America’s Medicare is in crisis. Already generating tens of billions of dollars annually in deficits, its financial challenges threaten taxpayers and enrolees alike. Moving to a premium-support model would reverse the programme's deterioration by using the dynamics of the free market to contain costs and improve consumer satisfaction, says Kathryn
The new U.S. health reform law won't help contain health costs, as the U.S. president so often claimed while lobbying for passage of his reform package. Instead, it will exacerbate them. Indeed, researchers estimate that health care spending will grow an average of 5.8 per cent per year through 2020,
The United States is running a record trade deficit with China. This is no surprise, given the wide array of items in stores labelled “Made in China.” Researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco examine what fraction of U.S. consumer spending goes for Chinese goods and what part
In early July, it appeared that a bipartisan group of senators had come up with a plan to end the 45-cents-per-gallon corn (maize) ethanol subsidy almost immediately rather than wait for it to expire, as planned, on December 31. But that deal never passed both houses of Congress. The result:
There is a persistent debate over the role of scale of operations in education. Some argue that school franchises offer educational services more effectively than do small independent schools. Sceptics counter that large, centralised operations create hard-to-manage bureaucracies and foster diseconomies of scale and that small schools are more effective
