If you’ve been to the doctor lately, you know our healthcare system is in decline. Although the profession of medicine can do things today we couldn’t imagine fifty years ago, the practice of delivering these advances in medical treatment is declining.

Many of the changes we are experiencing today in doctors’ offices are the result of shifts in who is employing your doctor. When I went into practice in 1984, most doctors were self-employed, or at least worked for other doctors. Today about 70% of all physicians are employed by hospitals, large healthcare systems, or the government. In other words, they don’t get to decide on their own what’s best for their patients.

This change is not happening by chance. It’s all part of the government’s plan to someday control the delivery of all healthcare. The more doctors are employed by hospitals, large healthcare systems, and the government, the more the government can determine what they can and can’t do and therefore what they spend and don’t spend on healthcare. The ultimate control of all healthcare expenditures is the goal – and that’s called socialized medicine.

Grace-Marie Turner, writing for Galen.org, tells us other ways the progressive government of the Biden Administration is moving in this direction. She says, “The Biden administration is continuing the march toward a universal, government-run health care system, both by chipping away at the private health sector and ushering more and more people into government programs. The latest: President Biden announced on Tuesday he’s giving legal status to undocumented spouses of U.S. citizens and their children. At least 500,000 are expected to qualify.

It’s hard to understand how this is legal since there will be significant costs associated with their new eligibility for entitlement programs, including ACA and Medicaid coverage—spending that should require congressional approval. Lawsuits will ensue. This follows the controversial “Dreamers” program the Obama administration created in 2012 that gave legal status—and entitlement eligibility—to adults who were brought into the U.S. illegally as children.”

She says The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services plans to award $500 million in grants over the next five years to “navigator” programs across the country. A creation of Obamacare, navigators are paid by government to assist consumers in signing up for health coverage.  The problem: We already have a network of nearly a million private insurance agents that have decades of knowledge and experience in helping clients find the best health coverage for their needs and pocketbooks. It’s very hard for them to compete with much-less-experienced navigators backed by $500 million in taxpayer dollars.

She also tells us the Biden administration is undermining the competitive, consumer-friendly model of Medicare’s prescription drug benefit.  It is making changes to Part D that are degrading the program, leading to fewer plan choices, fewer drugs covered, and premiums which are expected to increase by more than 20% next year.

And they are attacking Medicare Advantage plans in ways designed to discourage seniors from enrolling in these private, competing health plans that more than 30 million seniors have voluntarily chosen for lower costs and better benefits.  But the number of options is shrinking as plans exit the program, citing Biden administration regulatory demands and financial pressures.

The result of these changes will be: Fewer choices.  Higher costs.  More government control. More government spending. 

For more on how the government is expanding its control of the American healthcare system, read my recent blog The ObamaCare Subsidy Fraud.

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.