Hospital price transparency has not delivered lower costs because buyers still lack meaningful alternatives. A new proposal would restore bargaining power by pairing independently set reference prices with a ban on restrictive hospital contracts that prevent health plans from steering patients elsewhere.
A sweeping Senate health reform blueprint takes aim at insurers, PBMs, and administrative abuses while leaving hospital prices largely untouched. Concentrated hospital systems remain a major source of rising costs, weakened bargaining power, and pressure on household budgets.
It is with deepest sadness and regret that we learned of the passing of Dr. Perry Mehrling. Dr. Mehrling played a vital role in INET and its Young Scholar Initiative (YSI) for many years. We were looking forward with hopeful anticipation to working with him far into the future. Alas, it was not to be. Over the next few months, INET and YSI will be organizing a series of tributes to Dr. Mehrling. In the meantime, we gratefully reprint with permission the warm and generous appreciation of our long time colleague just published by our friends at the History of Economics Society.
In the 2026 midterms, congressional leaders of both parties are drawing huge shares of money from million-dollar donors, while small donors barely register. New data trace the rise of mega-donor and dark-money financing and what it means for party politics.
NVIDIA’s $150 billion buyback plan raises the question of who benefits when corporate cash is spent propping up share prices. Behind the AI boom lies a system that rewards executives and investors while starving productive investment and weakening resilience.
The SEC’s license to loot
A new Medicare pathway promises faster, more predictable coverage for breakthrough medical devices. When participation is voluntary, however, and manufacturers can take other routes, the real test is not who enters the fast lane, but what Medicare learns about those who don’t.
What does modern school privatization owe to Virginia’s fight against desegregation? A little-known history traces how segregationists and emerging libertarian ideas converged around publicly funded private schools, creating a political and intellectual blueprint with consequences far beyond the 1950s.
We keep talking about the impact of AI in the classroom, but even more pressing is whether children have the security to learn to begin with. The future workforce needs human beings who are healthy, stable, and capable of imagining a life beyond survival. *From the “AI and the Future of the American Worker,” a series on how artificial intelligence is impacting labor, power, and the meaning of work.
Inflation is usually treated as a national problem, to be managed through domestic monetary and fiscal policy. But its striking synchronization across countries suggests another story, one where it is shaped by global production, capital mobility, currency hierarchies, and the international distribution of economic power.
Sixty years of data show inflation moving in step across the world. Economic theory still treats it as a national affair.
