A recent study in the Journal of American Public Health concluded that 45,000 people die each year for lack of health insurance.

Another study in 2002, from the Institute of Medicine, put the number at 18,000. Still another, put it at 22,000.

As a back of...

In his "chairman's mark" on health care reform, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus had rejected the pure pro-choice position -- he limited direct government funding for abortion -- but still included provisions that pro-lifers viewed as supporting abortion.

Republicans have offered several amendments to move the health...

In response to some recent posts about the Catholic Bishops position on abortion and health care, some have chided me for caring too much about what the Bishops think. After all, there's plenty of evidence that Catholics don't follow the Bishops on a wide variety of political or social issues,...

The health care proposal being floated by Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus will be attacked or hailed for a variety of reasons.

But I'll say this: based on what I've read so far, it may have solved the abortion riddle -- enough so that the Catholic Bishops may...

A while back, I wrote a behind-the-scenes book about the passage in 1993 of the law creating AmeriCorps. That national service program is sometimes called the "Domestic Peace Corps," a reference to the international program established by President John F. Kennedy.

As chairman of the Senate Labor...

It might be tempting to equate the assertion that Obamacare definitely pays for abortions with claims that Obama's death panels will kill your grandmother and siphon money from your bank account. .

They're actually different. The death panel and raid-your-bank-account ideas are lies. The abortion charge is merely...

Until recently, Obama has emphasized two rationales for health care reform -- reducing the burden on the economy and providing universal coverage. One attempts to appeal to our sense of fiscal responsibility, another to our conscience. "The cost of our health care has weighed down our economy and the conscience...

Advocates for health care reform typically emphasize either restraining cost or covering the uninsured. I understand the practical and moral facets of both arguments but believe advocates are dramatically underemphasizing the most potent issue: the tendency for insurance companies to deny coverage to people with pre-existing conditions.

The ranks...

The day Sarah Palin announced her resignation as Alaska governor, I wrote a post speculating on whether there was anyone who could stop her from getting the Republican nomination. (Answer: Huckabee). I was surprised to see that most of the subsequent commentary was not on whether she was a...

I'm often asked by pro-choice friends why pro-lifers oppose sex education, family planning, and contraception. Don't those approaches reduce unintended pregnancy and therefore the numbers of abortions? It's a question at the heart of efforts to achieve "common ground" on abortion.

So I emailed Jill Stanek, an important pro-life leader...

Obama's speech reminds us that 9/11 needn't have led to a conflict between the West and Islam. It's a reminder of the road not taken.

Remember, after the attacks, the whole world -- including the Muslim world was on our side. America was innocent. Much of the Islamic world didn't...

The murder of George Tiller has prompted many families to post first-person accounts of their own heart-wrenching decisions about abortion and child birth.

There's a broad national consensus against late term abortions yet these stories raise the question of just how much do we know about why women have them....

The political debate on abortion has for several decades focused on the wrong moral question: Does life begin at conception? Those who believe it does, oppose abortion. Those who don't, or think the question is unanswerable, believe the pregnant woman should make that choice.

Yet consider this statistical couplet....

The political debate on abortion has for several decades focused on the wrong moral question: Does life begin at conception? Those who believe it does, oppose abortion. Those who don't, or think the question is unanswerable, believe the pregnant woman should make that choice.

Yet consider this statistical couplet....

Most attention these days has focused on revelations that administration officials sanctioned torture for "high value" Al Qaeda operatives.

That's important but another moral issue is as crucial, and in some ways more morally clear-cut: As part of the war on terror, the U.S. government routinely detained people for...

We have growing numbers of unemployed journalists.

We have zillions of dollars being spent by the federal government, a recipe for mismanagement.

How about we employ some of these out of work journalists to evaluate and monitor the programs to improve their quality?

Sergeant Shriver, the first director of the...

The Bristol Palin and Levi Johnston split seems to have re-ignited the old arguments about abortion, birth control, hypocrisy etc.

But now that it's clear, in hindsight, that this relationship wasn't likely to result in a happy, intact marriage, there's another question we should be discussing: under what circumstances should...

Here's a modest proposal to get the gay marriage debate unstuck: religious conservatives back gay marriage while gay marriage advocates push efforts to reduce the divorce rate.

Some opponents of same sex marriage say their big fear is the slippery slope toward a weakening of the institution of marriage. Gay...

The Democrats have been so busy defending federal spending, and denigrating the stimulative power of tax cuts, that they apparently either forgot -- or felt they couldn't -- point out something rather dramatic: the tax cuts in this stimulus plan appear to be the biggest in history.

The compromise stimulus...

I was recently telling a Democratic friend about Obama's abortion balancing act. One day he repeals the Mexico City "gag rule" delighting pro-choice activists. The next week he seems intent on making it up to pro-life voters, announcing that one priority of a new faith-based council will...