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Most of us now are familiar with MIT economist Jonathan Gruber ’s boast that he and others took advantage of the “stupidity of the American voter” to push ObamaCare through Congress. Behind this boast is something that many Americans don’t know: When it comes to major U.S. fiscal legislation, the most powerful player is the Congressional Budget Office, whose rules were exploited by Mr. Gruber and other parents of the Affordable Care Act. If the new Republican congressional majority wants to put the country on a path toward solvency, it will have no more important task than to reform the CBO. (Avik Roy, 12/1)

The Affordable Care Act, like most health care reform efforts, focuses on people without insurance. That’s fine, because those people do face significant problems obtaining health care in the United States. But underinsurance is a real concern, too, and it’s often ignored. (Aaron E. Carroll, 12/1)

Do you know that pecan pie is nearly twice as caloric as pumpkin pie? Or that a Burger King Whopper with fries and a Coke make up the better part of the calories you should consume in a day? Or that a buttered popcorn at the movies can have a higher calorie count than a steak dinner? Apparently many Americans don't, as more than a third of the nation's adults are obese. (12/1)

The Food and Drug Administration issued a final regulation last week that will bring consistency and reliability to the nutritional information offered at chain restaurants. But it included grocery stores, ruling that their recipes are as formulaic as the menu boards at fast-food restaurants. On the contrary, food retailers are in the business of customization, and the nation's grocery stores have been representing their shoppers' health interests for decades through personal relationships. (Leslie G. Sarasin, 12/1)

[A] majority of Americans spend their entire adult lives in a desperate, losing struggle against fat. We spend billions of dollars on diet products. We starve ourselves with Paleo and other diet fads, only to see the pounds creep back on as soon as the diet is finished. We buy gym memberships and castigate ourselves for never using them. It isn't enough to simply say that the U.S. has an obesity problem. We are drowning in fat. It’s time to wake up and recognize the seriousness of the problem. Only then can we muster the national will to actually take steps to slim down the national waistline. (Noah Smith, 12/1)

My college roommate — the most immediately likable person I’ve ever met, a man who would now be such a present to the world — died of AIDS at the age of 30. Back then, people with the disease did not so much die as fade, becoming gaunt and ghostly images of themselves, as the virus gradually destroyed enough T-cells to cut their ties with the flesh. Metaphors don’t really capture the horror. Declined? Withered? At any rate, he died. (Michael Gerson, 12/1)