending money on your social life and entertainment."

Click play on the audio player above to hear more of Pant's advice.

How do you waste money? We heard from a lot of you about your morning lattes, lottery tickets and lunch dates. One listener said she buys far too much chocolate. But "waste" is subjective. Here's a fact about personal finance though: you have to plug the leaky holes in your spending to stick to a budget.

If you can learn to do that, Paula Pant says you can eventually buy whatever you need -- and want, too. She is a personal finance journalist and author of the aptly named blog, Afford Anything. Pant joins us to talk about spending habits and answer some of your questions about waste.

We all waste money, one way or another. So how should people think about where to draw the line on their budget leaks?

"There's a difference between wasting money and using money in ways that you enjoy," says Pant. "Don't fall into the trap of thinking that any money that you spend on fun or entertainment is necessarily a waste. I mean, those are the memories you're creating that you'll look back on 20 years from now and think, wow, I really enjoyed those times in my life. That's not a waste at all, in fact, it's arguably some of the highest and best use of your money, as long as you do it in a constrained, judicious fashion."

One of the trickiest aspects of budgeting is separating your wants from needs. To help make it easier for you, we created a simple three-step guide.

Several Marketplace Money listeners wrote in to ask for advice about how to get their spending under control:

• Kari, an orchestral musician in Charleston, S.C., wants to know how she can curb her social spending. As someone who spends a lot of time practicing alone at home, Kari enjoys going out with friends but often comes home with a bar tab of $100 or more.
• Seth is based in Houston, Texas, but as a management consultant, he spends long stretches away from home. He likes to unwind by watching newly released movies in his hotel room, but they cost him $20 a pop, and often he falls asleep on the first-run films after working a long day.  He wants to know if his hotel movie habit is a waste of money.

"As a general rule... there's nothing wrong with spending money on entertainment," says Pant. "And in fact, there's a rule if thumb that says that you should spend roughly 50 percent of your money on necessities, another 30 percent on discretionary spending and then 20 percent on savings.  If that entertainment is contained within that 30 percent portion, then generally speaking -- assuming you don't have any huge credit card debt or anything like that, that should be addressed first, and assuming that you're saving enough for retirement and taking care of all of those things -- then there's nothing wrong with spending money on your social life and entertainment."

Click play on the audio player above to hear more of Pant's advice.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates the Treasury will report a $112 billion surplus for the month of April. So far in 2013, the federal government is running a deficit $230 billion less than it was last year.

Forty-eight-year-old Jack Ma, founder and CEO of the world's largest e-commerce website, Alibaba, says he's stepping down because he is "a bit old for the internet." The idea that a man who is not yet 50 could be "too old" for any leadership position may strike some as laughable but some analysts say tech entrepreneurship is often a young person's game.

The president will host several women at the White House today to talk about how Obamacare has helped them and their families, just in time for the Mother's Day. It's is just the latest in a week's worth of Affordable Care Act news as the administration gears up the charm offensive to sell health reform to the millions who still don't quite get it.

Believe me, I know the point of "Mad Men" is not to make us nostalgic for the good old days of advertising. But at least back then, as smarmy as the ad men were, the game was more straightforward: Companies wanted your money, and they ran ads to get it.

Okay, so that hasn't changed, exactly. Companies still want your money. But now they actually try and make you work to make it easier to sell you their products.

Oh, I'm sorry -- you thought that when your favorite DJ asks you to vote on whether you prefer your candles vanilla or cinnamon-scented, or which way you like your toilet paper to hang, or who was the best dressed at "The Great Gatsby" premier, it's because she's interested in your thoughts?

Ha.

It's all part of a two-part ploy. Step one: lure you to the company website, Facebook page or Twitter feed. Step two: motivate you to "like"/share/pin/rank/rate/comment/complete a survey -- anything to build a "relationship" or to show advertisers that you're an "engaged" user.

Can't we just watch or listen in peace?

Apparently not. The quest for engaged consumers is relentless. ABC wants me to follow my favorite "Shark Tank" shark on Twitter. CNN.com wants to me to submit my suggestion for the country's best beer town. The local oldies station nags me to stop by on Facebook and tell the hosts about incidents in which I've almost injured myself in the bathroom.

Even I don't care about that. Or do I? Listeners, tweet me and let me know your opinion.

There's some rare good news expected for the finances of the federal government this afternoon. The Congressional Budget Office estimates the Treasury will report a $112 billion surplus for the month of April. So far in 2013, the federal government is running a deficit $230 billion less than it was last year.

Chris Low chief economist at FTN Financial explains how this is possible.

Fannie Mae said on Thursday that it's paying $59.4 billion in dividends to the U.S. Treasury. So between that and the sequester, does this mean our debt limit problems are over?

"I think that it's kind of impressive that this clever little accounting gimmick that Fannie Mae discovered about tax credits has turned into $60 billion of real money, which is going to the government -- yay, good for them," said Reuters' Felix Salmon. "But the debt limit fight is absolutely certain to happen sooner or later, and at some point this year."

