by Robin Smith:  Why does health care in America cost so much and increase annually? Why do medicines, even generics, get more expensive? It’s primarily because the practice of medicine is not a service delivered in a free market driven by economic principles. Other goods and services sought by the public feature known prices and the consumer is both the payer and the decision-maker. Not so with health care.

          In American health care, we have managed health insurance, not care. Almost all of the debate about policy revolves around the current system that empowers the insurers and/or the government as the decision-makers, the payers and, in reality, the customer — not the patient.
          So, while some have really well-intended discussions and policy debates, unless the consumer is in control of making informed decisions and holds the responsibility of payment, there will not be authentic health care reform. There will be little more than tweaking policies that address the actual customers — the insurance companies and/or the government.
          We need insurance policies. But we need insurance policies that pay when we have catastrophic events or expensive procedures, not the average wellness check-up or routine physicals. If Americans used their homeowners insurance policy or their auto insurance just as they use their medical insurance policy, the rates would be unaffordable and out of control too. The time for Health Savings Accounts is now. The time for price transparency of medicines and procedures is now. If Americans want to see the cost of care and medicines decline while simultaneously increasing access due to affordability, true reforms must be made to return the service of health care and medicines to a free market.
          We also need the innovation of new medicines, devices and procedures. As long as a third-party payer controls the terms of coverage, care delivered and medicines on a formulary, the decisions are not made by patients, but by insurers or a government agency. A horrible side-effect is that those who are uninsured get hammered by the cost of care that is delivered outside a contracted rate, and they pay exorbitant costs.
          So let’s do as Dr. Tom Coburn, former U.S. senator from Oklahoma, did in his recent Washington Examiner analysis. Let’s look at ways that real reform can come to health care and not just address health insurance.
          Dr. Coburn focused primarily on the cost of pharmaceuticals, or prescription drugs. His simple solution is to reintroduce actual free markets to the sale and purchase of medications. Chiefly, Coburn says, just make the net price of all medicines available in the public domain and easy accessible by the consumer, the patient, not a contracted formulary of tiered/approved medicines by an insurance company. As it relates to insurance reimbursement for health care items ranging from very specialized medicines that cost upwards of $10,000 per month to the average wellness checkup, allow value-based payment with data on cost and efficacy made available. Simpler, if a hammer will do, there’s no need for a sledge hammer.
          Throughout the former senator’s analysis, he refers to an extensive report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine entitled, “Making Medicines Affordable: A National Imperative.” Take one guess what recommendations are offered by a government-funded study by a government-run group? Bingo! The study’s sponsors recommend more bureaucratic, centralized control. That government report, by the way, will cost you $67.00 to read online.
          Coburn argues for the pharmaceutical market what should be argued throughout all of health care: Transparency and the free market work; government control does not.
          In health care, we routinely pay for services that are very important without knowing their cost, thanks to the control of government and insurers. Not only does the American consumer need to demand price transparency, the debate surrounding “Big Pharma” must also address the unbelievably lengthy and costly in place for new medicines. A published study by the renowned Tuft’s University recorded that “the average cost to bring just one drug to the market is about $2.6 billion. It takes an average of 15 years from the time a drug developer first begins testing a new formula until the FDA approves it. Only 1 in 1,000 drug formulas will ever enter pre-clinical testing, and of those, roughly 8 percent will ultimately receive FDA approval.”
          Fifteen years and $2.6 billion are averages for a new medicine to be approved. Without argument, the safety of patients is absolutely mandatory. Yet the U.S. government process is not constructed to respond to the needs of patients in the here and now. Can you imagine if the smartphone or computer industry was controlled in a similar manner? Would Apple find it profitable to be able to bring a new product to market only every 15 years? The first iPhone was advertised on June 29, 2007. Look at the improvements to the technology, the innovation and the response to consumer needs while keeping the costs within range for mass consumption during that decade-long window.
          Summing this up, America does not have a health care problem rooted in the actual delivery of medicine. We have a health care billing issue that hides information that would create competition, provide a patient-centered approach and permit control by the actual consumer. Just take a look at the National Health System currently in England. Up to 50,000 surgeries have been canceled due to the onslaught of influenza that has hit a system understaffed and ill-prepared to be responsive to sudden change. You see, when you socialize the health care market, everyone gets a little with no incentive for excellence or to prioritize the patient experience.
          If you want the best health care, then return to free markets and the characteristics that truly empower the patients.  ~The Patriot Post
https://patriotpost.us/articles/532881

by Political Editors:  A favorite straw man regularly held up by anti-gun activists in their endless attempt to limit Americans’ Second Amendment rights is the supposedly significant problem of gun law “loopholes.” This false argument is often trotted out as justification for the calls for more gun-control laws. One example of this loophole fallacy is the claim of no background check requirements for firearm purchases at gun shows. This false claim has been repeatedly debunked and yet anti-gun activists and much of the mainstream media still repeat it as if it were gospel truth.

