Condoleezza Rice has called School Choice “the civil rights issue of our times.” The former Secretary of State, who is now head of Stanford University’s renowned Hoover Institution, explained recently what she means at an event held at The Reagan Presidential Library.

Jason Riley, columnist for The Wall Street Journal, tells us Ms. Rice spoke pointedly about the importance of school choice for low-income families. “We already have a choice system in education,” she said. “If you are of means, you will move to a district where the schools are good and the houses are expensive, like Palo Alto, Calif.” If you can afford it, she added, “you will send your kids to private school. So, who’s stuck in failing neighborhood schools? Poor kids. A lot of them minority kids.”

Ms. Rice expressed little patience for elites who criticize school choice for others while exercising it for their own kin. “How can you say you’re for civil rights—how can you say you’re for the poor—when you’re condemning those children to not being able to read?” she said. “If you want to say that school choice and vouchers and charter schools are destroying the public schools, fine. You write that editorial in the Washington Post. But then, don’t send your kids to Sidwell Friends,” the private school in Washington where tuition tops $55,000.

The good news is that school-reform advocates have made significant gains in recent years even though the current administration has been more hostile than its Democratic predecessors to educational choice. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama supported charters, as do large majorities of low-income minorities, but Joe Biden has disparaged school choice and has made it more difficult for charter operators to secure federal funding. The reason is Biden is beholden to the teachers unions because his wife Jill is a member!

But states are making progress. In 2023 Arkansas, Florida, Iowa and Ohio created or expanded programs that give underprivileged families more education options. Earlier this year, Alabama’s Republican governor, Kay Ivey, signed the Choose Act, which creates education savings accounts that can be used for public schools, private schools, online schools or home schooling. And in Texas, GOP Gov. Greg Abbott overcame opposition from the teachers unions (and some antichoice Republicans) to secure a legislative majority in November that will allow the state to pass an ESA bill that failed last year.

Nevertheless, school-choice evangelists suffered a defeat last week in Oklahoma, where the state Supreme Court blocked plans to establish the country’s first religious charter school. Last year, an Oklahoma school board voted to approve a Catholic Archdiocese application to create the taxpayer-funded St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School. State Attorney General Gentner Drummond, a Republican, sued to stop the school from opening, alleging that a contract between the state and a religious institution violated state and federal law.

In a 6-2 ruling, the court said Oklahoma’s constitution requires public schools, including charter schools, to be nonsectarian. The court also said that the contract violated the Establishment Clause of the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits the state from using public money to support a religious institution. A lawyer for St. Isidore told the Journal that an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court is in the works, and let’s hope so.

It’s hard to imagine anyone opposing school choice initiatives unless they are beholden to the teachers unions. School choice is the means to a productive future that should be available to all children, regardless of their economic status. If you oppose that, you are exposing your political bias and demonstrating you care more about the teachers union agenda than you do about the future of America’s children.

Just as civil rights became the issue of the 1960s, school choice has become the issue of the 21st century. It’s time everyone got on board this train.

From the very beginning, the Affordable Care Act, better known as ObamaCare, has been a fraud. This revolutionary healthcare legislation was passed by the Obama-controlled Congress in 2010 without a single Republican vote. That should tell you something about this legislation right away since Republicans rarely ever agree on anything. But they certainly agreed this was bad for healthcare and bad for the country.

I have written three books about ObamaCare including The ObamaCare Train Wreck, The ObamaCare Reality, andChanging Healthcare – so I know a thing or two about this subject. Yet even I was appalled to learn the latest news about the fraud that has been perpetrated by the Biden administration.

Brian Blasé, writing in The Wall Street Journal, tells us, “The Biden administration has made ObamaCare even more wasteful than it already was. A new Paragon analysis estimates that five million enrollees are receiving health-insurance subsidies well above the amounts to which they are legally entitled. The subsidy amount is largely determined by income, so that brokers and insurers alike financially benefit if applicants misstate their incomes. The administration, seeking to inflate coverage numbers, has prioritized enrollment over the program’s integrity. That has fostered fraudulent spending, which we estimate at $20 billion in 2024.”

How could this happen?

In August 2022, President Biden signed legislation increasing subsidies through 2025. In states that haven’t adopted ObamaCare’s Medicaid expansion, taxpayers pay the entire plan premium for enrollees with income between 100% and 150% of the federal poverty level. ObamaCare bars federal assistance to people with incomes below the poverty line who live in states that haven’t expanded Medicaid.

That creates an incentive to submit applications estimating income between 100% and 150% of the federal poverty level. Such misestimates of income, whether intentional or accidental, cost taxpayers thousands of dollars per enrollee. The average annual subsidy for this income group is about $6,000 per adult.