Mostly, it's good news for the government, said Bloomberg Government's Nela Richardson.

"Not only do they not have to deal with the debt ceiling, they don't have to deal with Fannie Mae," she said. "The company's now profitable and the calls for reform are much less frequent when the company is actually making the government and putting off decisions for the government. It's a win-win all around."

Listen to the full audio for more analysis.

#Longreads

Time to catch up on the week with our Wrappers' picks for #longreads for the weekend!

Felix Salmon suggests:

• Soros vs Sinn: The Europe debate.
• Martin Filler on MoMA and the Folk Art Museum building.
• Jim Holt on Benoit Mandelbrot.

Nela Richardson picked:

• Kelefa Sannah takes a deep dive into the Occupy Wall Street movement and the state of American anarchy.
• Chrystia Freeland explores parents and the money they spend to make their kids smarter, faster, more talented than their peers. Is it working?
• Related: Karen Weise reports that colleges financial aid is increasingly going to wealthier kids.
• Peter Coy asks what's wrong with the American job market. The article takes a look behind the numbers to the obstacles to full employment that still remain.

And a bonus from both:

• That New American Foundation Pell report on Pell Grants, related to the Weise article.

In just a few hours, POOF. $40 million. Gone. 

In what may be the largest heist of its kind, thieves across two dozen countries made off with $40 million dollars from thousands of atms around the world on February 19. 

In a similar scheme in December, they made off with $5 million.

Here’s how it worked: 

1. Hackers stole prepaid card numbers.
2. They hacked into card processing centers and raised the withdrawal limits on those cards.
3. They made fake cards.
4. They sent legions of thieves out to withdraw money from thousands of ATMS. 

NOT A NEW CRIME

“We’ve seen a pattern in these kinds of attacks in the past few years,” says Tom Cross, director of computer security research at Lancope. “There’ve been a few heists like this one.”

He says what’s surprising about this instance isn’t any technical novelty, but rather “the coordination of the cash out network where large amounts of cash was withdrawn by ATMs by multiple people almost simultaneously.”

A WEAKNESS IN HOW PEOPLE GET ACCESS TO CASH

That card processing centers continue to be subject to – in this case – spectacularly successful hacking is itself a major issue. “It shows a significant weakness in how people get access to cash,” says Ken Pickering, development manager of security intelligence at Boston-based CORE Security. There’s something wrong with “the infrastructure of how transactions are authorized,” he says.

Cross, with Lancope, says there’s another weak link in the chain mail around the world’s cash.

 Many ATMs, he says, don’t talk to each other. “A large financial institution may operate large numbers of ATMs, and can analyze transactions across their network” to detect signs of fraud. But many ATMs are run by small businesses and individuals who are not connected up to a financial institution, so one machine may not know that a card was just used five times at five other machines. “That coordination doesn’t exist today.” 

Pickering adds another weak point to the list: those magnetic strips on credit and debit cards. “Anyone who has access to the swipe or digital readout of the swipe can replicate the card,” says Pickering. In much of the rest of the world, cards use harder to fake embedded chips. 

Replacing those strips would involve changing not only all the cards in the U.S., but also all the readers. 

“I don’t think until fraud hits a certain level would people be willing to incur the cost of that,” he says. He notes that in 2008, credit and debit card fraud was over a billion dollars. “I think we’re getting pretty close.”

Several alleged footmen, responsible for withdrawing cash from ATMs in New York City, have been apprehended. But so far, the masterminds of the scheme remain at large.

A highly coordinated band of thieves stole $45 million from ATMs around the globe in a matter of hours. In New York City alone, the thieves made off with $2.4 million. On Thursday, federal prosecutors unsealed an indictment against eight men, one of whom was found dead in the Dominican Republic.

The BBC's technology correspondent Mark Gregory has been looking into how they pulled off.

When we asked Marketplace Money listeners what you waste your money on, we heard from many of you who struggle with overspending on things like first-run movie rentals and nights out on the town.

Of course, getting unnecessary spending under control is an essential part of planning for the future and reaching your financial goals -- goals like buying a house, having a baby or taking a big vacation -- these are hard things to achieve even when you aren't blowing money on little everyday treats.

Gail Cunnigham  is with the National Foundation for Credit Counseling, and she says the key is budgeting.  

"You know, a lot of people consider budget a four-letter word," says Cunningham. "And I tell those folks that if they can't tolerate thinking that they have a budget and if that sounds restrictive to them, call it a spending plan. But actually, a budget is meant to free up your money. You know, we work very hard for our money, and typically we spend it very casually, so let's adjust those to be in a better alignment by knowing where our money goes."

Many Marketplace Money listeners wrote in to ask how they can better budget for the future:

• Andrew Reback from Northern California is wondering how he can make enough room in his budget to purchase a new home. His family moved to Silicon Valley from Philadelphia, where they owned a row house, but now they can barely make ends meet and they've considered moving to a more affordable city
• Beth McGinley is a school teacher from Oakland, Fla. She has about $7,000 in savings and can't decide what to do with it. She wants to know if she should spend the money on an extended trip to New York City (a life-long dream), use the money as down payment on a rental condo or save up to buy a bigger house someday.

