Here are a few things the framers did not know about: World War II. DNA. Sexting. Airplanes. The atom. Television. Medicare. Collateralized debt obligations. The germ theory of disease. Miniskirts. The internal combustion engine. Computers. Antibiotics. Lady Gaga. People on the right and left constantly ask what the framers would say about some event that is happening today. What would the framers say about whether the drones over Libya constitute a violation of Article I, Section 8, which ...

Who hasn't experienced that sinking feeling during a visit to the pharmacy , or the face-reddening trauma of a teenage trip to the dermatologist ? If a new law is successful, those excruciating moments are a thing of the past. As of April 14th, we're all protected by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act — a law designed to shield medical information from the prying eyes of individuals and companies. It sounds like a ...

Health care in America is suffering a total nervous breakdown, but it isn't just because doctors are striking and maternity wards are closing. Health-care premiums are rising at unsustainable rates. Some economists estimate that unnecessary tests and procedures, ordered by doctors to build a record just in case there is a lawsuit, cost more than $100 billion a year--enough to provide health insurance for the 40 million Americans who have no coverage. Modern medical technology is bringing us miracle cures, ...

How long will you live? Today everybody expects to live longer. But the man who can give the best longevity estimate, at least for one out of every five Americans, is Carrol Meteer Shanks, president of the Prudential Insurance Co. of America, which has 33.2 million carefully analyzed policyholders. By charting a man's age, background, diseases, job, habits, even his morals, the Pru can chart the odds on the death age down to the last decimal. The Pru's tables ...

When researcher Karen Clark developed the first probability-based model for measuring the threat of natural disasters in the U.S. in 1987, almost no one cared. Clark, then 30, started her own company in Boston and used tens of thousands of data points--from the wind speeds of hurricanes to the lengths of fault lines--to help insurance firms estimate how often a disaster might strike and how much harm it might do. Then, in 1992, Hurricane Andrew struck, wreaking more havoc than ...

The largest government bailout in U.S. history was born before dawn on Sept. 17, when Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke woke up at 6 a.m., checked his BlackBerry and saw the very thing he had dreaded: the futures market in free fall. Bernanke, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and New York Fed president Timothy Geithner had spent the past year staving off one disaster after another, for the most part working behind the scenes. Earlier in the month, they had let ...

Leigh Ann Heinse can't help but feel nervous right now. Two years ago, she and her husband purchased what they believed was their forever home, a four-bedroom fixer-upper in a kid-friendly subdivision in  Baton Rouge, La., a half mile from the Mississippi River. Though the river levees are visible from the entrance to her neighborhood, Heinse says she and her husband did not buy flood insurance — it is, incredibly, not required — "because It was one ...

A few weeks back, at an event to celebrate the role of women in finance, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner tried to get things started with a joke. He said he had recently come across a headline that asked, "What If Women Ran Wall Street?" "Now that's an excellent question, but it's kind of a low bar," Geithner continued, deadpan amid rising laughter. "How, you might ask, could women not have done better?" It is rarely noted that the financial ...

As Democrats on the campaign trail do their best to drum up support for health care reform by touting the benefits that take effect this year, it's easy to forget that the full thrust of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act doesn't kick in until 2014. But by then, a few major players in the health care industry might have already experienced a real downside of the massive overhaul, so much so that they may no ...

Our faith in the power of the free market to solve our problems got a big endorsement from Congressman Paul Ryan. The Republican from Wisconsin believes there's nothing so wrong with Medicare's soaring spending that robust competition can't fix. He's proposed to shift Medicare clients to private insurance coverage by 2022, with the government chipping in the first $11,000 for most people. The government's cost would be capped. That's where you derive the savings. Under the Ryan Plan--a pessimist might ...