Commentary
Commentary
The Reality of Common Core in the Classroom
If one asked most people a couple years ago about the Common Core national education standards, the response would have been a blank stare. Now, Common Core is a front-burner political issue because parents are discovering that their children are struggling under the new standards. Common Core is a set ...
Commentary
Employer Health Insurance: A Bargain Compared to Government-Sponsored Coverage
After years of slowing growth, employer health costs are forecast to climb at a faster pace next year, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers. Even with that projected growth, employers are spending much less per person than is the government about 60 percent less, concludes a new study from the American Health ...
Commentary
The Corruption of Peer Review Is Harming Scientific Credibility
Academic publishing was rocked by the news on July 8 that a company called Sage Publications is retracting 60 papers from its Journal of Vibration and Control, about the science of acoustics. The company said a researcher in Taiwan and others had exploited peer review so that certain papers were ...
Agriculture
The Honeybees Are Just Fine
Is a relatively new class of insecticides, known as neonicotinoids or “neonics,” harming bees and other wildlife? That’s what the International Union for the Conservation of Nature claimed in a recent press release announcing the results of a meta-study the organization conducted earlier this year. One might have expected the ...
Commentary
U.S. Has the Worst Health Care? Not By a Long Shot
Few complaints about the U.S. healthcare system are as common as the claim that we spend too much on health care and get too little for all that spending in return especially compared to other industrialized nations. A new Commonwealth Fund report is the latest to indict U.S. health ...
Commentary
Healthcare’s Problem Is Not High Drug Prices
Is $84,000 too much to pay to save a life? That’s a question worth asking now that the insurance industry has declared war on what it has deemed outrageous prices for new specialty drugs. In this case, the complaints focus on Sovaldi, a breakthrough treatment that gives three million people ...
Commentary
Union wins $15 minimum wage for L.A. schools’ service workers
A Los Angeles Unified School District move to raise its minimum wage to $15 an hour has thrust the system into the forefront of a national movement and marks another political victory for a powerful labor group and it’s not the teachers union. The Service Employees International Union, Local ...
Commentary
How ObamaCare will kill job-based plans
Americans aren’t all that optimistic about ObamaCare, according to a recent Kaiser Family Foundation poll: Fifty-seven percent say the law isn’t working as planned. That number will shoot even higher if employer health insurance vanishes, as an S&P Capital IQ report predicts. The financial-research firm forecasts that 90 percent of ...
Commentary
The High and Rising Costs of the HealthCare.gov Fiasco
The final verdict on Obamacare has yet to be written. But earlier this month, Republican staffers from the Senate Finance and Judiciary Committees offered a first installment on the botched rollout of the federal health insurance exchange HealthCare.gov. It wasnt pretty. The Committees 34-page report explains just how bad ...
Commentary
Suburban Chicago’s schools: Not as good as parents think
Are Illinois’ public schools that serve many middle-class children performing well? Their parents think so. But many of these schools are not as good as they think. That’s according to a new study from the Pacific Research Institute, which analyzed school performance in Illinois using several different methodologies and found ...
The Reality of Common Core in the Classroom
If one asked most people a couple years ago about the Common Core national education standards, the response would have been a blank stare. Now, Common Core is a front-burner political issue because parents are discovering that their children are struggling under the new standards. Common Core is a set ...
Employer Health Insurance: A Bargain Compared to Government-Sponsored Coverage
After years of slowing growth, employer health costs are forecast to climb at a faster pace next year, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers. Even with that projected growth, employers are spending much less per person than is the government about 60 percent less, concludes a new study from the American Health ...
The Corruption of Peer Review Is Harming Scientific Credibility
Academic publishing was rocked by the news on July 8 that a company called Sage Publications is retracting 60 papers from its Journal of Vibration and Control, about the science of acoustics. The company said a researcher in Taiwan and others had exploited peer review so that certain papers were ...
The Honeybees Are Just Fine
Is a relatively new class of insecticides, known as neonicotinoids or “neonics,” harming bees and other wildlife? That’s what the International Union for the Conservation of Nature claimed in a recent press release announcing the results of a meta-study the organization conducted earlier this year. One might have expected the ...
U.S. Has the Worst Health Care? Not By a Long Shot
Few complaints about the U.S. healthcare system are as common as the claim that we spend too much on health care and get too little for all that spending in return especially compared to other industrialized nations. A new Commonwealth Fund report is the latest to indict U.S. health ...
Healthcare’s Problem Is Not High Drug Prices
Is $84,000 too much to pay to save a life? That’s a question worth asking now that the insurance industry has declared war on what it has deemed outrageous prices for new specialty drugs. In this case, the complaints focus on Sovaldi, a breakthrough treatment that gives three million people ...
Union wins $15 minimum wage for L.A. schools’ service workers
A Los Angeles Unified School District move to raise its minimum wage to $15 an hour has thrust the system into the forefront of a national movement and marks another political victory for a powerful labor group and it’s not the teachers union. The Service Employees International Union, Local ...
How ObamaCare will kill job-based plans
Americans aren’t all that optimistic about ObamaCare, according to a recent Kaiser Family Foundation poll: Fifty-seven percent say the law isn’t working as planned. That number will shoot even higher if employer health insurance vanishes, as an S&P Capital IQ report predicts. The financial-research firm forecasts that 90 percent of ...
The High and Rising Costs of the HealthCare.gov Fiasco
The final verdict on Obamacare has yet to be written. But earlier this month, Republican staffers from the Senate Finance and Judiciary Committees offered a first installment on the botched rollout of the federal health insurance exchange HealthCare.gov. It wasnt pretty. The Committees 34-page report explains just how bad ...
Suburban Chicago’s schools: Not as good as parents think
Are Illinois’ public schools that serve many middle-class children performing well? Their parents think so. But many of these schools are not as good as they think. That’s according to a new study from the Pacific Research Institute, which analyzed school performance in Illinois using several different methodologies and found ...
