Media

The Supreme Court's ruling on the healthcare mandate was bittersweet. The Affordable Care Act's greatest virtue was the expansion of Medicaid to include all persons under 133 percent of the poverty line. That meant that every family of four earning less than roughly $31,000 would be covered; that amounted to between 16 and 18 million new enrollees and almost half of all the people to be newly insured by the ACA. But on Thursday, the highest Court determined that the "forced" expansion (states who failed to comply faced losing all their Medicaid funding) was unconstitutional.

Just a few weeks after news came that Governor Cuomo was considering allowing limited fracking, emails were uncovered that show just how closely the Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) works with the fracking industry.

A two-income American family with an average income that dutifully invests in a 401(k) plan using typical strategies will lose $155,000 – or about 30 percent of what they should have saved for retirement -- to Wall Street fees, according to a study by an economic justice advocacy organization. 

New York – Today, in response to the Supreme Court’s ruling on the Affordable Care Act, Miles Rapoport, President of Demos and The American Prospect, released the following statement:

The Supreme Court’s decision is in. With the Affordable Care Act mostly intact, tens of millions of uninsured Americans will gain coverage. Senior citizens will get billions of dollars of prescription drug benefits. Everyone with insurance will get preventive services at no cost.

(Flickr/Wallyg)

For the first time in nearly 100 years, cities are growing faster than the suburbs. That is the finding of new Census data, released today.

Anne Marie Slaughter (Flickr/poptech)

Why does one person’s take on an enduring, omnipresent issue sometimes explode through the media din?

It is weird how vehemently conservatives have attacked the individual mandate -- and are still attacking it now, after their erstwhile hero, Justice Roberts, said it could stand.

The mandate is a quintessential conservative idea, which explains why it emerged from the Heritage Foundation. A central tenet of conservative thinking is that government -- and society broadly -- shouldn't encourage free loading or coddle free riders.