As the Washington Post among others reported Monday, Google is testing a new service "that provides live video chat advice to searchers looking for information on some medical conditions." The feature, uncovered by a Reddit user who noticed his Android phone suggested "Talk with a doctor now" when he did a search about "knee pain," […]

The merger of Miami-based Burger King and Tim Horton's of Canada is adding fuel to the raging debate about the so-called "tax inversion." While Jordan Weissman questions Burger King's denial that the decision to base the new fast food giant in Canada was motivated by a desire to lower its corporate tax bill, Megan McArdle […]

Walmart has had a very bad week. On Thursday, the New York Times reported that at least eight senior executives have left the company since an investigation was launched to probe allegations of massive bribery in Mexico and other foreign markets. Already shaken by previous revelations that low wage workers at the nation's largest employer […]

With its shameful backlog and secret waiting lists at some of its facilities, the Veterans Health Administration is facing an urgent crisis. But the only reform certain to make things worse would be to privatize the system of 1,700 VA facilities that serve 8.76 million American vets. Despite its troubles, studies consistently show that VA […]

And now for today's quiz: When is $10 billion greater than $310 billion? When Republicans control the House of Representatives. Yes, the American people got another lesson in GOP math this week when House Republicans refused to budge on a $10 billion, five-month extension of unemployment benefits for 1.3 million long-term jobless workers while the […]

Bloomberg News this week offered the state of Washington as a powerful rebuttal to those who claim hiking the minimum wage would kill jobs. Washington, it turns out, has had the nation's highest minimum wage since 1998 and over the past 15 years enjoyed annual job growth well above the national average. New Jersey, too, […]

While income inequality in the United States has hit record highs, so too has the decibel level from the tragically rich protesting their victimhood in the new class warfare. After walking back his "Kristallnacht" Holocaust analogy, legendary venture capitalist Tom Perkins nevertheless fretted that the 1 percent faces "economic extinction." Sam Zell, the billionaire chairman […]

For months, Republicans and their amen corner have been warning "Obamacare will destroy the private-insurance market" in order to "make a single-payer, i.e. socialized medicine, system inevitable." Apparently, the conservative prophets of doom forgot to tell the nation's major health insurance companies. As it turns out, even as Republicans decry the Affordable Care Act's mythical […]

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 […]