What we’ve gained from the Affordable Care Act, 13 years later

Do you remember when some senior citizens had to ration their medicines because their prescription drug costs would triple every year after they entered the Medicare coverage gap known as the “donut hole”? I do.

Do you remember when turning 19 meant getting kicked off your parents’ health insurance plan, regardless of your living situation? I do.

Do you remember when insurance companies could refuse to pay for preventive treatments — vaccinations, mammograms, colonos...

Chaos and rudeness at Stanford

It is unusual for a controversial event to end with absolutely everybody looking bad, but that is what happened on March 9 at Stanford University Law School, when the Federalist Society chapter sponsored a talk by Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan, an ultra-conservative firebrand appointed by President Trump to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. The judge, the student protesters and an on-scene administrator all played to type, exhibiting arrogance, intolerance and irresponsibility, respectivel...

Now is the time to guard against reckless banking legislation

All of this has happened before, and it will all happen again. The cycle of financial deregulation followed by financial calamities has a sickening familiarity to it. Our only hope for breaking out of this wasteful and destructive cycle is to learn enough from one of the crises to install reforms durable enough to have a chance to survive the money-induced amnesia that will inevitably follow.

The failures of Silvergate, Silicon Valley and Signature Banks provide us an opportun...

Republicans’ ‘Charlie Brown’ budget problem

Remember the great Peanuts comic strip where every time Charlie Brown went to kick the football it was yanked away? Think of congressional Republicans as Charlie Brown and Medicaid as the football.

For 40 years, the GOP has tried to slash Medicaid, the federal-state health care program targeted at the poor. They'll get some temporary wins, only to have that football yanked back. Over the past 40 years, Medicaid has grown more than Medicare.

They're at it again.<...