Red states are pushing back against the Democrat-led goal of unfettered abortion anytime. Several Republican-controlled legislatures are crafting new abortion laws much like the one in Mississippi that is currently awaiting a Supreme Court decision.

Florida is the latest state to revise its abortion laws. The new Republican-led bill would ban most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy. The current Florida law permits abortions up to 24 weeks of pregnancy. The new bill passed the state Senate last week in a 23-15 vote and mirrors the Mississippi law. Florida’s House of Representatives approved the same bill in a 78-39 vote in mid-February.

Jennifer Calfas, writing in The Wall Street Journal, says the bill now moves to the desk of Governor Ron DeSantis, who is expected to sign the new legislation. “ I think that we’ll be able to sign that in short order,” said Mr. DeSantis during a press conference.

GOP lawmakers in Arizona and West Virginia are also pushing bills that would ban most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy in anticipation of the coming Supreme Court decision in June. The bills in both Arizona and West Virginia have passed one chamber in the state legislatures.

Democrats in other states are pressing for even more abortions. New Jersey lawmakers in January codified the right to reproductive choice, including abortion and access to contraception, into state law. In Vermont, a constitutional amendment enshrining abortion rights will appear on ballots in November.

Naturally, the Biden administration is pushing back against these red states. Vice President Kamala Harris said recently that the Biden administration would “continue to do everything in our power to protect access to healthcare and defend a woman’s right to make decisions about her body and determine her future.” No mention of what they would do to protect unborn Americans or their future. Harris called the Florida bill “extreme by any standard,” saying it would limit access to reproductive healthcare. I’m sure she meant any Democratic standard.

Antiabortion advocates say the legislation puts Florida more in line with neighboring states. Republicans who support the measure have defended it as a compromise that allows abortions, but prompts people to decide to get the procedure earlier in pregnancy. “This is a reasonable approach,” said state Senator Kelli Stargel, a Republican who voted to pass the bill.

It is uncertain what decision will be handed down by the Supreme Court. It may uphold the Mississippi law or even overturn Roe v. Wade entirely. If that happens, the decisions regarding abortion would be entirely left up to the states. That would return the issue to the voters who could then express their opinions in coming elections within states. The Roe v. Wade decision essentially took the issue out of the hands of voters by imposing one federal standard.

In Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Mississippi has argued that by 15 weeks of pregnancy a human fetus has made important physiological developments and claimed abortions are riskier by then. Attorneys for the Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the only abortion clinic in Mississippi, said nearly 50 years of Supreme Court precedent has recognized a person’s right to the procedure before the fetus is viable, meaning when it is capable of meaningful life outside of the womb. That was about 24 weeks when Roe v. Wade was decided. But recent advances in healthcare technology have made it possible to recognize the earlier development of the fetus and made it possible to survive outside the womb sooner.

Both the Mississippi and Florida laws include exceptions for medical emergencies – including those that threaten the life of the mother or for severe fetal abnormality. They do not include exemptions for rape or incest. These laws may have little real impact since the CDC estimates about 95% of abortions in the U.S. take place before 15 weeks of gestation.

Conformity can be a good or a bad thing. Conformity to obeying the law, or playing by the rules of a game, or dressing like the other members of a choir are all good things. But conformity with a false narrative is never a good thing.

The Wall Street Journal editorial board says the year 2021 was full of conformity to false narratives by politicians and the media alike. This kind of conformity promotes misinformation and can be dangerous. WSJ says, “By conformity we mean the progressive political and media consensus that forms quickly around an issue and then reinforces itself no matter the competing arguments or new information. This isn’t a conspiracy in any formal sense; there are no organized calls or Zoom meetings. This is about a shared set of political values and preferences that leads people to reach the same conclusions about an event. The reporters and commentators of the major progressive media – the Washington Post, Bloomberg, the Financial Times, the New York Times, the Atlantic, and more – all then reinforce what they now like to call the “narrative” of a story.”

Here are a few examples from 2021:

The Wuhan Virology Lab origin theory of Covid-19

Although this was a definite possible source of the origins of Covid-19, the idea was quickly shut down by a group of scientists who stood to be embarrassed and possibly lose grant money if this was found to be true. The Lancet, a British medical journal, published a letter in February 2020 “to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin.”

This year we learned that the Lancet letter was part of a coordinated effort to quash the lab theory. We learned about the conflicts of interest of Anthony Fauci and others who provided funding for the Wuhan lab. Eventually even the press noticed that China had blocked an honest inquiry, and that no evidence for a natural origin has emerged.

Lockdowns stop Covid-19

WSJ says, “There was no fiercer consensus in the early days of the virus than the belief that locking down the economy to stop the virus was an unadulterated social good. We felt the consensus wrath when we raised doubts in an editorial on March 20, 2020, about the harm that lockdowns would do to the economy and public health.” 

Two years later their skepticism has proven well founded. At most, lockdowns only delay the spread of the virus, but cause severe damage to the education of children, lost livelihoods for many workers and employers, and damage to mental health leading to increased rates of drug abuse and suicide. Even Randi Weingarten, the teachers union president who was most responsible for school closures, now pretends she wanted to keep them open all along.

The supply side of the economy doesn’t matter

Keynesian economists, who dominate the U.S. and European media, have long held that the demand for goods and services drives the economy. The ability or incentive to supply those goods is largely ignored or dismissed. Spurring demand was the theory behind the trillions of dollars in spending by Congress and easy money from the Federal Reserve. They dismiss supply-side economists like Arthur Laffer, who was so successful in the Reagan administration.

