Wonkblog's Ezra Klein published 21 charts yesterday from the International Federation of Health Plans that illustrate just how ridiculous our health care prices are in the United States.

Klein writes:

This is the fundamental fact of American health care: We pay much, much more than other countries do for the exact same things. For a detailed explanation of why, see this article. But this post isn’t about the why. It’s about the prices and the graphs. 

The Portland City Council approved unanimously a measure today to allow employees to earn paid sick time off. 

Are people really living longer? That depends...how much money do you have?

Media pundits and Washington elites love to point to their own lives and say, "Hey, we're living longer, why not raise the Social Security retirement age and Medicare eligibility age?"

What they fail to realize is that large gains in life expectancy are closely related to how wealthy a person is. Just look at the case of the two counties in Florida that Washington Post reporter Michael A. Fletcher examined in Research Ties Economic Inequality to Gap in Life Expectancy.

While many Republicans balked at passing $60 billion in relief for Hurricane Sandy cleanup (they eventually passed a little higher than $50 billion), TIME’s Steven Brill wrote that the United States spends nearly that much in health care costs each week.

In Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us, Brill asks the question very few people raise: Why does the United States pay so much for health care?

Americans overspend $750 billion in health care each year. One-fifth of our economy enriches very few at the expense of everyone else. Labs, drug companies, medical device makers, hospital administrators and purveyors of CT scans, MRIs, canes and wheelchairs are some of the entities and people reaping the financial rewards by gaming the health care system, writes Time magazine's Steven Brill in a fascinating, in-depth look at why health care prices are just "too damn high" in Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us. 

Working families rallied on Capitol Hill last week, calling on Congress not to make any benefit cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. They also told Congress to close tax loopholes for big corporations and the wealthiest 2% and to prevent the sequester from going into effect and harming the country. 

When Medicare Part D was introduced in 2003, the goal was to provide seniors with cheaper prescription drugs, writes Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) in an Op-Ed for the Duluth News Tribune. But, with the Part D "donut hole" and the clause that prohibits Medicare from negotiating drug prices, the burden of prescription drug costs has been a hardship for many of America's seniors over the past decade. 

Working families aren't fooled. There's nothing "fair and balanced" about the Bowles-Simpson budget plan that would ultimately increase unemployment, cut Social Security benefits, tax workers’ health benefits and scapegoat federal employees while giving more tax breaks for sending jobs overseas and lowering tax rates for Wall Street and the wealthiest 2%. Yesterday, Rep. Kurt Schrader (D-Ore.) introduced an amendment to H.R. 444, that would direct President Obama to follow the budget recommendations of Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, known as the Bowles-Simpson plan. 

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka sent this message to working family activists:

Tom Ward’s hardest memory to live with was the day his father came home from what would be his last day of work. His father barely made it through the door, fell to the floor and, between tears, said, “I can’t do it anymore.”

Football is a dangerous sport by nature, but it doesn't have to be as dangerous as it is today.

The NFL Players Association (NFLPA) has awarded $100 million to Harvard Medical School for a 10-year study of player injuries and illnesses, including brain trauma. The study is funded under the collective bargaining agreement the players reached recently with the NFL. Its goal: to transform the health of current and retired players, whose lifespan averages 20 years less than men who are not professional football players.