Top articles shared by The Fiscal Times journalists

We don't know where this resume took its creator, but he seems to have a good sense of direction By PATRICIA LAYA, The Business Insider One looks like a movie poster. Another is a Facebook profile. One even requires a bar code. Are these insanely creative resumes a waste of time?

The Food and Drug Administration fired six device division reviewers after they complained to Congressional staffers that the agency was approving unsafe or inadequate medical devices. The charge? Leaking confidential business information. The evidence? Personal gmail-account emails viewed on government computers that the agency monitored without employee knowledge, the Washington Post reported this morning.

Offering a military budget designed to head off charges that he's weak on defense, President Obama on Thursday unveiled a Pentagon spending plan that fails to cut any major procurement programs and calls for spending $36 billion more on the military in 2017 than it will spend this year.

Did you like this? If so, please bookmark it, about it, and subscribe to the blog RSS feed.

It's too bad former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney doesn't want to talk about his state's health care reform legislation on the campaign trail. If he did, he'd have a pretty good story to tell.

Sen. Mark Kirk, Republican of Illinois, suffered a debilitating stroke on Monday, a tragedy for him and his family. Ironically, it occurred on the eve of one of the more important Medicare meetings of the year, which convened Wednesday at the Baltimore headquarters of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services to discuss the best ways to prevent strokes in at-risk older adults.

Mitt Romney's tax disclosure on Tuesday should help him in his struggle against Newt Gingrich for the Republican nomination. But his 2010 and 2011 tax returns raise major questions about the fairness of the U.S. tax code, and will likely become exhibit ‘A' if he debates President Obama over tax reform during the general election.

From a reader in response to the "Cost of Cancer Care" story: "Patient Assistant Programs," you have got to be kidding! As an 62-year-old uninsured and self-pay colon cancer patient, I was charged by my hospital, Hershey Medical Center, about $14,000.00 per dose and having endured 8 doses.

Julie Gralow, an oncologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle, recently prescribed an exciting new therapy for a 60-year-old woman with metastatic breast cancer. Three-and-a-half years into her battle against the disease, the patient had already exhausted three different anti-estrogen therapies, each of which only put a temporary check on the spreading tumors.

Nothing gets a true South Carolinian's heart beating faster than a salute to the state's proud military tradition. A closer look at the data raises a question. What are they thinking about? Fort Sumter?

about it, and subscribe to the blog RSS feed.

In the long-running war to hold down health care spending, controlling cancer chemotherapy costs looms as the next great battleground. Pharmaceutical companies have been slapping price tags on their latest cancer drugs from $50,000 to $160,000 a year, even though most of them have limited ability to extend the lives of people in the final stages of this devastating illness.

"Now that story is coming out." So reports the New York Times this morning in a story about the controversy surrounding the discovery of artemisinin, the anti-malarial drug developed by Chinese scientists during the Vietnam War to help Ho Chi Minh's soldiers, who were succumbing in greater numbers to the mosquito-borne disease than they were to American bombs.

Much has been made of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius' decision last month to overrule Food and Drug Administration scientists and prohibit the over-the-counter sale of the morning after pillto minors. Many observers blasted the move as a blatant political move by the White House, which didn't want to antagonize social conservatives ahead of this year's election.

The Congressional Budget Office released an issue brief Tuesday that suggested lifting Medicare's eligibility age from 65 to 67 would save the federal government 5 percent on projected outlays over the next decade, and only "a small share of those people would end up without health insurance."

The Great Recession was preceded by a massive run-up in private sector debt, and not just by overstretched homebuyers snapping up bubble-era priced houses. Corporate borrowing also rose sharply. But even though both forms of borrowing are heavily subsidized by the government through deductions on interest, only one - the home mortgage deduction - is on the chopping block in the tax reform debate.

The Great Recession has achieved what 20 years of policy machinations in Washington could not. For the second straight year, the world's most expensive health-care system did not gobble up a greater share of the nation's economy. In fact, health care grew at a slightly slower pace.

Regular readers of this blog know how much importance I attach to the war on waste, fraud and abuse in the Medicare and Medicaid programs (see posts here and here). Anyone who cares deeply about providing health care for all our citizens needs to make this a high priority, since taxpayers won't long support those in need if the programs that deliver services aren't protected from theft.