Health insurers will charge 25-year-olds between $142 and $190 per month for a bare-bones health plan in Los Angeles.

A 40-year-old in San Francisco who wants a top-of-the-line plan would receive a bill between $451 and $525. Downgrade to a less robust option, and premiums fall as low as $221.

These premium rates, released Thursday, help answer one of the biggest questions about Obamacare: How much health insurance will cost. They do so in California, the state with 7.1 million uninsured residents, more than any other place in the country.

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As prepared for delivery.

It's an honor to return to the National Defense University. Here, at Fort McNair, Americans have served in uniform since 1791 standing guard in the early days of the Republic, and contemplating the future of warfare here in the 21^st century.

For over two centuries, the United States has been bound together by founding documents that defined who we are as Americans, and served as our compass through every type of change. Matters of war and peace are no different. Americans are deeply ambivalent about war, but having fought for our independence, we know that a price must be paid for freedom. From the Civil War, to our struggle against fascism, and through the long, twilight struggle of the Cold War, battlefields have changed, and technology has evolved. But our commitment to Constitutional principles has weathered every war, and every war has come to an end.

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Forget trying to make Apple pay higher taxes. How about if we don't make them pay any taxes at all?

Mitt Romney got roundly mocked for saying, "corporations are people, too," but he had a point. Talk to tax economists for very long and they'll make a variant of the same argument. The question in corporate taxation isn't whether it's paid by people. Of course it is. It's how much of it is paid by shareholders, how much of it is paid by workers, how much of it is paid by customers, etc.

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This week's uproar over Apple's tax strategies merely highlighted something that everyone in the tax world already knows. The U.S. corporate tax system is needlessly complex, dysfunctional and needs to be fixed. Could there be an elegant solution right under our noses?

Apple's Tim Cook and many others have proposed lowering the top U.S. corporate rate, which currently stands at 35 percent. Doing that alone, though, misses a root problem in the current system: the incentive for companies to shift profits toward low-tax countries.

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