The Questioning Librarian

It's almost too obvious to be worth pointing out, but healthcare impacts everyone. And it seems like there's one thing everyone can agree on. Healthcare is expensive, whether we're talking about drug prices or insurance premiums. It wasn't always like this. The story of how healthcare got this way is the subject of Elisabeth Rosenthal's book An American Sickness: How Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take it Back . I'm always interested in current events, and with the battles over healthcare on the national stage, this book seemed particularly timely. It turned out that this was the most important book I've read all year. I read a lot of non-fiction, but this is the first book in a long time that made me truly, absolutely angry. And there is quite a lot to be angry about. Rosenthal charts how multiple players in the healthcare industry figure out all manner of ways to take in as much money as possible. Listing example after mind-numbing...

What do presidents as diverse as William McKinley, George W. Bush, Harry Truman and both Teddy and Franklin D. Roosevelt have in common? Each one issued more executive orders than Barack Obama. The chart  from The American Presidency Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara, is useful in charting both the number, and the frequency, of executive orders both past and present. Two things are quite evident when you start to look at the numbers. The first, interesting as a student of history, is that up until the presidency of Ulysses S. Grant, fated to be president at the ending of Reconstruction, no president issued more than one hundred executive orders during their time in office. After Chester Arthur, no president has issued fewer than one hundred executive orders, even those who served only a single term.  The second thing looking at the numbers reveals is that Barack Obama has issued fewer executive orders than nearly any president in the last century, wit...