Click play on the audio player above to hear Cunningham's advice.

Finance ministers and central bankers from the Group of 7 leading economic powers -- including the U.S. -- are holding informal  talks about the global economy in a stately home north of London today. But their fireside chat may not be too cozy. Germany’s finance chief is in for roasting over the hot topic of austerity.

The U.S. will lead the onslaught, urging the Germans to go for growth and ease up on austerity and slacken their demand that debt–laden euro zone countries cut their public spending. France will join in the Germany bashing and the new, anti-austerity Italian finance minister will add his voice to the small chorus of criticism.

But the Germans insist that the criticism is misplaced. They’ve already shifted ground. With Germany’s blessing, France and Spain have recently been given an extra two years to cut their budgets. German analyst Constanze Stelzenmueller says German policy has been misunderstood.

“In all fairness, Chancellor Merkel would say this is not just about cutting debt or austerity. It’s about structural reforms to labor and services markets in order to enable growth,” says Stelzenmueller. 

Germany does have at least one ally at the meeting in Britain.  Yesterday, Prime Minister David Cameron said, “We need to go on cutting our deficit -- but at a sensible, measured pace.”

You probably heard this week that the federal government released new data about just how dramatically the cost of identical medical procedures can vary from hospital to hospital. Tens of thousands of dollars in some cases. So what should you, as a consumer, do make of this information?

"There's a lot of room for consumers to shop around to different hospitals and to negotiate with hospitals to get a better value for their money," says Dr. Jeffrey Rice, CEO of Healthcare Blue Book -- a free price comparison Web site.

"You might pay $1,200 for a colonoscopy at one facility and you might pay $4,000 or more at another facility," says Rice. "And by just calling ahead before you get your care and asking the facility and your provider how much it's going to be under your own insurance plan, or if you're a self-pay, under a self-pay discount, you can find out exactly how much you're going to pay and get a much better value from the healthcare system."

But how feasible is it for someone to shop around for different health care options, especially if they're sick and in need of medical attention quickly?

In an emergency situation, Rice says you obviously don't have the same opportunity to be a health care comparison shopper. "But the vast majority of health care that Americans use, is not an emergency," he says.

Still, he admits that some procedures are easier to shop around for than others. "It's typically really easy to shop for outpatient procedures, most independent facilities can give you a specific price and they'll stand by that commitment," says Rice. "It's a little more difficult when you're dealing with larger inpatient facilities and inpatient services.  Typically, they'll give you an estimate, but they won't commit to that estimate, so it can be much more difficult to shop for the inpatient services, even if it's not an emergency."

But if you limit your options according to price, couldn't you also jeopardize the quality of your care? How can a consumer take both into account before making decisions?

Rice says his company, Healthcare Blue Book, makes it easy for patients to look up the fair price of procedures -- and it's free. "Then, when you call and check with your providers on their price, you'll know whether it's a reasonable price or not," says Rice. As for health care quality, he recommends looking at physicians' board certifications, malpractice history and any special training they might have. And to find out about facilities, he suggests visiting the government's Center for Medicaid and Medicare Service website, which includes quality metrics for inpatient care.

"The good news for patients," says Rice, "is that typically, the lower price providers have as good or better quality than the higher cost providers, and there's study after study showing that."

No matter who you're going to see though, Rice stresses that it's important look into cost before receiving care. "You wouldn't go buy a car without knowing the price or a house without knowing the price," he says. "If you're not in an emergency situation, it's absolutely the patient's right to know how much their care is going to cost them before they get treated."

Sometimes this can mean having to call several healthcare providers and insurance agents -- who aren't exactly known for their transparency. But Rice says it's worth the effort. "When thousands of dollars are at stake, and -- literally -- patients can overpay by $3000, $5000, $10,000 or more, on a lot of surgeries, for example, it's worth the time to make those phone calls and then check with your providers, " he says.

As the debate over immigration rages on, consider this: people who were born in one country, but then move somewhere else, have an estimated $400 billion in savings. These days, the old country sometimes comes back to the emigrants with an offer -- lend us money.

Dan Lainer-Vos teaches sociology at the University of Southern California and has written a book about what are referred to as Diaspora bonds, and how they're used by Irish and Israeli Americans, called "Sinews of the Nation."

All this week, Marketplace Tech looks at the near future of tech -- so let's forget traveling with warp drives and worm holes for a second. What's coming in the next decade of space exploration? Marketplace Tech host Ben Johnson speaks to NASA engineer Adam Steltzner, who navigated the incredibly challenge of landing the Mars Curiosity Rover. Steltzner says the next ten years will be about getting humans into deep space to mine asteroids and preparing a human Mars mission. Also on the horizon?Looking for life on Jupiter's moon, Europa -- with a bit of team work, of course.