The average price of health insurance in the Obamacare marketplaces will rise by 13 percent next year, according to an analysis on Friday by KFF, the health research group.
The Trump administration on Friday published new prices for 2027 in 30 states with markets managed by the federal government. Using that data and state figures, KFF calculated the increase nationwide.
…The average cost for the cheapest bronze plan with a high deductible will be about $700 a month for a 50-year-old single person, according to Ms. Cox.
Here is more from the NYT. Of course that makes the people who can expect to be healthy all the less likely to sign up, given that the enforcement of the mandate, for political reasons, was forced to evolve into something quite weak. For purposes of context, when the original mandate was more tightly enforced, with actual penalties, the ACA was very unpopular and led to significant political protests. In essence the benefits to a broad, scattered majority were imposed on a well-identified minority, namely those who signed up because of the mandate. Trump in his first term relaxed mandate enforcement, thereby politically saving Obamacare at least for a while, but also creating this longer-term problem.
It is striking to me how infrequently I hear Democrats boasting about Obamacare. They instead prefer to talk as if little or nothing has been done for America’s uninsured.
Before 7 October 2023, the English-language Wikipedia article on Zionism opened by describing a movement that emerged to “espouse support for the establishment of a homeland for the Jewish people in Palestine.” Since then, the opening has been reworded to say that this homeland was to be established “through colonization,” immediately followed by a new sweeping claim: “Zionists wanted to create a Jewish state in Palestine with as much land, as many Jews, and as few Palestinian Arabs as possible.” The sentence is backed by an unusually large bundle of 17 citations, drawn from historians including Benny Morris, Rashid Khalidi, Avi Shlaim and Ilan Pappé, and to the casual reader it looks like the settled verdict of scholarship. It is not. The editor who introduced it in August 2024 has since been banned from the entire Palestine-Israel topic area for non-neutral editing. Yet the sentence survives, and for a year Wikipedia formally barred its editors from even discussing whether to remove it.
That matters because Wikipedia is widely regarded as a generally reliable source of information, and its influence extends far beyond the millions of people who consult it directly: it has also been incorporated into many of the datasets used to train artificial intelligence systems, thereby shaping the information those systems subsequently reproduce. That reputation and reach rest in large part on one of Wikipedia’s foundational principles—presenting a “neutral point of view.” Wikipedia articles are supposed to summarise what reliable sources say without taking a position of their own. This principle is particularly important on controversial subjects, and few subjects are more contentious than Zionism and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict more broadly.
The rewrite
The sentence is only the most visible symptom of a much larger change. Over the past three years, Wikipedia’s coverage of this topic has undergone an extraordinary transformation, best exemplified by the Zionism article itself. I recently conducted a quantitative analysis of the article’s revision history and found that since 7 October 2023, about 80 percent of the article has been completely rewritten, and only about 20 percent of the pre-October 2023 text has survived.
How much of the Zionism article’s pre-October 2023 text survives (blue), against the share of the article that is new text with no match in that version (orange). By mid-2026, only about 20 percent of the pre-October 2023 text remained. Source: author’s analysis of the article’s revision history.
More importantly, this dramatic, measurable change reflected a fundamental shift in the topics emphasised by the article. For example, the volume of material associated with colonialism rose roughly two-and-a-half-fold, and coverage of ethnic cleansing roughly doubled. At the same time, discussion of antisemitism and persecution—the primary historical drivers of the Zionist movement—was cut approximately in half, while the return to the historic Jewish homeland went from the most prominent of the four topics to the least.
How often four topics appear in the Zionism article, measured in sentences per 1,000: the return to the historic homeland, antisemitism and persecution, colonialism, and ethnic cleansing and displacement. Source: author’s analysis of the article’s revision history.
What makes this particularly unusual is the maturity of the article. By October 2023, it was already more than twenty years old, contained more than 27,000 words and represented the cumulative product of over 9,000 edits by nearly 3,000 different editors. While it is not unusual to see major rewrites of new articles or specialised pages in need of serious scholarly attention, this was an extensively sourced article that had been revised and expanded for two decades and already prominently featured critical perspectives, including interpretations of Zionism as a colonial project, discussion of Palestinian displacement, and competing accounts of the causes and conduct of the 1948 war.
Similarly, the scale of this rewriting cannot be explained by any recent fundamental shift in the underlying scholarship. For example, the most cited author in the article is Benny Morris, who published Righteous Victims in 1999, the substantially revised The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited in 2004, and 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War in 2008, drawing extensively on Israeli and Western archival material that had become available over the preceding decades. The same holds for the broader academic literature on the subject: the key works on which the article relies had all been published long before the page underwent its wholesale rewrite. In other words, there has been neither substantial new evidence nor a major historiographical shift since 7 October 2023 that could plausibly explain why four-fifths of a mature encyclopedic article suddenly needed to be replaced.