          Recently, another one of these gun law loophole fallacies was debunked, and royally so. In 2015, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) was commissioned for some research by three Democrat members of Congress, Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD), Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI) and Sen. Elizabeth dinky-Warren (D-MA), who are well known for their anti-gun rights crusading. Motivated by a 2011 Michael Bloomberg-funded anti-gun campaign called “Point, Click, Fire” — which claimed that in supposedly largely unregulated online transactions, 62% of private sellers would sell a firearm to an individual who couldn’t pass a background check — the three Democrats sought to have the GAO officially validate this loophole problem.
          However, The Washington Free Beacon reports, “Between July 2015 and November 2017 investigators from the Government Accountability Office (GAO), following up on a congressional request, tried to make the illegal private gun purchases through a number of online forums and market places. They made 72 attempts over that time but couldn’t complete a single sale using legitimate sites.” [emphasis added]
          Not only does the GAO report largely debunk Bloomberg and company’s online gun-purchasing loophole fabrication, it reinforces the fact that the cause of criminal violence stems not from the legal availability of guns but from the hearts and minds of lawless individuals. Lawful gun owners are simply not the problem, and this study only further cements this reality. As our friends at 2ndVote so effectively point out, a gun has yet to act alone to kill anyone.  ~The Patriot Post
https://patriotpost.us/articles/53322

by Arnold Ahlert:  Under the heading, “be careful what you wish for, you might just get it,” the satisfaction  Democrats, other leftist organizations and their media allies derived from President Donald Trump’s decision to disband the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, led by Vice President Mike Pence and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, may be short-lived.

