Edward Luce’s book has been widely praised as carefully balanced and filled with evocative analysis and reportage. With a cast of dozens of academic, business and governmental thinkers, it wrestles with America’s relative economic decline, how the global economy is increasingly siphoning away America’s ability to innovate and manufacture, and a wide range of U.S. policy failures from education to healthcare to reinventing government. Too often Internet-entranced readers like me look for distillations to digest quickly, rather than dwell on the fascinating interviews, anecdotal treasure chest, and hard-nosed analyses in Mr. Luce’s detailed yet highly entertaining book.

Peabody Energy, the largest coal company in the US and one of the largest in the world, is once again embroiled in controversy over shady treatment of employees.

In 2007, Peabody Energy created Patriot Coal, a spin-off company comprised of Peabody’s eastern US mines. According to lawsuits involving the United Mine Workers (UMW), Patriot was formed as a place to stash union mines in West Virginia and the Midwest, along with the significant pension and health-care obligations that these eastern mines held.

Due to the widespread and continual use of antibiotics bacteria have evolved (I said it) to be resistance to the current drugs in circulation. Drug resistant bacteria can only be neutralized with newer drugs. Unfortunately there has been something of a slow down in the development of new antibiotic drugs leading some in the medical community to now warn that drug-resistant bacteria represent a serious threat.

Gruenhagen gone wild: “welfare” tells men to “impregnate as many women as they want“

It’s no exaggeration, either. Glenn Gruenhagen (R-Glencoe) doesn’t like the idea of the health care exchanges in the Affordable Care Act, so he dipped into a can of rancid snuff and snorted out this classic bit of business to “raise awareness” of the impending doom of black men running on an impregnation spree.  ”Gruenhagen dove in with a claim that “welfare” programs were responsible for out-of-wedlock births among “minorities”–and so the health care exchange might further erode traditional marriage.”

With the sequester set to kick off on Friday some in Washington are scrambling to figure out a “grand bargain” type deal to cut spending while protecting social programs. But one plan that would actually work has yet to be considered or endorsed by any major player – lowering the Medicare eligibility age.

The facts are in, the American healthcare system is one of the worst in the developed world.

Yes, the continual line repeated ad nauseum during the Obamacare debate about ruining the best healthcare system in the world by more regulation of insurance companies has been thoroughly discredited

While the idea that giving women access to birth control is a great way to reduce abortion rates would seem self-evident, there is now a newly published study proving that to be the case. Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, over the course of several years, provided women in the area access to birth control at no cost. The result was a large drop in both abortions and teen pregnancy rates.

If the US fought for the post-carbon economy the way it fights for nebulous state-building goals in foreign wars, the future would be brighter, cleaner, safer and cheaper, with more jobs and perhaps – because it would need to secure less of that foreign oil -fewer wars. If the country built new classrooms with the same urgency it built armored vehicles, more American teens could be choosing between colleges instead of choosing between minimum and sub-minimum wage jobs – and fewer would eventually need public assistance. If the government spent more on blackboards and less on bullets, it would create more jobs today and more innovation in the future.

The article proclaims that RomneyCare “achieved its main goals.” But nowhere in the 4,600+ word article does it treat “ensuring MA residents get access to health care” as one of RomneyCare’s goals. Instead, it reports on RomneyCare’s great success at ensuring MA residents get health insurance. And given the article’s admission that the cost of the program is unsustainable, the distinction is critical.

At the end of May, Vermont Governor Peter Shumlin signed a bill that can put Vermont on the path to single-payer health care. As it stands, Vermont’s plan is to cover every resident of the state for actual health care they can use. But the Green Mountain State’s ambitious plan can only succeed if the Federal Government grants several critical waivers of existing health care laws.