Features

Across the political spectrum, alarm bells are ringing about Medicare, America’s giant health program for the aged and disabled. To conservatives, Medicare is a huge, Kremlin-esque bureaucracy destined to soak up more and more of the American economy. To critics on the left, it’s an inadequate program that nonetheless siphons off increasingly limited funds that […]

Sam Heyward thought he’d paid his debt. A tall, soft-spoken 45-year-old man from Tallahassee, Florida, Heyward was convicted in 1981 of a felony for buying furniture he knew was stolen. He spent a year in a prison work camp and then tried to rebuild his life. He got a steady job at a Tallahassee church […]

The American health-care system is again at a point of critical change as a result of escalating costs and a gathering movement among employers, insurers, and policy-makers to revamp the structure of health insurance. Like the spread of managed care a decade ago, the new changes will be a bitter pill for many people. Most […]

There was plenty of humiliation to go around in the aftermath of the 2000 elections. Vote counters and ballot designers, election boards and state legislatures all came in for heavy criticism. But special ignominy was reserved for the five major broadcast and cable networks and their news operations. The networks that night broadcast multiple incorrect […]

Around about the third week of the “Swift”-boat controversy, commentators began to note, in a tone of disapproving sadness, that the firestorm created by the accusations against John Kerry proved that three decades later, the nation was still hopelessly divided over the Vietnam War. David Broder of The Washington Post kicked things off: “Will we […]

For most Americans, the last four years have represented a low point in our economic history. But for the big-business interests financing the Bush campaign, these have been high times. In previous eras, and even under previous Republican administrations, corporate America was one of a number of players in the public-policy arena. But under the […]

Remember the 2000 election? With the country enjoying a seemingly endless spell of peace and prosperity, and no apparent daunting challenges facing the next chief executive, the media were finally granted the chance to construct a narrative entirely around personalities. Al Gore, based on a handful of small exaggerations and his association with the occasionally […]

Back in 1996, Terry Johnson, the human-resources director for Ada County, Idaho, was excited about his new health-care coverage. He had just helped the county become the first in the United States to offer employees a medical savings account (MSA) as an alternative to traditional indemnity health insurance, and he was eager to try it. […]

Two years ago, Evan Snyder, a developmental and child neurologist, was working at the Harvard Medical School, transplanting neural stem cells into the damaged brains and spinal cords of mice and other animals and watching them reconstitute tissue or recover function. “I had just moved to better lab space,” Snyder recalled in June at the […]

Sure, the Democrats could hit the jackpot this year and take the White House and both chambers of Congress. But if John Kerry wins, he could just as easily be facing a Republican-controlled Congress that’s, well, not eager to cooperate. Luckily, his hands wouldn’t be tied. He’d still have the executive order to help promote […]