Portside

In the very near future, countries are going to have to choose whether they make guns or vaccines.

The U.S. spends about twice as much per capita for its patchwork health-care system than most industrialized countries. Why were we caught with such shortages of masks, ventilators or hospital beds?

Why do we fail in protecting our own people’s health and well-being while we squander more than a trillion dollars each year – with the assent of both Republicans and Democrats – on maintaining a failed and futile military empire across the world?

All it took was a pandemic of potentially unprecedented scale and severity and suddenly it’s like we’re turning into Denmark over here.

Some problems can only be solved when public officials have the resources to act. Today’s public health crisis is that kind of problem. The current disaster threatens our health and our economy.

When the county implemented a penny-per-ounce tax on both sugar-sweetened and artificially sweetened drinks — purchases of the taxed beverages decreased by 21%, even after an adjustment for cross-border shopping.

Nearly two in five women of reproductive age may face restricted access to...abortion, contraception and sterilization, because they...live in a county where Catholic hospitals make up a high share of the market...

"Donald Trump and his advisers know that this will kill people, and they do not care. Every current and future Social Security beneficiary must band together to defeat this horrific proposal, or else all of our earned benefits will be next."

For family coverage, the average premium was $20,843, equivalent to $10 per hour worked for a full-time worker—just two dollars less per hour than California’s current $12 minimum wage for employers with more than 25 workers.

We could easily fund health care for all by ending military boondoggles and fruitless wars. Here’s how.