The explanation lies instead within Wikipedia itself—specifically, in the editorial choices determining which sources were foregrounded and how they were represented. An encyclopedic article is not supposed to reflect the political preferences of its editors, but to fairly represent serious scholarship on the subject. The post-October 2023 rewrite did exactly the opposite. Rather than neutrally presenting the actual range of views found among historians, the article moved towards a simplistic, partisan account, dominated by the perspective of Zionism’s political adversaries. Nor was the partisan editing limited to deciding which parts of the scholarship to foreground and which to push aside. It also repeatedly distorted what the scholarship actually said.
The most cited historian
Wikipedia’s use of Morris’s work shows the pattern particularly clearly. His archival research played a central role in reshaping the historiography of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by foregrounding many previously neglected aspects of Jewish and Israeli conduct before and during the 1948 war that contributed to the creation of the Palestinian refugee problem, including expulsions, massacres, attacks on civilian communities and the destruction of villages. At the same time, he rejected the simplistic claim that the Palestinian exodus was the result of a pre-existing Zionist master plan to expel the country’s Arabs. As Cambridge University Press noted in its description of The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited, Morris’s findings “undermined the conflicting Zionist and Arab interpretations”—the former that the Palestinians had left voluntarily, and the latter that their flight was the result of a pre-planned expulsion. His account instead presented a much more complex history that did not conform neatly to either political narrative. That complexity is precisely what the rewritten article strips away. To make sure I was reading Morris’s work correctly, I asked him to review my analysis at an early stage. He confirmed that I had accurately caught and explained the distortions of his scholarship described below, and later graciously agreed to review the full draft.
Tim Stanley is a historian by trade, and the author of Whatever Happened to Tradition? — a book subtitled History, Belonging and the Future of the West.
It was something of a surprise, then, to hear him tell attendees at a Conservative Party conference fringe event last week that “the country has changed”, and that “you are not going to reverse that”. Stanley went further still, declaring himself “pleased to see that the right accepts that change and has changed with it”; in his view, “it would be regressive and immoral to try to reverse what has happened.”
He was, of course, talking about the seismic demographic changes which have taken place in this country over the past few decades, against the express wishes of the British people. Indeed, the changes which have taken place over the past few decades represent the biggest demographic change in these islands since the migration of the Anglo-Saxons a millennium and a half ago.
Which in turn causes me to recall a remark made by Chesterton:
The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected. Even when the revolutionist might himself repent of his revolution, the traditionalist is already defending it as part of his tradition. Thus we have two great types — the advanced person who rushes us into ruin, and the retrospective person who admires the ruins. He admires them especially by moonlight, not to say moonshine. Each new blunder of the progressive or prig becomes instantly a legend of immemorial antiquity for the snob. This is called the balance, or mutual check, in our Constitution.
Nixon incurred a generation’s outrage and mockery for insisting to interviewer David Frost that, “When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.” Trump, within the first month of his second term, asserted on social media that, “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law,” a formulation frequently attributed to Napoleon. When asked the previous month by The New York Times whether there were any constraints on his power, he said: “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” These statements are much closer to reality than they were during his first term, thanks to a 2024 Supreme Court decision, Trump v. United States, granting presidents absolute immunity from criminal prosecutions for the exercise of “core constitutional powers,” plus lesser forms of immunity for “official acts.”
The ASI published a paper that recommended the wholesale privatization of local government services, starting with bin collection. Thatcher liked it so much that she had it photocopied 10,000 times and sent a copy to every Conservative councillor in Britain.
Thatcher didn’t like the word ‘privatization’, because it sounded new and strange. She wanted to call it denationalisation. But we pointed out that we were going to apply it to industries that had never been nationalised in the first place. We still insisted on spelling it with a ‘z’ to make it look like something new.
The first to go was Cable and Wireless, then BP, but the first big public flotation was of the Post Office telephone service, a state monopoly. Rather than sell it to a private company, the government decided to sell it to everyone, with a flotation in which the public were invited to apply for shares. To keep the telephone workers on side, they were offered 200 free shares if they bought 200. The union ran a hostile campaign showing a telephone cable being cut with scissors, but 96% of the workforce took the money instead.
– Madsen Pirie, recalling how Margaret Thatcher turned things around.
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