Tommy Thompson, who was secretary of health and human services during President George W. Bush’s first term, predicts that Congress will pass a health-care bill this year that includes the so-called public option.

Speaking at the National Association for Business Economics…

After reading STL JobWatch’s update on the unemployment situation in St. Louis, I headed for the Bureau of Labor Statistics website to refresh my knowledge on where the jobs are being lost. There are no surprises in the big industry categories, which I’ll…

The health-insurance excise tax that’s part of a Senate Finance Committee bill has been touted as a tax on “Cadillac” plans, but it might affect employers who think of their plan as more of a Chevy with a few nice…

The Corporation for Enterprise Development, which espouses policies that help Americans build savings, start businesses and buy homes, gives middling marks to both Missouri and Illinois.

Both states got solid C’s on CFED’s latest Assets and Opportunity Scorecard. That’s better than…

Sen. Max Baucus’ latest health-care idea, a tax on insurers and employers to pay for covering the uninsured, is already getting a thumbs-down from one liberal think tank. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities asserted today that Baucus’ plan would…

A bigger role for the federal government in health care will make costs accelerate even faster,  a new Show-Me Institute study says. The study, by Arthur Laffer’s firm Arduin Laffer & Moore Econometrics, is based on the same research that Laffer…

Obesity is generally blamed on both genetics and behavior. Economists, though, like to look at incentives, and a new National Bureau of Economic Research study suggests a strong link between obesity, which we tend to think of as a bad…

The Social Security trustees’ latest report moves up the system’s insolvency date by four years, to 2037. Medicare’s hospital fund runs out of money in 2017, two years sooner than expected. What’s more, the hospital fund is already paying out…

As the Job Watch blog mentioned earlier this week, metro St. Louis lost 7,000 jobs in March. That was the fifth straight monthly decline in the seasonally adjusted employment total, and with details now available on BLS.gov, we can see which industries…

The St. Louis metro area lost 1,600 jobs in February, according to new seasonally adjusted figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. St. Louis has posted losses for five months in a row, and employment has fallen by 31,500, or 2.3…