This past two weeks have been big ones for some very big promises from Republicans in Washington. It didn't go well for them. Three weeks after House Republicans voted to pass a new version of their "American Health Care Act," the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) weighed in on high-profile pledges from President Donald Trump […]

From the moment Donald Trump won his surprising victory on Election Day, a new cottage industry sprung up to offer sympathetic profiles of the supposedly long-overlooked and long-suffering voters who rallied to him. The New York Times has been at the forefront, delivering on-the-ground stories from Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan within days of the balloting. […]

When the Supreme Court struck down the Affordable Care Act's mandatory expansion of Medicaid by the states back in 2012, observers quickly began focusing on who would "opt in" or "opt out." But from a purely budgetary standpoint, there was never any question that accepting federal dollars to fund 100 percent of that expansion and […]

It only takes about 31 seconds of this week's health care coverage to show why people hate what passes for mainstream media reporting. After Democrats sang "goodbye" to 217 Republicans who voted to take health insurance away from 24 million Americans and strip essential protections from millions more, conventional wisdom regurgitators like Katie Couric and […]

Long before it mastered the mass production of "fake news," the Republican Party propagated its Ur-lie that "tax cuts pay for themselves." Almost from the moment that Arthur Laffer first sketched his now-famous curve on a napkin in 1974, right-wing pundits, politicians, and propagandists have declared as an article of faith the belief that tax […]

The end is nigh for the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. To be sure, ISIS affiliates in Libya, Yemen, Afghanistan and elsewhere will remain dangerous. And its fighters and sympathizers will continue to launch terror attacks in Europe and the United States for years to come. But the writing is on the wall for […]

On Saturday, April 15, thousands of Americans will take part in Tax Day Tax Marches in cities and towns across the country. Their objective? To pressure President Donald Trump to release his hidden tax returns. The concerns are certainly legitimate. After all, Trump isn't merely the first occupant of the Oval Office in over 40 […]

Economics, the textbooks say, is the study of the allocation of scarce resources. The economics of health care is certainly no exception. Given the competing and often contradictory demands across its ecosystem of patients, employers, physicians, drug stores, pharmaceutical firms, device manufacturers, clinics, hospitals, insurers, and government, the economics of health care might more accurately […]

With the Republican drive to repeal and replace Obamacare halted (at least, for now), President Trump and GOP leaders are moving on to their next quest: tax reform. On this issue, press secretary Sean Spicer declared, Trump will be "driving the train" because "this is a huge priority for him, something that he feels very […]

ive days after the presidential election, I wrote a concession message to Trump voters congratulating them for what they had won. To those Trump promised would get "sick of winning," I predicted, "You've won his 'big and beautiful' Obamacare replacement plan that will take away health insurance from 22 million Americans." If the president-elect and […]