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Columns/Opinion

Best outcome for lawsuit to fail

There’s an important bit of contingency planning that Republicans have neglected to do. Neither in the White House nor on Capitol Hill are they prepared for the possibility that their lawsuit against Obamacare will succeed. Most observers don’t expect the courts to strike down the law, and last week’s oral arguments in a New Orleans federal courtroom didn’t change many minds. If the suit is successful, however, it will create an acute problem for a lot of people. Insurers will again be able to discriminate against people with chronic conditions. Many states’ budgets will be ...

Politics spoiled fun of our win at World Cup

Too bad we had someone like Colin Kaepernick playing soccer in the Women’s World Cup. I’m a fan of international soccer — men’s and women’s. I was excited when the Women’s World Cup came along and I was proud the U.S. team won. But having to put up with someone like Megan Rapinoe, who did all she could to turn her team’s victory into a “I hate Donald Trump” event, spoiled a lot of the enjoyment for me. Rapinoe spent most of her time off the field dissing Donald Trump, dissing America, dissing the National Anthem and praising her left-wing political heroine, ...

Drug price gouging: It’s your money or your life

To be American is a wonderful thing most of the time. There are moments, however, when it is downright humiliating. Can you imagine a more pitiful scene than a busload of Americans traveling 815 miles from Minneapolis to a Walmart in London, Ontario, Canada, to buy insulin at a 10th — a 10th! — of the price charged in the United States? Dollar-wise, the difference is not modest. In the U.S., one vial of insulin costs around $300. In Canada, it’s $30. From 2012 to 2016, drugmakers nearly doubled the U.S. price of a medication that was invented almost a century ago. Type 1 ...

Respecting life at the end of it

“God be good to him — we sure weren’t,” was the prayer that came to mind when I saw the news that Vincent Lambert had died. He died nine days after being taken off food and water following a long legal battle. Lambert, from France, had been in a traffic accident in that country in 2008. He was in what most media reports called a “vegetative state” since the accident. The debate over whether he should be kept alive or allowed to die escalated from a family dispute to a pitched legal battle, eventually roping in the French president and even the United Nations. In the days ...

A Woodstock wedding, a dream fulfilled

My son Ben and his fiancée Lindsey are planning a wedding in a reclaimed Catskills barn in Woodstock, shot through with light from a galaxy of knotholes. The celebration in August will resound with live covers of songs by The Band, Bob Dylan, The Grateful Dead; Crosby, Stills & Nash, and other musicians who were part of a cultural revolution that peaked long before they were born. It was only natural that a family road trip to tour the barn and find a wedding-welcome party spot would include a visit to the nearby Woodstock Museum at Bethel Woods. There, we discovered that the ...

Trump’s right: Citizenship a big deal

In backing down from his plan to include a question about U.S. citizenship on next year’s census form, President Donald Trump on Thursday gave credence to the claims of critics that his administration had an ulterior — and partisan — motive in pressing for inclusion of the question. During rambling remarks in the Rose Garden, the president let a very big cat out of the bag by suggesting that data about how many citizens and noncitizens there are — which he ordered his administration to collect “by other means” — could help states that “may want to draw state and local ...