Most people who sign up for insurance-exchange plans are counseled by brokers and agents. Customers provide personal information because they are told the coverage is free. Many people wouldn’t pay any of their own money for this coverage and enroll if they weren’t told there is no financial cost.

Blasé says, “Many more enrollees than are eligible are reporting income within narrow ranges that leave them with zero premium for a plan. The scope of this problem suggests something akin to organized fraud. Reports indicate that unscrupulous agents and brokers aiming to maximize their commissions are switching many ObamaCare enrollees into new plans without their consent.”

In several states, the number of people signed up for coverage with an application listing income between 100% to 150% of the federal poverty level exceeds the number of working-age adults with income in that range. Children and seniors in this income range aren’t eligible for exchange plans. In Florida, 2.7 million people who reported income between 100% and 150% of the federal poverty level signed up for an exchange plan this year. Yet our analysis found that only about 700,000 Floridians with income in this range are eligible for such coverage. In Georgia, the respective figures were 830,000 and 340,000.

Who benefits from this fraud?

Insurers benefit because the Treasury pays ObamaCare subsidies directly to them. Hospitals benefit because more of their patients have healthcare insurance, reducing their charitable treatments. Patients in the system benefit from free or nearly-free healthcare. Politicians benefit because they can brag to their constituents about lowering the cost of healthcare insurance. But they won’t brag about lowering your taxes because taxpayers have to pay for all this government largess.

Blasé makes three recommendations to eliminate this fraud:

• Refrain from enacting legislation renewing the enhanced ObamaCare subsidies after 2025.
• Significantly increase the amount of subsidies that insurers and brokers must repay if income is misstated.
• End auto-reenrollment into plans from one year to the next and reverse Biden administration actions that enabled such widespread fraud.

Progressives have been trying to implement socialized medicine – complete government control of healthcare – since the days of President Teddy Roosevelt. ObamaCare has taken them one step closer to their goal and Biden has enabled this latest step forward through widespread misstatements of income while government looks the other way. It’s time to put a stop to this.

The U.S. Surgeon General and I are on the same page. Recently I warned about the dangers of smart phones to our youth (Smart Phones Destroying Our Youth). This week Dr. Vivek Murthy, the U.S. Surgeon General agreed.

Dr. Murthy has called for warning labels on social-media platforms, saying urgent action is needed to address a mental health emergency involving young people. Gareth Vipers, writing in The Wall Street Journal, tells us Dr Murthy says warning labels, similar to those on alcohol and tobacco products, should accompany platforms to “regularly remind parents that social media has not been proved safe,” in an op-ed for The New York Times.

Murthy cited research showing that social media was an important contributor to a growing mental-health crisis among young people. “Adolescents who spend more than three hours a day on social media face double the risk of anxiety and depression symptoms, and the average daily use in this age group, as of the summer of 2023, was 4.8 hours,” Murthy said.

Four point eight hours! If you sleep eight hours, that leaves 16 hours for an average day awake. These young people are spending more than 25% of their waking hours on social media! Is there any wonder we have a problem?

The surgeon general didn’t name any social-media companies in the article. TikTok, Snapchat, X and Meta Platforms, which owns Facebook and Instagram, didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

Murthy has long warned of the risks of social media to young people, urging policymakers and technology companies to increase safeguarding efforts and strengthen standards for younger users. ​​“We are in the middle of a national youth mental health crisis,” he said in a report published last year. “I am concerned that social media is an important driver of that crisis—one that we must urgently address.”

The report pointed to several studies examining a range of adverse effects of social media on adolescents. Those include online harassment, increased exposure to content related to self-harm and racism, and negative impacts on sleep, body image and physical activity.

The Wall Street Journal’s Facebook Files series in 2021 showed internal research at the company found Instagram was harmful for a percentage of young users, primarily teenage girls with body-image concerns. The research reviewed by the Journal showed the platform made body-image issues worse for a third of teenage girls. Facebook, which became Meta in 2021, scrapped plans to create an Instagram platform tailored to children after lawmakers and others raised concerns over the popular app’s impact on young people’s mental health.

Government officials, lawmakers and technology companies have for years grappled with how best to manage the issue. Lawmakers in the U.S. and Europe are weighing plans to tighten online age restrictions. Last year, Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, a Republican, signed a law requiring social-media companies to verify users are 18 years or older, and require those under age 18 to receive the consent of a parent or guardian to open an account.

It is encouraging to see our U.S. Surgeon General take a stand on this issue of great significance to the health of our youth. Perhaps his action will give parents the motivation and encouragement they need to set standards for their children and enforce them.