With President Obama’s health care reform currently under intense partisan scrutiny in the United States, this article is an objective resource for understanding the ways in which Medicare has historically served as a weather vane for charting the changes to the American health care system....

This article explores the hypothesis that the U.S. health care system operates more like a robber baron than like Robin Hood, burdening ordinary payers of health insurance premiums disproportionately for the benefit of industry interests and higher-income consumer-taxpayers. Thus, lower- and...

This article examines the usual explanations for high U.S. health care costs, including medical technology, physician spending, patient choices and others. It then looks at the Affordable Care Act and other regulatory ideas to slow and better rationalize the high costs of the American system,...