What did these Keynesians produce? – the worst inflation in forty years. WSJ says, “All that money did spur demand. But the Keynesians ignored the disincentives to increase supply from paying people not to work and restricting work with lockdowns and mandates. The result was the surging inflation that caught nearly all of them by surprise. Their demand-side models never saw it coming.”

The Steele dossier and Russia collusion narrative

In 2019 the Mueller report exposed the lack of evidence for the claims that Donald Trump and the Kremlin were in cahoots. This past year the indictments by special counsel John Durham have revealed how Democrats and the press worked together to promote the dossier that was based on disinformation.  WSJ says, “Yet for four years nearly everyone in the dominant media bought the collusion narrative. One or two of the gullible have apologized, but most want everyone to forget what they wrote or said at the time.”

Vilifying police won’t affect crime

Where did common sense go? Anyone with half a brain should realize that reducing the presence of police will lead to more crime. If it were not so, we wouldn’t need police at all. But man is basically sinful and needs to have accountability to control his nature.

WSJ says, “The fast-congealing consensus after George Floyd’s murder was that most police were racist, as was most of American society, and violent protests against this were justified -even admirable. Woe to anyone who pointed out that the victims of these riots and crime were mostly poor and minority communities.”

Unfortunately, police funding was cut and bail laws eased in many large cities. Eighteen months later we see the result in rising crime rates and a soaring murder count. A political backlash now has even many Democrats claiming they really do want more funding for police. All of this was entirely predictable.

The lessons of this past year should be clear; jumping to quick conclusions is rarely justified and frequently leads to misinterpretation and misunderstanding. What is needed is a media that does its job – independently investigating stories until they get it right. Simply repeating what others have said is sloppy journalism and a successful democracy depends on the media doing better.

In my last post, we discussed Republican ideas for transforming healthcare. Former Louisiana Governor Booby Jindal gave us several ideas to consider as an alternative to the Democratic push for socialized medicine.

Today, healthcare economist John C. Goodman gives us several ways that states can improve your healthcare without federal changes. While this is unlikely in Democratic-controlled legislatures, Republicans can certainly make changes where they are in charge. Goodman says we tend to think we have one healthcare system in all 50 states, but the reality is we have 50 different healthcare systems.

In a new report called “Don’t Wait for Washington”, Paragon Health Institute has revealed some startling differences in healthcare according to which state you live in. In Montana, for example, the state payment for inpatient procedures at some hospitals was more than three times the Medicare rate. For outpatient procedures, that state was paying more than six times the Medicare rate in some instances. To solve this problem, Montana negotiated with all the hospitals and got a better deal. It now pays a little more than two times the Medicare rate for all procedures – regardless of where the patient gets treated.

To avoid the time-consuming problem of negotiating with hospitals, California began an approach called “reference pricing.” California state employees, retirees and their families are enrolled in CalPERS – one of the largest employee benefits plans in the country. With the help of the health insurer Anthem, CalPERS discovered that its charges for hip and knee replacements varied from about $15,000 to $110,000 at various hospitals across the state. CalPERS agreed to pay the full cost for beneficiaries who got a joint replacement at any of about 40 hospitals that routinely charged $30,000 or less. If employees went elsewhere, they had to pay the difference. No hospital negotiations were needed.

Within two years, the average cost of hip and knee replacements across the whole state of California fell below $30,000!

In our last post, we discussed the importance of eliminating Certificate of Need (CON) laws, which create huge regulatory obstacles to newcomers who want to open a hospital or nursing home. Studies show that CON laws raise costs and lower quality (the opposite of competition!) As a result ,15 states have repealed them. In contrast, Hawaii has CON barriers to entry for 28 different services, North Carolina for 27 services, and the District of Columbia for 25 services. You can be sure that healthcare is more expensive in all of these states.

States can also create alternatives to ObamaCare. The average premium for an individual last year was $7,100 and the average deductible was $4,364. That means if you’re not getting a subsidy from the government, you will have to pay more than $11,000 before you will get any benefits whatsoever from your health plan!

But there are alternatives. Some states exempt plans sold through the Farm Bureau from state insurance regulation. Since federal regulation, like ObamaCare, only applies to plans regulated by states as insurance, Farm Bureau plans are not subject to ObamaCare regulations. It is true that these plans can exclude applicants because of health conditions, but once enrolled, membership is guaranteed to be renewable even with a change in health status. Premiums and deductibles are far more affordable than under ObamaCare and satisfaction is very high.

There are also so-called “short-term insurance” plans. These plans have been available for years to serve as gap insurance for people moving between jobs, from home to school or from school to a job. Traditionally, these plans last for about 12 months and ObamaCare mandated benefits don’t apply. As a result they are cheaper, more affordable and good for meeting limited needs.

The Obama administration tried to limit the use of these plans to three months with no renewals. The Trump administration reversed these policies, extending them again to 12 months and allowing renewals up to three years. Furthermore, people are allowed to buy a second type of insurance to bridge the gaps between three-year periods, allowing the use of these plans indefinitely. Critics have claimed that these plans destabilize the Obamacare individual market, but studies by Paragon CEO Brian Blasé found that in half the states that are allowing short-term plans to take full advantage of the Trump reforms, the overall market is actually working better.

For more information on reforms, read the full Paragon Institute report.