On January 1, 2014, the Affordable Care Act went fully into effect. But for all of the furious fighting over the law these past five years, Obamacare was always an evolutionary reform grafted onto the existing American health care system. The Medicaid public insurance program has been extended to roughly four million lower income Americans […]

Four Americans were slaughtered there. The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee held hearings to try to understand what really happened there -and why. And California Republican Representative Darrell Issa dominated the proceedings, determined to advance his party's interest--and not the national interest--at every turn. But that city wasn't Benghazi in eastern Libya, but Fallujah […]

With the Affordable Care Act now in full effect, the conservative propaganda factory is working overtime to produce and publicize Obamacare horror stories, real or imagined. So with the federal government, the states, private insurers, hospitals, doctors and pharmacies scrambling to assist the six million newly insured so far, the GOP's media water carriers are […]

A new study in the journal Science revealed that emergency room use rose by 40 percent over 18 months among new Medicaid beneficiaries in Oregon starting in 2008. While opponents of Obamacare and its expansion of Medicaid cheered those findings suggesting that U.S. health care costs will go up as a result, their exhilaration may […]

With an estimated 2 million Americans having signed up for private health insurance plans on the federal and state exchanges, the Affordable Care Act is now making real progress towards the goal of 7 million new enrollees by the end of 2014. But as the Washington Post cautions, Obamacare's first real test comes on January […]

For years, the defining truth of health care in America has been this: health care is worst in those states where Republicans poll best. In general, the states with the greatest percentage of uninsured, the unhealthiest residents and the most dismal health care systems give the GOP its strongest support. (With the "coverage gap" in […]

One man is the star of reality television show with 12 million viewers. With over 1.2 billion followers worldwide, the other may now be the hosting the greatest show on earth. Yet for American conservatives, Phil Robertson of the Duck Dynasty clan is being silenced for "a point of view that is traditional, that holds […]

Back in November 2010, I wrote a piece titled "The End of the Tea Party." A year later, a version of that essay ("Tea Party Activists Are Just Republicans by Another Name") appeared in The Tea Party Movement, an anthology published by multi-billion dollar education publisher, Cengage Learning, Inc. But in the intervening two years, […]

As 2013 draws to close, the negotiations over the Iranian nuclear program have entered a delicate stage. But in 2014, the tensions will escalate dramatically as a bipartisan group of Senators brings a new Iran sanctions bill to the floor for a vote. As many others have warned, that promise of new measures against Tehran […]

After watching Americans engage in a week of national self-flagellation over Duck Dynasty and its controversial patriarch Phil Robertson, I decided to watch something else. Passing up ersatz conflict for the real thing, I put on Ken Burns' unforgettable documentary, The Civil War. But my escape from the Daily Mail's latest "exclusive" from the Robertson […]