Millions of Americans don't have bank accounts. That could be a problem for Obamacare.

Americans shopping for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act next year might hit an unexpected obstacle: the lack of a bank account.Millions of Americans are expected to qualify for tax subsidies under the health overhaul, which they can use to purchase coverage on new marketplaces. One quarter of those people are effectively "unbanked" and without a checking account, according toa n

Wonkbook: A thaw in the Senate?

_Welcome to Wonkbook, Ezra Klein and Evan Soltas's morning policy news primer. To subscribe by e-mail, click here. Send comments, criticism, or ideas to Wonkbook at Gmail dot com. To read more by Ezra and his team, go to Wonkblog._ Read full article >>

The best sentences we read today

-- "More than 800 people have paid as much as $200,000 apiece to reserve seats on commercial flights into space, some of which are expected to launch, at long last, within a year."-- "Fashion models are almost twice as likely to get their visas as computer programmers, by one rough measure." (Note that this stat is misleading, but the article's interesting.) Read full article >>

A short history of violent tornadoes in the United States

It's official: The massive tornado that ripped through Moore, Okla., on Monday has been rated an EF-5 — basically at the very top of the scale, with winds over 200 miles per hour. So how common is this? An EF-5 only comes around about once a year, on average. Here's the National Climatic Data Center: "On average over 1000 tornadoes hit the U.S. each year, [and] 20 can be expected to be viole

Five things we learned from Tuesday's big Apple tax hearing

On Tuesday, Washington took a break from its usual scandals to bring you the Senate vs. Apple, a face-off between the chief executive of the computing giant and a group of senators who seemed shocked — shocked! — that Apple has been able to minimize its U.S. tax obligations by funneling international earnings through holding companies registered in Ireland. Read full article >>

The IRS controversy isn't about taxes. It's about disclosure.

At some level, the scandal around the IRS's targeting of conservative 501(c)4 groups has nothing to do with taxes. That may sound weird -- 501(c)4 is a section of the Internal Revenue Code, the entire 501(c) section exists to list groups that are exempt from some federal taxes, the IRS is the tax man, etc. Read full article >>

Self-driving cars are a privacy nightmare. And it's totally worth it.

Will self-driving cars let the government track your every move? Greg Beato says yes, and Randal O'Toole disagrees. Beato is right: Self-driving cars will make it easier for the authorities to track you everywhere you go. But the benefits of self-driving cars are likely to be so enormous that American consumers will sign up in droves, regardless of the privacy implications. Read full article >>

Study: Election officials are biased against Latino voters

There's an election coming up, and Greg Walsh wants to be sure he's ready. So he shoots a quick e-mail to his county election commission to clear up what documentation he needs to vote. The note goes like this: Read full article >>

Swastikas and 'witch hunts': On the front lines of the fluoride wars

After I posted my history this morning of the fluoride wars, Wonkblog reader Sandra Guerard wrote in with her own experience more than four decades ago. After reading through the literature on the fluoride battles, hers seems like one of the more extreme fights that has occurred over fluoridating a city's water supply: Read full article >>

The National's new album is out! Here's one song.

The National put out its eighth album, "Trouble Will Find Me," on Tuesday. Public radio station WFUV recently had the band play one of its new tracks, "Graceless," in its Cutting Room Studio. Read full article >>

Hollywood should not decide our copyright laws

Robert Goodlatte (R-Va.), the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, has vowed to conduct a comprehensive review of our nation's copyright laws to determine whether they are "still working in a digital age." That's a long overdue task. But there's a danger that the process will be dominated by a handful of special interest groups that have long been reflexively hostile to technological progr

The end of health price secrecy may be starting in Miami

When Medicare released thousands of health-care prices this month, one of the biggest criticisms was that these figures didn't represent what patients actually paid.Medicare, for example, pays hospitals on a set fee schedule, regardless of their prices. Health insurance plans typically negotiate a lower rate with a hospital than the sticker price that showed up in the new data. Those prices s

Rand Paul unloads on 'bullying, berating and badgering' of Apple

This much is clear from the first hour of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations hearing on Apple's steps to avoid paying billions in U.S. corporate income tax: It will be primarily an exercise in righteous indignation for the senators present; and there will be at least one lawmaker with a quite different take. Read full article >>

Why are tornadoes so hard to predict?

Just 16 minutes before a gigantic twister formed near Oklahoma City on Tuesday, the National Weather Service put out a tornado warning.That doesn't sound like very much time to get out of the way. And for many, it wasn't: At least 51 people died when the tornado tore a wide swath through the city of Moore, Okla. Read full article >>

A brief history of America's fluoride wars

The fluoridation war is alive in Portland, Ore.The city is one of the few major American cities that does not fluoridate its water supply. It is now in the middle of a heated battle about whether to change that. While the Portland City Council voted last fall to reverse policy and begin fluoridating the city'swater, it drew the ire of anti-fluoride activists, who gathered the 20,000 signature

Wonkbook: Could the scandals help immigration reform?

