Congress

See the following -

What We Could Do With A Postal Savings Bank: Infrastructure That Doesn’t Cost Taxpayers A Dime

Ellen Brown | Web of Debt Blog | September 23, 2013

[...] What has pushed the USPS into insolvency is an oppressive 2006 congressional mandate that it prefund healthcare for its workers 75 years into the future. No other entity, public or private, has the burden of funding multiple generations of employees who have not yet even been born. Read More »

Whatever Happened To The "Crowd" In Crowdfunding?

Daniel Gorfine | Washington Monthly | July 23, 2013

The Securities and Exchange Commission recently generated a buzz in the investment world when it voted to lift a nearly 80 year-old ban on advertising private debt and equity offerings to the general public. The SEC voted to allow “general solicitation” so long as the ultimate buyers are “accredited investors” wealthy enough in the SEC’s eyes to be presumed sophisticated and capable of withstanding investment losses. Read More »

What’s In Store For Health IT In 2014?

Brian Ahier | HL7 Standards | January 23, 2014

2013 was a good year for health IT and has laid the foundation for 2014 to be the biggest year ever for the industry. Read More »

When The Best Hospitals Are The Worst

James Hamblin | The Atlantic | July 1, 2013

Assume we successfully get health insurance for 32 million more Americans. Not a single person "falls through the cracks." [...] There's a quantifiable change in barometric pressure as the nation collectively sighs. The moment would be fleeting. Panic resumes when the newly insured try to get appointments to see doctors. Read More »

When Will It Stop? Sexual Assault Claims Pile Up In Military

Meredith Clark | MSNBC | May 18, 2013

“There is no silver bullet,” for stopping military sexual assault President Obama said earlier this week. Surely, that came as no surprise to his former defense secretary, Leon Panetta, who said more than a year ago: “There is no silver bullet when it comes” to solving military sexual assault. Read More »

When Will Our Email Betray Us? An Email Privacy Primer In Light Of The Petraeus Saga

Hanni Fakhoury, Kurt Opsahl, and Rainey Reitman | Electronic Frontier Foundation | November 14, 2012

The unfolding scandal that led to the resignation of Gen. David Petraeus, the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, started with some purportedly harassing emails. [...] After the FBI kicked its investigation into high gear, it identified the sender as Paula Broadwell. [...] We've received a lot of questions about how this works—what legal process the FBI needs to conduct its email investigation. The short answer? It's complicated. Read More »

White House Accused Of Letting Politics Influence HealthCare.gov Design

Joseph Marks | Nextgov | October 22, 2013

Congressional overseers made their first move to apportion blame on Monday for the troubled launch of HealthCare.gov, the government’s online health insurance marketplace, while the White House turned to social media to drum up public support for the ailing and embattled website. Read More »

White House Could Face Bipartisan Scorn If It Bucks IT Reform

Joseph Marks | Nextgov | July 25, 2013

If White House officials don’t get behind a House-passed bill that overhauls how the government buys information technology, they’re likely to face wrath from congressional Republicans and Democrats alike, Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va., said Thursday. Read More »

White House Makes Good On Patent Reform Promises, More Changes To Come

Adi Kamdar | Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) | February 20, 2014

The White House updated the nation on its commitment to curtail the patent troll problem and tie up some egregious loose ends in our patent system, announcing progress made on all fronts—as well as three new executive actions. [...] Read More »

White House Petition On Cellphone Unlocking Receives Over 100,000 Signatures

Derek Khanna | Forbes | February 25, 2013

At 7:37 AM EST on February 21, 2013, a White House petition on cellphone unlocking went over the 100,000 signature threshold on the White House’s “We the People” website.  This was the threshold for a White House response.  Now they will will wait to hear from the White House. How did we get here and what is cellphone unlocking? Read More »

Who Broke America’s Jobs Machine?

Barry C. Lynn and Phillip Longman | Washington Monthly | March 4, 2010

If any single number captures the state of the American economy over the last decade, it is zero. That was the net gain in jobs between 1999 and 2009—nada, nil, zip. By painful contrast, from the 1940s through the 1990s, recessions came and went, but no decade ended without at least a 20 percent increase in the number of jobs. Read More »

WHO Sounds Alarm On Widespread 'Superbug' Infections

Kim Painter | USA Today | April 30, 2014

Disease-causing bacteria that resist antibiotic treatment are now widespread in every part of the world and have reached "alarming levels" in many areas, says the first global report on the issue from the World Health Organization. Read More »

Why CISPA Is Worse Than SOPA

Rebecca Greenfield | The Atlantic Wire | April 27, 2013

Following the SOPA/PIPA uproar that splashed across the Internet earlier this year, we now have another cyber-security bill that threatens American Web browsing privacy, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, otherwise known as CISPA. Read More »

Why Delaying Obamacare Has Insurers Freaking Out

Sam Baker | Nextgov | October 31, 2013

The health insurance industry already had plenty to freak out about with the implementation of the Affordable Care Act. Simply complying with the law is a massive undertaking, never mind the terrible HealthCare.gov debut. But the botched rollout has produced a new source of anxiety for insurers: the growing bipartisan support for delaying parts of the act’s implementation. Read More »

Why Do Medicare, Medicaid And Veterans Affairs Deal With Drug Costs Differently?

David Sell | Philly.com | April 9, 2013

Countries sometimes do things differently from other countries or gain reputations for doing certain things well or poorly. But within a country, within the same federal government, does it make sense to do things differently among departments or programs that are providing essentially the same service? Read More »