Drugmakers have been enduring withering criticism over the rising cost of drugs. It does not seem to be working. They've raised prices on brand-name drugs by double-digit percentages since the start of the year, and list prices increased more than 12%, in line with the trend over the five previous years. One of the cruelties of drug pricing is that the burden falls most heavily on those least able to pay it. Uninsured patients often must pay the list price of a drug.   read more

"Texans don't generally expect a lot of their politicians," said political scientist Cal Jillson. "Politicians often get off because the laws they are accused of violating are so poorly written. They have holes in them big enough to drive a truck through ... They'd rather have this guy who agrees with their politics, under indictment than someone else who is not beholden to them. What that says about Texas is that the state is currently run by [Republicans]."   read more

In their years as top national security officials, Michael Hayden and Michael Chertoff were fierce advocates of using spying powers to pry into intelligence data. But today, their jobs have changed, and so, apparently, have their views on privacy. Both now work with tech companies and back Apple — not the FBI. They and other prominent former officials now support Apple and the impenetrable “end-to-end encryption” during a furious national debate over the balance between privacy and security.   read more

He often brags that he is paying for his campaign, saying, “I don’t need anybody’s money.” But Donald Trump’s disregard for fundraising by email, building lists of small donors and assembling a digital operation could hamstring him as a general-election candidate and do lasting damage to the Republican Party, strategists say. Trump has emailed no mass requests for contributions. Rather, he has passively harvested the contact information of his website visitors and merchandise customers.   read more

A large body of research shows that the rich live longer — and that the life span gap between rich and poor is growing. And that means that the progressive ideal built into the design of Social Security is, gradually, being thwarted. In some circumstances, the program can actually be regressive, offering richer benefits to those who are already affluent. For anyone who believes that it’s important for the Social Security program to remain progressive, the life-span shifts have big implications.   read more

A top-secret federal court has called the NSA and FBI's retention of personal information "disturbing and disappointing," and ordered them to reveal how they will destroy such information going forward. The court said the NSA may have broken the law by failing to redact information collected about its targets online. Judge Hogan also singled out the FBI, ordering it to submit a report containing each instance in which it places Americans under surveillance to "extract foreign intelligence."   read more

Not since 1929 has American currency undergone such a far-reaching change. The remaking of the nation’s paper currency may well have captured a historical moment for a multicultural, multiethnic and multiracial nation moving contentiously through the early years of a new century. Tubman, an African-American and a Union spy during the Civil War, would bump Jackson — a white man known as much for his persecution of Native Americans as for his war heroics — to the back of the $20.   read more

Hogan’s ruling is notable because some lawmakers want to require government agencies to get a warrant before searching the raw repository of emails for an American’s name or email address. Bipartisan majorities in the House have twice passed such a proposal in the last two years. The ruling was also the first time that the intelligence court has reviewed the surveillance program with contributions from an outside “friend of the court,” rather than hearing arguments from the government alone.   read more

The biggest European economies announced a plan to share information about owners of shell companies. But there is one major player that is coming up short, and that is the U.S., which in 2015 ranked third in a financial secrecy index. U.S. failure to respond to the worldwide clamor for financial accountability looks hypocritical from afar, considering the U.S.’s aggressive extraterritorial pursuit of foreign companies that breaks its laws and its demands that foreign banks provide information   read more

So many low-income people gained coverage that it halted the decades-long expansion of the gap between the haves and the have-nots in the American health insurance system. Hispanics accounted for nearly a third of the increase--the single largest share of any racial or ethnic group. Low-wage workers, who did not have enough clout in the labor market to demand insurance, saw sharp increases. Coverage rates jumped for cooks, dishwashers, waiters, hairdressers and cashiers.   read more

The U.S., Russia and China are aggressively pursuing a new generation of smaller, less destructive nuclear weapons. The buildups threaten to revive a Cold War-era arms race and unsettle the balance of destructive force among nations that has kept the nuclear peace for more than a half-century. The concern is that the precision and less-destructive nature of these new weapons raises the temptation to use them. “We are witnessing the opening salvos of an arms race,” said analyst James Acton.   read more

Saudi Arabia has told the U.S. that it will sell off hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of American assets it holds if Congress passes a bill that would allow the Saudi government to be held responsible in U.S. courts for any role in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The Obama administration has lobbied Congress to block the bill’s passage. “It’s stunning to think that our government would back the Saudis over its own citizens,” said Mindy Kleinberg, whose husband died in the 9/11 attacks.   read more

The report comes amid growing criticism of unaffordable drug prices from patients, doctors, insurers, Congress and presidential candidates, who have pledged to rein in drug prices. Drug spending keeps growing due to factors including rising prices, fewer blockbuster drugs getting new generic competition and a 10% jump last year in the number of prescriptions filled, to nearly 4.4 billion. Total drug spending rose by $24.3 billion last year.   read more

An international debate is now emerging over whether it is possible to limit the evolution of weapons that make killing decisions without human involvement. “I would argue that [the in-development U.S. missile] LRASM is intended primarily to threaten China and Russia and is only likely to be used in the opening shots of a nuclear war that would quite likely destroy our civilization and kill a large fraction, or most, or nearly all human beings,” said physicist Mark Gubrud.   read more

Education Department reviewers found in 2013 that a major for-profit college chain had systematically raised students' tuitions without properly telling them. As a result, the U.S. government demanded a refund — but only for the handful of students whose records had led to the discovery. Though the company's schools had more than 100,000 students, reviewers never investigated further. A new report has concluded that flaws in the government's oversight of student aid were routine.   read more

Goldman is the last major bank to settle with the government. Deals with other banks contained some of these concessions, but Goldman appears to have negotiated an even sweeter deal. “They appear to have grossly inflated the settlement amount for PR purposes to mislead the public, while in the fine print, enabling Goldman Sachs to pay 50 to 75% less,” said Dennis Kelleher. “[These settlements] are carefully crafted more to conceal than reveal to the American public what really happened here...”   read more