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Anger against insurers comes honestly

There is no condoning the cold-blooded murder of a UnitedHealth Group executive in predawn Manhattan. Moments after Brian Thompson was shot dead, a torrent of unsympathetic posts flooded social media. I was surprised by both the brazen attack and the unveiled congratulations to a killer. The reasons for the anger, however, I understood very well. I have my own story. I shared it after the insurer had launched its cruel “Delay Deny Defend” strategy to avoid covering my husband’s cancer treatment. Those three words became the title of a 2010 book on the subject, written by Rutgers ...

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is 1-man plague

At a New York rally in October, Donald Trump promised the crowd that if elected, he would let Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “go wild” on health, food and medicines. It delighted the crowd, who imagined they were cheering for better health and better medicine. They’re in for a bitter surprise. Some who should know better are offering cautious approval. Well, he has a point about fluoride in the water, a Washington Post columnist conceded. American health care has “become too reliant on treating every matter of discomfort with a pill instead of tackling questions about environment, ...

Everyone pays for Palestinian catastrophes

The word that Palestinians use for the 1948 displacement of many of their forebears is “Nakba,” Arabic for “catastrophe.” That displacement, of course, was a self-inflicted catastrophe, but also one that Arab leaders inflicted on the rest of the world, which has paid a heavy price for it. It was the proximate result of the decision by Arab nations to reject a United Nations partition of disputed land into a Jewish state and another Arab one, a decision to invade the nascent state of Israel in order to wipe it out. Improbably, this invasion failed, and in the process several ...

The end of a scam

How appropriate that the Biden presidency is ending with an act of self-dealing that he and his allies insisted, with great righteousness, would never happen. Joe Biden was always a scam, and his pardon of his son, Hunter Biden, is just the latest evidence. No one should have believed Biden’s flagrant lie that he wouldn’t pardon Hunter for his tax and gun crimes and other potential wrongdoing. The president has a long record of dishonesty, about his own biography (which blew up his first presidential campaign in 1988) and especially about the family influence-peddling ...

The problemed nominee

President-elect Donald Trump has nominated Fox News host Pete Hegseth to be Secretary of Defense. Hegseth left a well-paid Wall Street job to deploy with the Army National Guard to Guantanamo Bay in 2004, and then to Iraq shortly afterward. He then worked for military nonprofits before joining Fox in 2014. There are some real problems with Hegseth’s nomination. First, he failed to disclose an incident with police to the Trump team that related to a purported sexual assault. It seems clear there was no sexual assault, but Hegseth should have raised it and did not. Second, his tenure ...

Three Januarys: All ye need to know

My father and I, discouraged at the election over the holiday, opened a book of poetry I brought along to the house. Somewhere we traveled was back in time to John F. Kennedy’s inauguration on a bright snowy day on Jan. 20, 1961. Almost unbelievably, Kennedy asked New England poet Robert Frost to compose and read an original poem for the high-noon hour in front of the country, so ready for a change. (A heavy storm is coming straight toward us.) The white-maned wintry Frost praised the young president as heralding “The glory of a next Augustan age ... A golden age of poetry and ...