Research

Regina Herzlinger has been dubbed "the Godmother of Consumer-Driven Health Care," and without question she is a revolutionary in her field.

While businesses and consumers alike have been feeling economic doldrums all year, the National Bureau of Economic Research only recently made it official: the U.S. is in a recession, one that began in December 2007.

Facing huge infrastructure needs over the next 25 years, Arizona must find a new way of doing business, according to former U.S. Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta.

The U.S. real estate market, which was central to the global financial crisis, remains deeply troubled, and a full recovery could be years away, according to industry experts and analysts at the W. P. Carey School of Business.

In the midst of one of the worst financial crises the country has seen in decades, one man is optimistic about America's future. Barry Asmus is senior economist at the National Center for Policy Analysis, a non-profit, non-partisan public policy research organization.

In the last month, financial markets came as close to collapsing as they have since the Great Depression, and the root of their woes was frozen credit markets. The crisis sparked several weeks of furious and futile improvisation by U.S. regulators and lawmakers.

The market for health insurance is different from other markets. Government is heavily involved and would become more so under reform plans now being debated. Information often is shielded from participants, whose behavior can be far from transparent.

We've begun to feel the pain of a recession in the real economy and that pain will get worse before it gets better. So far in 2008, job losses have averaged about 85,000 per month, but in September the number was 159,000.

About 46 million Americans — 15 percent of the population — do not have health insurance, according to the latest U.S. Census data. Approximately $100 billion would be needed to provide them with coverage. Can we afford it? And where would the money come from?

In the third and final presidential debate on October 15, Senators Barack Obama and John McCain spent some time discussing health care — an issue which, in spite of increasingly dominant concerns about the economy — still seems to matter a great deal to American voters.