The largest share of the total cost is the health insurance premium paid by employers.

Last year, the premium for the most popular health plan offered by employers — what is known as a preferred provider organization — for family coverage was $19,481, according to the annual survey done by the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Health Research & Educational Trust.

Employers paid $13,430 and employees paid $6,050 of the premium on average.

This is how far Elizabeth Warren’s star has fallen: she had a head start over all of her main presidential rivals, a full three months to woo donors and raise money, and she is trailing someone who’s not even officially in the race.

The Massachusetts senator’s relatively paltry $6 million haul for the first quarter of 2019 fell $1 million short of the new Democratic sensation, South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg, who is not planning to announce his campaign until this weekend.

Warren raised three times less money than her main progressive rival, Vermont’s Bernie Sanders, who raised $18 million in just six weeks of campaigning. Sen. Kamala Harris, who has been running for just two months, outraised Warren by $6 million.

Bank of America is raising the minimum wage for employees this year and plans to hike it to $20 an hour in two years.

“If you get a job at Bank of America, you’ll make $41,000” a year, Chairman and CEO Brian Moynihan told MSNBC on Tuesday. “With the success our company has ... we have to share that success with our teammates.”

Starting May 1, the hourly minimum wage will rise to $17 and will go higher in increments for the next two years, the Charlotte, North Carolina-based company said Tuesday in a statement. The bank has also frozen healthcare cost increases for lower-paid employees, Moynihan said on MSNBC.

There will be people protesting: the Mueller report doesn’t prove anything! What about the 37 indictments? The convictions? The Trump tower revelations? The lies! The meeting with Don, Jr.? The financial matters! There’s an ongoing grand jury investigation, and possible sealed indictments, and the House will still investigate, and…

Stop. Just stop. Any journalist who goes there is making it worse.

For years, every pundit and Democratic pol in Washington hyped every new Russia headline like the Watergate break-in. Now, even Nancy Pelosi has said impeachment is out, unless something “so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan” against Trump is uncovered it would be worth their political trouble to prosecute.


The biggest thing this affair has uncovered so far is Donald Trump paying off a porn star. That’s a hell of a long way from what this business was supposedly about at the beginning, and shame on any reporter who tries to pretend this isn’t so.

The story hyped from the start was espionage: a secret relationship between the Trump campaign and Russian spooks who’d helped him win the election.