Helsinki, Finland
Credit: Grisha Bruev/ Shutterstock

This is what Americans fail to understand: My taxes in Finland were used to pay for top-notch services for me.

Bernie Sanders is hanging on, still pushing his vision of a Nordic-like socialist utopia for America, and his supporters love him for it. Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, is chalking up victories by sounding more sensible. “We are not Denmark,” she said in the first Democratic debate, pointing instead to America’s strengths as a land of freedom for entrepreneurs and businesses.

Commentators repeat endlessly the mantra that Sanders’s Nordic-style policies might sound nice, but they’d never work in the U.S. The upshot is that Sanders, and his supporters, are being treated a bit like children—good-hearted, but hopelessly naive. That’s probably how Nordic people seem to many Americans, too.

A Nordic person myself, I left my native Finland seven years ago and moved to the U.S. Although I’m now a U.S. citizen, I hear these kinds of comments from Americans all the time—at cocktail parties and at panel […]

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Doctors have long disputed that the payments they receive from pharmaceutical companies have any relationship to how they prescribe drugs.

There’s been little evidence to settle the matter — until now.

A ProPublica analysis has found for the first time that doctors who receive payments from the medical industry do indeed tend to prescribe drugs differently than their colleagues who don’t. And the more money they receive, on average, the more brand-name medications they prescribe.

We matched records on payments from pharmaceutical and medical device makers in 2014 with corresponding data on doctors’ medication choices in Medicare’s prescription drug program. (You can read our methodology here.)

Doctors who got money from drug and device makers—even just a meal– prescribed a higher percentage of brand-name drugs overall than doctors who didn’t, our analysis showed. Indeed, doctors who received industry payments were two to three times as likely to prescribe brand-name drugs at exceptionally high rates as others in their specialty.

Doctors who received more than $5,000 from companies in 2014 typically had the highest brand-name […]

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The Supreme Court
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Much is at stake in a Supreme Court case over a Texas abortion law. The nation’s highest court heard oral arguments last week in Whole Woman’s Health v. John Hellerstedt. The case challenges restrictions placed on Texas abortion clinics under a law known as HB2. That law uses medical arguments to restrict women’s access to abortion in a state that has already decimated clinics.

Meanwhile, Indiana passed a draconian bill last week that so severely curtails abortion access that it has horrified reproductive rights advocates. Gov. Mike Pence is expected to sign it into law soon.

Both laws represent what Jessica Pieklo calls “a Frankenstein’s monster of anti-abortion legislation.” Pieklo is the vice president of law and the courts at RH Reality Check, and in an interview on “Uprising” she explained that such a bill “takes a bunch of different provisions and stitches them all together.” Such omnibus bills have become increasingly popular among Republican-dominated state legislatures, and […]

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Paul Krugman
Credit: Businessweek

Remember Paul Ryan? The speaker of the House used to be a media darling, lionized as the epitome of the Serious, Honest Conservative — never mind those of us who actually looked at the numbers in his budgets and concluded that he was a con man. These days, of course, he is overshadowed by the looming Trumpocalypse.

But while Donald Trump could win the White House — or lose so badly that even our rotten-borough system of congressional districts, which heavily favors the G.O.P., delivers the House to the Democrats — the odds are that come January, Hillary Clinton will be president, and Mr. Ryan still speaker. So I was interested to read what Mr. Ryan said in a recent interview with John Harwood. What has he learned from recent events?

And the answer is, nothing.

Like just about everyone in the Republican establishment, Mr. Ryan is in denial about the roots of Trumpism, about the extent to which the […]

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Sea level rise over the North Carolina Coast.
Credit: www.biogeocreations.com

A set of standard apartment buildings line Esplanade Avenue in Pacifica, California, a small beach town just south of San Francisco. They’re not much to look at: two stories high, with chipping taupe paint and rickety staircases. Inside are cookie-cutter units with shaggy carpet and outdated kitchens. But residents refuse to move out of this place. And it’s hard to blame them: Just beyond each apartment’s sliding glass doors are cliffs that drop to the Pacific Ocean. Residents’ balconies overlook miles of sea, providing a serene backdrop and sunset view.

At least it was serene until January, when a strong El Niño storm surge suddenly caused a giant chunk of the cliffs to crumble into the ocean, leaving a section of apartments teetering over the edge. Pacifica declared a state of emergency and 20 families were ordered to evacuate. This month, the building was demolished and tenants in the neighboring dwellings were told to […]

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