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WASHINGTON - Health care was already a vulnerability for President Donald Trump before the coronavirus pandemic hit. Now his lack of a plan to fix the system is coming under a new microscope as the crisis costs many Americans their coverage and overwhelms providers. The clarity in Trump's health care vision begins and ends with repealing the Affordable Care Act, or ACA, also known as Obamacare. His budget proposals would strip away funding for the law, and he has endorsed a lawsuit to wipe it off the books. But the president hasn't thrown his weight behind a replacement bill or...

WASHINGTON - More than two months into what President Donald Trump calls a "war" against COVID-19, his administration's efforts to combat the deadly disease, along with its disastrous effects on the U.S. economy, are often creating more problems than they solve. Bidding wars for life-saving equipment, a power struggle between Trump's son-in-law and the vice president, political gamesmanship, the centralization of authority and decentralization of accountability, and the creation of new government programs while standing bureaucracies are ignored, have all contributed to chaos within the political, economic and health care systems. Banks haven't been able to process loan applications for...

Andrew Cuomo is no longer just New York's governor - he is now America's governor. Thanks to his excellent leadership during the overwhelming health crisis caused by the coronavirus, Cuomo has provided much-needed comfort and information to the entire country. He has been so effective and has presented such a stark contrast with the vacuum of leadership in the White House that now some people are saying he should be America's president. As a New Yorker, I understand where they're coming from, but I wish they would stop. First, New York needs Cuomo's leadership now and in the months to...

CHICAGO — Democratic presidential contender Pete Buttigieg on Friday accused Vice President Mike Pence of advancing “homophobic policies,” saying that while he doesn’t know whether Pence is truly homophobic, his policies are “hurting other people” just the same. “I don’t know what’s in his heart,” Buttigieg told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt in an interview airing Friday. But, he added, “if you’re in public office and you advance homophobic policies, on some level it doesn’t matter whether you do that out of political calculation or whether you do it out of sincere belief.” “The problem is, it’s hurting other people,”...

A consortium of oil-producing countries has taken more than a million barrels a day off the market — and that’s the least of the problems plaguing American gasoline prices. Across the U.S., regular gas averaged $2.77 a gallon, up 7 cents on the week and 29 cents on the month, according to GasBuddy. Last year, gas prices topped out at $2.98 at the outset of Memorial Day weekend. Oil prices are climbing, but that only accounts for about one-quarter of the recently higher gas prices American drivers have been facing. A bigger issue is that this is around the time...

New York state is failing to ensure that children and teenagers who come from families who don't speak English as the first language don't fall behind, according to a coalition that advocates for educational opportunities for people of color. A newly released report from the LEAD coalition, a group of 30 organizations, points out that the state has the nation's second lowest graduation rate among multilingual learners (MLLs) and English Language Learner (ELLs), as well as higher dropout rates and lower rates of proficiency in math and English as compared to the rest of the student population. In just the...

Ginsburg, 85, was up and working on Sunday while still at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, a spokeswoman for the court said. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has been up and working from the New York City hospital where she recently underwent surgery to remove cancerous nodes from her lungs, according to a spokesperson. Ginsburg, 85, continued working on Sunday while still at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, according to Kathy Arberg, a spokeswoman for the court. On Friday, Ginsburg underwent a pulmonary lobectomy to remove two malignant growths from her lungs, which were discovered after she fell and...

President Donald Trump said on Monday that sky-high Obamacare deductibles ensure that the insurance plans are "practically not even useable" for those who have them, a claim health care experts said is a misleading one because it ignores a core tenet of the law.

NBC News legal analyst Jill Wine-Banks is publicly floating the idea of indicting President Trump’s children if no way can be found to indict him. “I firmly believe the Constit[ution] permits indicting a sitting president, but if DOJ disagrees, indicting his children, the Trump Org & Foundation for their roles in wrongdoing is a great alternative–or addition[,]” she tweeted on Thursday: Wine-Banks is not only a frequent legal analyst for MSNBC; she was a Watergate prosecutor, served in the Carter administration as U.S. general counsel of the Army, and as the executive director of the American Bar Association. But here...

Russian agents who favored Donald Trump's presidential candidacy harnessed the major players of America's tech industry in a sophisticated propaganda effort that was far more extensive than originally understood, according to a detailed analysis prepared for the Senate intelligence committee. The Russian efforts included an attempt to suppress the votes of African-Americans. Researchers combed through millions of posts from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube created by the Internet Research Agency, the St. Petersburg-based firm run by a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin whose key executives have been indicted by special counsel Robert Mueller on charges of defrauding the...

WASHINGTON - Despite President Donald Trump's public declaration that he isn't concerned about impeachment, he has told people close to him in recent days that he is alarmed by the prospect, according to multiple sources. Trump's fear about the possibility has escalated as the consequences of federal investigations involving his associates and Democratic control of the House sink in, the sources said, and his allies believe maintaining the support of establishment Republicans he bucked to win election is now critical to saving his presidency. The president has been on a days-long tirade, sources tell NBC News, lashing out at his...

People who oppose immigration often argue that migrants bring disease with them, and that they then become a burden to health systems in their new countries because they’re so sick. But that's not true, a team of experts argued in a new report released Wednesday.

People who oppose immigration often argue that migrants bring disease with them, and that they then become a burden to health systems in their new countries because they’re so sick...

More American voters now oppose Brett Kavanaugh's Supreme Court nomination than support it after he was accused of committing sexual assault while he was in high school, with opposition increasing 9 points since last month, according to a new national NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll. Kavanaugh has categorically denied the accusation, which delayed his scheduled confirmation vote before the Senate Judiciary Committee, and which has roiled American politics less than seven weeks before the 2018 midterm elections. In the poll — which was conducted Sunday (when the accusation from Christine Blasey Ford was first made public) through Wednesday — 38...

Is it dangerous to speak Spanish in public in Trump's America? Well, sí! Just this month, we've seen a lawyer threaten to call ICE after he overheard people in a restaurant in Manhattan speak in Spanish, and a Border Patrol agent in Montana detain two Mexican-American women for 40 minutes because he heard the bilingual women chatting en español, because the language “is very unheard of up here,” according to la migra man.

MSNBC host Ali Velshi took grave offense at President Donald Trump taking questions from reporters from the Washington Examiner and One America News Network on Friday. Velshi considered it vital that Trump face questions about the report that former campaign aide Rick Gates would plead guilty in Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian involvement in the 2016 election. The news on Gates broke minutes before Trump’s joint press conference with Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, and Trump ended up taking questions about Syria and Jared Kushner’s security clearance. Velshi expressed outrage that the people who asked those questions were Gabby Morrongiello...