_Welcome to Wonkbook, Ezra Klein and Evan Soltas's morning policy news primer. To subscribe by e-mail, click here. Send comments, criticism, or ideas to Wonkbook at Gmail dot com. To read more by Ezra and his team, go to Wonkblog._ Read full article >>

The best sentences we read today

- "Since 2006, Slate has declared email, the independent bookstore, the American pun, and instant gratification dead."- "Of the country'stop 10 congressional districtswith the highest capacity of wind-powered electricity, nine are represented by Republicans." Read full article >>

How to make $30 billion and pay no corporate income tax, the Apple way

Apple went to Ireland, and it found a pot of gold. Or more precisely, it managed to bring in $30 billion in overseas profits over a four-year period without paying a dime of corporate income tax to the Irish, American or any other national government. Read full article >>

Senior poverty is much worse than you think

One frequent knock on the official poverty rate is that it generally excluded income from some government programs like food stamps and the Earned Income Tax Credit, but included income from others, like Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) and Social Security. That means people who, if those benefits were treated as cash, wouldn't be counted as impoverished, still get counted as such.

How net neutrality regulations could undermine the open Internet

In recent years supporters of network neutrality have tried and failed to get Congress to enact neutrality regulations. In 2010, Julius Genachowski, President Obama's choice to lead the Federal Communications Commission, decided to act anyway, relying on a controversial interpretation of existing statutes to justify a new regime of "open Internet" rules. Read full article >>

Only 27 percent of college grads have a job related to their major

Here's some interesting new data from Jaison Abel and Richard Dietz of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The vast majority of U.S. college grads, they find, work in jobs that aren't strictly related to their degrees: Read full article >>

Here's why the 'scandals' aren't affecting Obama's poll numbers

If you've been reading the newspapers, you know that the Obama administration has had a very tough week.It was "a bad week for the White House," according to the National Journal. USA Today said it was "one of the most challenging weeks at the White House for the Obama administration." The Washington Examiner went with "Obama's roughest week." Our colleagues at The Fix dissented a bit: They d

Oregon may be the White House's favorite health exchange

_Welcome to Health Reform Watch, Sarah Kliff's regular look at how the Affordable Care Act is changing the American health-care system — and being changed by it. You can reach Sarah with questions, comments and suggestions here. Check back every Monday, Wednesday and Friday afternoon for the latest edition, and read previous columns here._ Read full article >>

Here's what snake venom does to blood

This video is about a year old, but it's resurfaced thanks to David Grann's always-excellent Twitter feed:"A single drop of venom (from a Russell's viper) is dripped onto a petri dish of blood, and in seconds the blood clots into a thick chunk of solid matter." That about sums it up. Plus you get to watch venom drip out of a viper's fangs. Read full article >>

No, the federal government does not profit off student loans

If you're sick of having to make student loan payments, you're not alone. A recent report from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau estimates that there 38 million student loan borrowers in the United States and the total debt load has passed $1.1 trillion. The Project on Student Debt has estimated that 66 percent of graduating college seniors in 2011 had some student loan debt, with an aver

The question for Yahoo: Will Tumblr turn out to be more like Google or more like Craigslist

Yahoo has concluded that Tumblr, the social blogging service, is worth a whopping $1.1 billion. Will the bet prove a good one? The answer depends on whether the combined company can turn its many millions of users into a interlocking set of services that no competitor can hope to replicate. In short, the question is whether Yahumblr, or Tumbloo, or whatever we want to call it, is more like Googl

Yahoo can't decide if it's a media company or a tech company

Yahoo's acquisition of Tumblr for $1.1 billion is a big gamble by Marissa Mayer, the company's recently-hired CEO. The microblogging site is a valuable asset, but media accounts of Mayer's thinking suggest she hasn't come to terms with Yahoo's fundamental dysfunction: that it can't decide whether it's a media company or a technology company. Read full article >>

What's the best way to pass a climate bill? Fix the economy first.

Wondering why Congress doesn't pass more environmental legislation? The poor economy probably has a lot to do with it. A new study finds that U.S. senators are far less likely to take green votes when the unemployment rate in their state is high. Read full article >>

Is the future of American health care in Oregon?

"The governor has a notion that you can move away from medical billing and towards a more flexible approach to health-care spending that makes more sense for the community," John McConnell, a health economist at Oregon Health and Science University, is telling me. Then he stops. "You've heard the air conditioner story, right?" Read full article >>

Wonkbook: What we're learning about the IRS's Cincinnati office

_Welcome to Wonkbook, Ezra Klein and Evan Soltas's morning policy news primer. To subscribe by e-mail, click here. Send comments, criticism, or ideas to Wonkbook at Gmail dot com. To read more by Ezra and his team, go to Wonkblog._ Read full article >>