Has U.S. Health Care Spending Finally Stabilized? An Outlook for 2019 The official 2017 statistics from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) are out, and there are some good news: The annual growth rate of health care spending is slowing down, and is the lowest since 2013 at 3.9%—it was 4.8% for …
Read More »Posts Tagged ‘economy’
Obamacare in the next few years
The Future of the Affordable Care Act: Unscathed by Attacks from the Right, Overtaken on its Left? Having survived years of attacks from Republicans, will the surviving ACA be rendered obsolete by Democrats’ local and state efforts towards universal health care? This could be an ironic twist of fate for Obamacare. Conceived out of the …
Read More »Why ACA Enrollment is Down This Year
Why ACA Enrollment is Down – and Why It Might Stay That Way Enrollment in Obamacare is down this year Enrollment in Obamacare is down this year. Halfway through the sign-up period for ACA health care insurance plans, which ends on December 15, the federal website Healthcare.gov reported early in December that enrollment was down …
Read More »The U.S. Government as a Leading Venture Capitalist
The U.S. Government as a Leading Venture Capitalist Uncle Sam supports entrepreneurs The U.S. Government as a leading venture capitalist, wow, is this a joke? This sounds like industrial policy, public intervention, and “picking winners.” It is something that European and East Asian governments do, but not us, right? Think again. The U.S. government has actually …
Read More »What Does Climate Change Mean in the U.S., Particularly for Minorities and…Coal Country?
The recent UN climate change report wake-up call The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued on Sunday October 7 an urgent call to action to governments all around the world: In its report, the IPCC stated that major changes are needed within the next decade to limit global temperature increases to 1.5 degree …
Read More »The California Resistance: Make the Planet Great Again
The real resistance is to protect our only planet Right after Labor Day, with most of the country coming together in memorial tribute to John McCain, the U.S. political environment reached fever pitch with the publication of an anonymous op-ed in the New York Times, claiming that members of the Trump administration were working together …
Read More »The ten-year anniversary of the 2008 financial crisis
A primer on Dodd-Frank, through a simple Q&A Why was Dodd Frank passed? The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act was passed by Congress, and signed by president Obama on July 21st, 2010, to stabilize our banking and financial system, and prevent a repeat of the disastrous 2008 financial crisis, which …
Read More »