Congress may be proposing to vastly expand Medicaid as a main vehicle for reducing the number of uninsured in America, but this (like many of the proposed ideas) could have serious ramifications for families. The state and federal health insurance program doesn’t cover just poor people. As Heritage senior health fellow Dennis Smith explains:
Today, Education Secretary Arne Duncan unveiled the regulatory guidelines for his so-called “Race to the Top” Fund, the administration’s $4.3 billion incentive fund for state reforms. Like previous federal education reform efforts, including No Child Left Behind, American parents should be skeptical that new federal incentives will really encourage the kind of reforms that American students urgently need. For starters, it’s naïve to think that $4 billion in funding will provide a real incentive that will have transformative effect on the $600 billion elementary and secondary education sector.
Recent media reports tout a forthcoming study in the American Journal of Medicine claiming that medical bills are responsible for 60% of U.S. personal bankruptcies. Putting aside the overly-generous criteria for counting a bankruptcy as “medical,” the figures reported in the study actually show that even by their criteria, medical bankruptcy is actually dropping. As Megan McArdle points out, the report’s figures indicate that the number of medical bankruptcies dropped from almost 671,000 in 2001, to only 502,000 in 2007. That’s a drop of over 25% in six years. Why, …
In 1959, President Eisenhower signed into law the Captive Nation Week resolution which mandated that the United States, as “the citadel of human freedom,” provide “leadership in bringing about [Captive Nations’] liberation and independence.” Last weekend, President Obama delivered his version of the Captive Nations Week proclamation.However, although Obama spoke to the value of “fundamental freedoms” and “universal principles,” his words lacked the passion and conviction needed to demonstrate America’s commitment to advancing freedom to all corners of the earth. For instance, President Obama’s proclamation was completely devoid of any …
Throughout his campaign, then-candidate Obama repeatedly made two promises about health care reform: that if you like your current health plan, you could keep it—and that it would cost about $2,500 per year less. Obama made this pledge on his campaign web site, in the second presidential debate, and in the third debate, : If you have health insurance, then you don’t have to do anything. If you’ve got health insurance through your employer, you can keep your health insurance, keep your choice of doctor, keep your plan. … And …
The FY10 Labor-HHS Appropriations bill heads to the House floor today. The Appropriations Committee approved this annual spending bill for the Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education last week. While the appropriation includes funds for programs to “help at-risk women and teens bear healthy children,” it eliminates funding for abstinence education and conspicuously disavows the very means to ensure that teens will not become pregnant in the first place. Removal of abstinence-only education funding was not entirely unexpected after Congress let the only other source of abstinence …
Meet Gunner Hawkins. Gunner loves Disney cartoons. He loves to be read to, so long as there are pictures. Gunner loves his rock ‘n’ roll bunny. He has a Facebook page. And 6-month-old Gunner is loved very much by two caring parents, Kristan and Jonathan. In March of 2009, Gunner was diagnosed with the deadly genetic disease, cystic fibrosis (CF), just two months after being born. Gunner’s story is not unique. 1 in 4,000 American children are born with cystic fibrosis. What makes Gunner unique is that his parents have …
This week’s bloggers’ briefing brought the biggest crowd yet; standing room only. What was the draw? Matthias Shapiro, mastermind of the 10,000 pennies videos that have become a viral sensation, showed the eager bunch how to utilize the overused rhetoric and statistics of the day to instead communicate the numbers coming out of Washington in a way that people can digest. Through his use of visualizations, Shapiro puts real value to seemingly unfathomable amounts of money like millions, billions, and trillions of dollars. We’ve posted these videos before, but they …
According to the United States Department of Labor, the nation’s unemployment rate has already risen to 9.5%. The Obama administration is predicting that the nation’s unemployment rate will soon rise above 10% and the Federal Reserve predicts unemployment could stay above that 10% mark for sometime. One would think, therefore, that the Obama administration would do everything in their power to stop federal government policies from causing even more job losses. You’d be wrong. Today the Obama administration is not just allowing, but celebrating, a job- and opportunity-killing raise in …
Australia’s Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has a problem. His Labor Party government wants to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 60 percent from 2000 levels by 2050, but opposes building nuclear power plants– the one clean, abundant, and affordable energy source known to this planet. Ziggy Switkowski, head of the nation’s main nuclear research institute, says that will soon change: As more and more Australians get involved in the whole climate change debate, as they learn about what’s happening around the world where the uptake of nuclear power is increasing quite strongly, …
