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Our country has been transfixed by recent efforts to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare. The head-spinning activity begs some important questions. As part of ongoing coverage of the health care debate, Christy Ford Chapin of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and Gerald Friedman of the University of Massachusetts Amherst address a key one: when we talk about reform, why aren’t we talking about the role that
insurance companies have played in driving up costs? And today, Shervin Assari of the University of Michigan explores a question central to all of these discussions: why do many Americans blame the poor for their poverty?
Separately, today we include the full list of articles from our special series on cash, timed for the 50th anniversary of the first ATM.
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A homeless camp in Los Angeles, where homelessness has risen 23 percent in the past year, in May 2017.
AP Photo/Richard Vogel
Shervin Assari, University of Michigan
Americans, an independent group, tend to believe that people can "pull themselves up by their boot straps." Yet bigger forces are at play in a person's ability to gain education, a good job and money.
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Economy + Business
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Gerald Friedman, University of Massachusetts Amherst
GOP lawmakers say their bills to replace the Affordable Care Act would do a better job than the ACA of controlling rising health care costs, but 40 years of deregulation show it just won't work.
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Claire Snell-Rood, University of California, Berkeley; Cathleen Willging, University of New Mexico
Health outcomes for rural Americans have steadily deteriorated in recent decades even as they've improved elsewhere. The GOP plan to replace the Affordable Care Act will worsen the problem.
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Dana Kornberg, University of Michigan
India's recent move toward a cash-free society helped reveal just how important physical currency is to the informal economies that the poorest families depend upon.
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Health + Medicine
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Simon Haeder, West Virginia University
Almost nine million women gained insurance coverage from the Affordable Care Act. Here's why women could be set back by Republican bills to undo the ACA.
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Christy Ford Chapin, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
The health care bill proposed by Senate Republicans was little better than the House version, which begs an important question: Who's driving health care law – a free market or insurance companies?
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Simon Haeder, West Virginia University
Cutting back or cutting out social safety net programs, as the Senate and House health care proposals would do, is rare. Here's a look at how such actions have fared.
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Johanna Ohm, Pennsylvania State University
What's on your cash? Studies show our money carries everything from pet DNA and old food to E.coli and traces of cocaine.
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Science + Technology
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Pradeep Atrey, University at Albany, State University of New York
Fifty years after the first ATM went into service, the main problem – identifying authorized users – remains the same. But methods for doing so have improved significantly.
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Chapurukha Kusimba, American University
Currency first hit the scene thousands of years ago. An anthropologist explains the early origins and uses of money – and how archaeological finds fill in our picture of the past.
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Today’s Chart
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Gerald Friedman
University of Massachusetts Amherst
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