Nicholas Bavaro has always been bigger than his twin brother. He was nearly a pound heavier than Christopher at birth, and by the time the boys hit their first birthday, their mother, Lynette, had noticed other differences, too. Christopher babbled, made eye contact, and pointed as he toddled around the family’s home in Long Island, New York. Nicholas did not—and was soon diagnosed with autism.

That program is the Earned Income Tax Credit, which supported roughly 28 million families with an average credit of $2,440 as of 2015, pushing 3.3 million kids above the poverty line. Its popularity stems in no small part from the fact that the EITC is not just a handout, but a program that induces more people into the workforce and encourages them to work more, by bolstering their wages. To get the credit, a single mother needs to have earned income—meaning wages or other income she makes herself. And the credit is structured not to penalize her for earning more by eating away at her benefits if she does.

Republicans’ failure—so far—to repeal and replace Obamacare has breathed new life into the single-payer dream. In June, the majority of Americans told Pew that the government has the responsibility to ensure health coverage for everyone, and 33 percent say this should take the form of a single government program. The majority of Democrats, in that poll, supported single payer. A June poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation even found that a slim majority of all Americans favor single payer.

Keeping up with the Congressional Budget Office can be tough these days. While Congress itself is often slowed by gridlock and party obstruction, the legislators’ independent budgetary agency has done yeoman’s work this year, churning out funding and coverage analyses for six different laws either repealing or replacing Obamacare. On Thursday, the CBO released another , finding that a revised version of the Senate’s replacement plan isn’t all that different from the draft they scored before.

The current debate over the future of the Affordable Care Act is obscuring a more pedestrian reality. Just because a person is insured, it doesn’t mean he or she can actually afford their doctor, hospital, pharmaceutical, and other medical bills.

Kriste Dragon grew up in Atlanta, a mixed-race child in a segregated school system. When it came time to find a school for her children in her new Hollywood, California, home, Dragon was hopeful that the neighborhood’s highly diverse demographics would be reflected in its schools. But instead, she found a low-performing school system that was as segregated as—or worse than—what she’d experienced growing up.

More than a quarter of Americans say that someone in their household is struggling to pay medical debt, according to a report from the Kauffman Family Foundation last year. Low-income and other uninsured people tend to be in this situation at higher rates. Many dealing with the crushing weight of medical debt aren’t those suffering from continuing, chronic illness—they’re people who have had a sudden or one-time illness.

What If Taxpayers Could Decide How Their Money Is Spent? Most Popular Print Text Size American's don't really know where the taxes they pay actually go. Sure there are programs they hear about, but how is it actually divided up? Think tank Third Way suggests providing taxpayers a receipt (.pdf) showing how their money is spent. It would look something like the example they created you can see to the right. My colleague Megan McArdle championed this idea on Friday.

According to Dr. Rick Hanson, a neuropsychologist, a member of U.C. Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center's advisory board, and author of the book Hardwiring Happiness: The New Brain Science of Contentment, Calm, and Confidence, our brains are naturally wired to focus on the negative, which can make us feel stressed and unhappy even though there are a lot of positive things in our lives. True, life can be hard, and legitimately terrible sometimes. Hanson’s book (a sort of self-help manual grounded in research on learning and brain structure) doesn’t suggest that we avoid dwelling on negative experiences altogether—that would be impossible. Instead, he advocates training our brains to appreciate positive experiences when we do have them, by taking the time to focus on them and install them in the brain.

The doom hung like an anvil over her head. In 2012, a few years after Carol Vincent was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma, she was waiting to see whether her cancer would progress enough to require chemotherapy or radiation. The disease had already done a number on her, inflating lymph nodes on her chin, collar bones, and groin. She battled her symptoms while running her own marketing business. To top it all off, she was going through menopause.

Throughout his campaign, President-Elect Donald Trump repeatedly vowed to repeal and replace Obamacare, which he called “a disaster.”

That was music to his supporters’ ears. Repealing Obamacare is Republican voters’ biggest priority for the Trump administration, according to a recent Politico/Morning Consult poll. People who are unhappy with the Affordable Care Act overwhelmingly voted for Trump, and now 74 percent of Republicans want it gone.

Health Last year, Decker Ngongang realized he needed to find a good therapist to help him with a lot of little stresses that were piling up. “I grew up in a single-parent household,” he said. “A lot of the things I wanted to talk about were just childhood-related, but also the stress of being a black man in America.” He figured it would be similar to getting someone to take a look at a knee injury. Ngongang has good insurance through his work as a consultant for NGOs in Washington.

For the last several months, social scientists have been debating the striking findings of a study by the economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton.* Between 1998 and 2013, Case and Deaton argue, white Americans across multiple age groups experienced large spikes in suicide and fatalities related to alcohol and drug abuse—spikes that were so large that, for whites aged 45 to 54, they overwhelmed the dependable modern trend of steadily improving life expectancy. While critics have challenged the magnitude and timing of the rise in middle-age deaths (particularly for men), they and the study’s authors alike seem to agree on some basic points: Problems of mental health and addiction have taken a terrible toll on whites in America—though seemingly not in other wealthy nations—and the least educated among them have fared the worst.

As the disability-insurance program’s trust fund runs out of cash, there are new signs of internal reform—but more changes are needed.

Many veterans are suffering from a condition similar to, but distinct from, PTSD: moral injury, in which the ethical transgressions of war can leave service members traumatized. Amy Amidon has listened to war stories on a daily basis for almost a decade. As a clinical psychologist at the Naval Medical Center in San Diego, she works with a multi-week residential program called OASIS, or Overcoming Adversity and Stress Injury Support, for soldiers who have recently returned from deployments.

Some parents opt for traditional mohels, rather than doctors, to perform the procedure on their sons—even when they aren’t Jewish themselves. When Allison Finch, a 36-year-old mother of five from Houston, had her first son, in 2007, she had him circumcised before taking him home. But the circumcision was cosmetically uneven, a result that left her regretting the choice to have the procedure done in the hospital.

Many of my older-adult patients wanted to make a difference in the world but, finding no role for themselves, were treated as socially useless. Having created a new stage of life, the next step is to make it meaningful.

Pregnant women and their newborns tend to be healthier when the economy is worse, a new study shows. Why?

During recessions, mothers consistently reported being in better health, and they exhibited healthier behaviors: “They smoke and drink less, exercise and sleep more, and weigh less,” Gonzalez wrote.

When should you disclose medical conditions to a date? When is illness too much for a relationship to bear?

People with depression are at a 32 times increased risk, while social factors are more closely associated with suicide in men than in women.

While there are recognized factors that put some people more at risk of suicide than others, it's extremely difficult to predict who will end up taking their own life. Over one million people do each year. Knowing specifically as possible what to look out for -- and in whom -- can help us concentrate prevention efforts.