Peter Orszag

A new set of projections released last week by Medicare’s actuaries has drawn much attention, in part because it suggests the deceleration in the growth of health costs we’ve seen over the past few years is ephemeral. The actuaries attribute the slowdown to the “lingering effects of the economic downturn and sluggish recovery” and to […]

Although childhood obesity in the U.S. is a stubbornly difficult problem, some progress is being made. And the new organizations fighting obesity offer larger lessons for national policy. This month — National Childhood Obesity Awareness Month — has brought more evidence that obesity in youngsters leads to health problems throughout life. A study overseen by […]

The U.S. nonprofit sector has survived surprisingly well since the 2008 financial crisis. Even during the depths of the downturn, its revenue rose steadily. Today, nonprofit sales of goods and services to households amount to almost $1 trillion a year — or more than 5 percent of gross domestic product. This continues a longer trend. […]

An odd puzzle is taking shape in the labor market: Over the past three years, the number of job openings has risen almost 50 percent, but actual hiring has gone up by less than 5 percent. Companies are advertising a lot more jobs, in other words, but not filling them. To get some sense of […]

For Medicare, this has been a summer of good and bad news. On one hand, the program’s costs continue to rise remarkably slowly. So far this fiscal year, they have gone up by only 2.7 percent in nominal terms, the Congressional Budget Office reports. On the other hand, opposition to the Independent Payment Advisory Board […]

Despite the hoopla over dysfunction in Washington, the government can still do useful things. To prove it, the Food and Drug Administration should move aggressively to implement and then strengthen its proposed cancer warnings about tanning beds. A stunning 20 million to 30 million Americans each year use tanning beds. Use is particularly concentrated among […]

The Barack Obama administration should be commended for delaying implementation of the employer mandate under the Affordable Care Act. The delay won’t do much damage — other than perhaps symbolically — to the effort to expand insurance coverage, and it allows the administration to focus on more pressing issues in carrying out the law. The […]