The Supreme Court's 2012 rejection of a challenge to Obamacare had a downside for the law: because the Court deemed the law's expansion of Medicaid to additional low-income individuals "coercive" to the states (even though, as Justice Ginsburg pointed out in her dissent on that holding, the government would pick up most to all of the […]
Author Archives: Scott Michelman
… is the thesis of an article in Slate yesterday, which points out that about a quarter of Americans think differences in the amount of work people do is responsible for income inequality (according to a Pew study) and that on average, an American working a full time job reports that s/he works 47 hours per week […]
Slate's coverage begins: In what may prove to be a turning point for political action on climate change, a breathtaking new study casts extreme doubt about the near-term stability of global sea levels. The study—written by James Hansen, NASA’s former lead climate scientist, and 16 co-authors, many of whom are considered among the top in […]
…is the headline associated with Sunday's NPR story about individuals' requests that Google "erase their digital footprint." NPR interviews Mona Chalabi, one of the number crunchers at fivethirtyeight.com, about this new phenomenon. Since the European Court of Justice ruled last year that Google must respect Europeans' "right to be forgotten," the company has received around […]
The story, based on data from Sallie Mae, is accompanied by several informative charts documenting the rise of higher education and breaking down methods of payment by category — grants, student income and saving, parents income/savings, other relatives, and loans. The amount financed by parents and other relatives is revealing in terms of the barriers […]
"For many households, the monthly rent check is so big that it eats up the majority of their paycheck — and the burden is growing," observed the Washington Post this week, in a story discussing a recent Harvard report on the subject and explaining that 11 million Americans, or about a quarter of all renters, spent more […]
At http://safeguardsdelayed.org, Public Citizen will keep track, on a daily basis, of regulations that have been held up by the U.S. Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, which reviews all significant safety regulations before they are implemented and has been the source of lengthy delays for numerous important regulations. Although OIRA is supposed to complete its review […]
Jeb Bush: "work longer hours." Hillary Clinton: "raise incomes." NYT coverage of those statements and their implications here and here, respectively.
Today's Washington Post reports on a ProPublica expose concerning the use of the drug Coumadin, a popular (in the sense of widely used) anti-coagulant used by many elderly people to prevent blood clotting. (The Post headline jumped out at me in part because two of my own relatives use or have used the drug in […]
The Washington Post reports: No one knows exactly how much money hotels extract from resort guests in fees. A recent study by New York University found that hotels and resorts collected $2.25 billion in surcharges last year, but the number includes other add-ons. We do know that virtually no hotels disclose the fees in their […]