It’s time to scrap federal physician quality measurements
When ObamaCare passed, ABMS had a virtual monopoly. The Affordable Care Act used the standard tactic of creating market power by listing specific requirements that only the ABMS program could meet. Among other things, “equivalent programs” would have to report patient data to a registry, require periodic exams, and conducting periodic “practice assessments.”
The link between Obama’s departure and your increasing wealth
But let’s face it: The election of almost any of the major presidential candidates other than avowed socialist Bernie Sanders probably would have triggered a similar boom . . . the upsurge would have come because its principal cause has not been who was elected, but who has departed.
MAMA: Make America Mine Again
Our national security and economic prosperity (including Colorado’s) depend on it After falling behind foreign regimes, the U.S. may begin to develop and mine its own deposits of a whole host of minerals vital to our national security and economic prosperity. In a December 20 executive order, President Trump directed federal agencies to develop a […]
A suburban school board just set back educational opportunity for all Americans
Last week, the new 7-0 union-backed school board in Douglas County, Colorado, voted to repeal a first-of-its-kind local voucher program and to end the district’s role in a related constitutional case involving nonpublic parental choice. In so doing, the board drastically decreased the likelihood that the case will ever reach a final resolution — a […]
Medicaid funds shouldn’t be used to subsidize state taxes on health care
Medicaid patients are the losers. Studies suggest that higher Medicaid reimbursements are associated with better care, and that Medicaid patients are more likely to be treated by lower quality hospitals and less highly trained physicians. Recent studies also suggest that the health reforms favored by state and federal governments have done little to improve quality or reduce costs.
Supreme Court’s gay cake case is about a lack of religious tolerance
This June, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear Masterpiece Cakeshop Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission. The facts of the case are similar to the Oregon one: a same-sex couple tries to buy a custom-decorated wedding cake from a business owned by a Christian baker; they were refused based on the bakers’ religious beliefs. Both couples asked their states’ civil rights agencies to prosecute the offending bakers. Both prosecutions were upheld by state courts.
What if there were serious gun controls?
After the Las Vegas murders, Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) urged Congress to “take a stand against gun violence by passing common-sense gun safety laws.” On Monday, after the mass murder in Texas, he wrote, “A simple idea: Anyone convicted of domestic abuse should see their rights under the 2nd Amendment severely curtailed.” On Tuesday, Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) announced that he and Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) are writing a bill “to prevent anyone convicted of domestic violence — be it in criminal or military court — from buying a gun.
A national teachers’ union’s war machine is on the move in Colorado
For months, one of America’s most important fights over parental choice in education has been raging on suburban street corners, in school gymnasiums, and in voters’ mailboxes in Douglas County, Colo. Now, the nature of the race has been irrevocably altered in its final weeks by the full-scale deployment of a national teachers’ union’s political war machine.
As the county’s Nov. 7 school board election rapidly approaches, the nation’s second-largest national teachers union has thrown down the gauntlet in a bid to strangle parental choice. With two slates of candidates vying for four open seats on the district’s seven-member board of education, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) in Washington, D.C., pumped $300,000 into the race in early October.
The undeniable efficacy of charter schools
Two studies were released this month from universities in California that demonstrate the effectiveness of school choice and the need for more options in education.
How I came to stop fearing guns and embrace the Second Amendment
I used to hate guns, even giving money to anti-gun organizations. Today I am a life member of the National Rife Association.
Cities must end the economic apartheid of ‘growth management’
Boulder residents would bristle at claims they are racist, but the nation’s most progressive cities tend to be the ones that have adopted policies that make housing unaffordable and push low-income people out. Since black per capita incomes remain about 60 percent of whites, they are some of the first to leave such cities.
Congress could improve health care by reforming the False Claims Act
In a new Independence Institute working paper on the use and misuse of the False Claims Act (FCA), attorneys Mark W. Pearlstein and Laura McLane explain how an 1863 statute written to expose and punish Civil War contractors who billed for gunpowder and supplied kegs full of sawdust raises costs and threatens access to medical care.
