Even Obamacare’s main defenders are starting to look in the right places for real health care reform. Ezra Klein has a great column diagnosing what the single payer pivot gets wrong about insurance, in which he notes that it’s not the diversity of insurers per se that cause high costs in the United States. Most European countries with more nationalized health care systems, after all, don’t have just one payer. Rather, it’s that, relative to health care providers, insurance companies are too weak in the the U.S. system.

Late last year, it looked like China may have been slowly backing away from its one-child policy. Not so fast. This week, Zhang Yimou, arguably China’s most famous director, will face a massive $1.24 million fine for fathering multiple children without approval from the authorities following a public uproar.

A Massachusetts health care commission has found that one-third of state health care spending is wasted on inefficient medical procedures. One of the biggest talking points for health care reform is that the US spends much more on health care than other countries, but has worse health statistics, and the financial waste in our system is always identified as a big cause of our inflated spending. But if Massachusetts is any evidence, we’re no closer to reducing systemic waste in a post-ACA world than we were before

Germany produced more energy more coal last year than the ostensibly green-minded country has in nearly a quarter century. King Coal’s return comes courtesy of Germany’s reactionary energiewende—its turn towards green energy—put in place following the Fukushima nuclear disaster. The plan was to phase out the country’s numerous nuclear reactors and jump-start its fledgling renewable energy industry, but coal is having to fill the gap.

Oscar Niemeyer’s architectural vision needed the support of authoritarian governments.

Step by step, China is extending its control of disputed waters in the South China Sea. A new rule took effect this month that requires foreign fishermen operating in almost two thirds of the entire Sea, including areas claimed and controlled by neighboring countries, to identify themselves to the Chinese authorities.

Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ new memoir provides an inside look at foreign policy in the Bush and Obama eras, but it is far more than a set of partisan talking points.

Electronic health records have just received their second big setback: a new study finds that EHRs might increase costs across the health care system by leading to providers to over-bill. The ACA poured billions into a technology that hadn’t been fully tested. The problems with EHRs mostly spring from the failure of government agencies to carefully observe them in action on a smaller scale, and then to develop proper standards to make the technology effective on a larger scale. Pushing forward new programs or technologies before we fully understand how they work best is a textbook central-planning fail.

For companies in the West, going “green” is at least as much a PR move as it is an effort to help save the planet, but in the developing world, firms are making environmentally friendly decisions based on a more immediately practical concern: their bottom line.

Nearly everyone agrees that college is far too expensive; more difficult is determining exactly what changes need to be made. Over at National Review, Victor Davis Hanson takes a crack at this question, proposing 10 areas where colleges should be reformed to make them both more accountable and more affordable. Some of them are things we’ve discussed here before, others are new to us; all of them are worth a look.