In his 2007 book The Assault on Reason, former Vice President Al Gore warned about what he saw as a dire threat to American democracy. "The 'well-informed citizenry,'" Gore fretted, "is in danger of becoming the 'well-amused audience.'" In a presentation on Super Tuesday 2008 ("That's Entertainment: Politics as Theater in Campaign '08"), I elaborated […]

In December 2003, Democrats in Congress overwhelmingly opposed President Bush's Medicare Part D prescription drug program. With good reason. The new benefit included the infamous "donut hole," a gap in coverage which still saddled many seniors with out-of-pocket costs for their prescriptions. Making matters worse for 45 million elderly and the United States Treasury alike, […]

Are you ashamed to be seen with your health care bill? Do you fear facing your own constituents? Are you plagued by feelings of dread and mild nausea at the thought of disappointing your seething supporters, angry activists and demanding donors? If you answered "yes" to all these questions, you might be a Republican member […]

Ever since Donald Trump's shocking victory on Election Day, press, pundits, and pollsters have engaged in a furious debate about which voters propelled him to the White House. Was Trump's win the revenge of the "guns and bitter crowd" in the Rust Belt, the white working-class voters whose racism, xenophobia and/or "economic anxiety" led them […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

There is total chaos in the House of Representatives today as Speaker Paul Ryan rushes to jam through a version--any version--of his so-called American Health Care Act. The timing and the ever-changing content of the bill have little to do with health care for the American people and everything to do with political spite. Ryan […]