Illustration by Matt Chase

On Thursday, Senate Republicans unveiled their bill to replace the Affordable Care Act. Below, New Yorker writers offer some initial reactions to the news.

The Senate bill is really three separate proposals. In the private-insurance market, it amounts to what Larry Levitt, a health-care expert at the Kaiser Family Foundation, calls “Obamacare-lite.” As for Medicaid—the federal program that provides health services to roughly seventy-five million Americans, most of whom are poor or elderly or are children—the bill involves much bigger, and more harmful, changes. Finally, the legislation would deliver a hefty tax cut to some of the wealthiest households in the country.

In the individual market, the bill offers somewhat more generous subsidies for people buying individual plans on government-run exchanges than the ones in the House G.O.P.’s American Health Care Act. Because the subsidies would be tied to income and the actual cost of insurance …

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You’ve heard it a million times. The reason so few of us can afford Vancouver is because there aren’t enough new homes being built. This is the version of reality that real estate industry leaders and their political allies want us to believe.

But an investigation of the industry by The Tyee has revealed reality to be much more complex. Over the past six months I spoke at length with financial analysts, economists, industry consultants, realtors and many others to learn the true causes of Vancouver’s housing crisis and who is profiting from it. They were in broad agreement that real estate is at the centre of a massive realignment between our society’s rich and poor — and one that few leaders in the industry seem willing to publicly acknowledge. Here are the key takeaways from those conversations.

1. The industry no longer sells homes — it sells investments

Real …

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People who oppose wind farms often claim wind turbine blades kill large numbers of birds, often referring to them as “bird choppers”. And claims of dangers to iconic or rare birds, especially raptors, have attracted a lot of attention.

Wind turbine blades do indeed kill birds and bats, but their contribution to total bird deaths is extremely low, as these three studies show.

A 2009 study using US and European data on bird deaths estimated the number of birds killed per unit of power generated by wind, fossil fuel and nuclear power systems.

It concluded:

wind farms and nuclear power stations are responsible each for between 0.3 and 0.4 fatalities per gigawatt-hour (GWh) of electricity while fossil-fuelled power stations are responsible for about 5.2 fatalities per GWh.

That’s nearly 15 times more. From this, the author estimated:

wind farms killed approximately seven thousand birds in the United States in

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Credit: Silver Spring Acupuncture

The world’s largest randomised controlled trial of the use of acupuncture in emergency departments has found the treatment is a safe and effective alternative to pain-relieving drugs for some patients.

Led by RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, the study found acupuncture was as effective as pain medicine in providing long-term relief for patients who came to emergency in considerable pain.

But the trial, conducted in the emergency departments of four Melbourne hospitals, showed pain management remains a critical issue, with neither treatment providing adequate immediate relief.

Lead investigator Professor Marc Cohen, from RMIT’s School of Health and Biomedical Sciences, said pain was the most common reason people came to emergency, but was often inadequately managed.

“While acupuncture is widely used by practitioners in community settings for treating pain, it is rarely used in hospital emergency departments,” Cohen said.

“Emergency nurses and doctors need a variety of …

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Credit: Bloomberg

Around the world, the number of millionaires and billionaires is surging right along with the value of their holdings. Even as economic growth has slowed, the rich have managed to gain a larger slice of the world’s wealth.

Globally, almost 18 million households control more than $1 million in wealth, according to a new report from the Boston Consulting Group. These rich folk represent just 1 percent of the world’s population, but they hold 45 percent of the world’s $166.5 trillion in wealth. They will control more than half the world’s wealth by 2021, BCG said.

Rising inequality is of course no surprise. Reams of data have shown that in recent decades the rich have been taking ever-larger shares of wealth and income—especially in the U.S., where corporate profits are nearing records while wages for the workforce remain stagnant.

In fact, while global inequality is simply accelerating, in …

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NEW BEDFORD, Mass. — This salt-caked fishing port has been flush with wind prospectors ever since Massachusetts legislators passed a law for massive wind development in the shallow waters south of Martha’s Vineyard.

Ed Anthes-Washburn, a local port official, estimates he gives five harbor tours a month to wind industry representatives. Planning for the industry’s arrival now occupies much of his time, alongside proposals to redevelop several old industrial sites and a Seattle-style fish pier.

“It started Aug. 8, the day the governor signed the bill,” Anthes-Washburn said, gazing out over the harbor here, where a mass of fishing trawlers, scallopers and clam boats formed a rocking forest of rigging and nets. “It’s been pretty consistent since then.”

States up and down the Atlantic coast are rushing to become the capital of America’s burgeoning offshore wind industry, hoping the massive turbines will breathe new life into ports mired by a …

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