          Not that they get it — yet. Thus, the reliably feverish Sen. Chuck clown-Schumer (D-NY) reiterated the Left’s tiresome tropes that ensuring the integrity of American elections constitutes “a front to suppress the vote” and an effort to “perpetrate dangerous and baseless claims.” clown-Schumer further insisted the Committee’s disbandment demonstrates that “ill-founded proposals that just appeal to a narrow group of people won’t work, and we hope they’ll learn this lesson elsewhere.”
          clown-Schumer’s assertion that protecting elections resonates solely with a “narrow group” is laughable. A 2015 CBS News poll revealed a majority of Americans considered voter fraud to be fairly widespread, and a 2016 Gallup poll revealed a whopping 80% of Americans favor requiring voters to provide photo ID to cast a ballot. Moreover, a 2007 Gallup poll and a 2012 Washington Post poll both revealed more Americans are concerned with voter fraud than voter suppression.
          So why did Trump shut down the Commission? “Despite substantial evidence of voter fraud, many states have refused to provide the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity with basic information relevant to its inquiry,” Trump said in a brief statement last Wednesday. “Rather than engage in endless legal battles at taxpayer expense, today I signed an executive order to dissolve the Commission, and have asked the Department of Homeland Security to review these issues and determine next courses of action.”
          Leftists will likely regret the shift and fittingly, they have only themselves to blame. As columnist Thomas Lifson explains, Democrats made so-called Russian hacking of the election “a national security issue. This opens the door for DHS — armed with far more investigatory power than any commission might exercise — to go full bore at election fraud,” he writes. “President Trump tried it the nice way, only to encounter obstruction. Now it is time for Plan B, and I am pretty sure that Democrats will not like it at all.”
          Kobach, who led the Commission along with Pence, was equally explicit. “What’s happening is a tactical shift where the mission of the commission is being handed off to Homeland Security without the stonewalling by Democrats,” he stated. Kobach also hammered reliably leftist organizations like the ACLU and the NAACP, along with congressional Democrats and their Commission members, who attempted undermine its work at every turn. “They have absolutely no interest in stopping voter fraud,” Kobach declared. “It’s truly extraordinary that one party in our system has made clear that they don’t care.”
          The most critical aspect of the change? Leftists who often use the courts to get what they want (or prevent that which they don’t) will no longer have that option. “The investigation will continue. And it will continue more efficiently and more effectively,” Kobach warned. “By throwing their food in the air, [Democrats] just lost their seat at the table.”
          At least eight lawsuits have been filed against the Commission, largely based on accusations that asking for state voter data, much of which is on the public record, violated open-records laws, or breached privacy protections. Moreover, Democrat Commission member and Maine Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap filed his own lawsuit, accusing the commission of hiding information from him. Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly partially agreed, saying the panel should provide him the requested documents.
          Despite the commission being disbanded, Dunlap insists it still has to honor the judge’s decision. “I didn’t want to go to court,” he told The Daily Signal. “All I wanted, honest to God, was to participate and get an answer to all of my questions.”
          Dunlap was also concerned about the change of course. “How many driver’s licenses has Homeland Security issued?” he asked rhetorically. “None. How many elections has Homeland Security run? None.”
          Despite Dunlap’s take, DHS’s outsider status is a good thing. Driver’s licenses? Twelve states — California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, Vermont and Washington, plus the District of Columbia — allow illegal aliens to obtain driver’s licenses. Of those 12, only Utah favored Trump in the 2016 election. Only three — Washington, Nevada and Hawaii — were willing to provide the Commission with any information.
          As for running an election, Americans might be shocked to discover that at least 38 states currently or will soon allow voters to register online, and 14 currently or will soon permit voters to register on Election Day. Moreover, according to Ballotpedia, 34% of the states have no ID requirement to vote, 24% have non-strict, non-photo voter ID laws, 20% have non-strict, photo ID laws, 6% have strict, non-photo ID laws, and 16% have strict, photo ID laws. In other words, there is ample opportunity to commit voter fraud.
          Nonetheless, Democrats would have Americans believe lax registration and voting procedures, coupled with wholesale resistance to investigations, has a non-existent or marginal impact on the integrity of elections. Moreover, they insist any effort to conduct an investigation that would either reveal fraud — or the lack thereof that would validate their assertions — amounts to “a wild-goose chase for voter fraud, demonizing the very American voters whom we should all be helping to participate — with the not-so-secret goal of making voting harder with unnecessary barriers,” according to Dale Ho, director of the ACLU Voting Rights Project.
          That would be the same ACLU whose executive director, Anthony D. Romero, called for the DOJ “to appoint a special prosecutor to independently investigate the Trump campaign’s ties to Russian interference in November’s election and for Congress to create a select committee, akin to the Watergate select committee, to ensure an adequate and public resolution of this crisis” — to “preserve our constitutional values.”
          Thus, some allegations of voter fraud are “more equal than others.” And despite Democrat denials, the Commission did document 8,471 cases of double-voting in elections in 21 states, and 938 voter fraud convictions since 2000. Moreover, the same Democrats who have issues with the DHS’s current effort to supersede their resistance, had no problem when liar-nObama administration DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson determined that state election systems were “critical infrastructure,” requiring federal oversight due to “hacking” concerns — despite no evidence of hacking.
          Again for leftists, hacking by extra-national entities is highly problematic, but “hacking” by thousands of potentially ineligible or double voting individuals, including “extra-nationals” (read: illegals), is no problem at all.
          In short, the Democrat Party’s stance on investigations of voter fraud is highly selective. Any DHS investigations that might prove inimical to their interests amounts to “disenfranchisement,” while any investigation that even hints at delegitimizing the current president — courtesy of a Special Counsel armed with extra-constitutional power — must be pursued with unrelenting vigor.
          How Democrats miss the searing irony that the special counsel’s investigation provides a powerful justification for the DHS’s investigation is anyone’s guess.
          Let the proverbial chips fall where they may.  
~The Patriot Post
https://patriotpost.us/articles/53283

by Political Editors:  The New York Times recently reported that the leftist organization Media Matters, founded by David Brock, had spent $200,000 funding an effort in 2016 to bring down Donald Trump via allegations of sexual assault. The Times reports that leftist organizations are still “raising hundreds of thousands of dollars to support accusers who come forward with charges against President Trump and members of Congress.”      Motivated by the success of the #MeToo movement, which has been credited in helping to expose and bring down famous and powerful men in Hollywood and the mainstream media, as well as prompt the resignation of members of Congress like former Democrat Sen. Al Franken, Brock and other leftists seek to do the same to Trump and Republican candidates. Just as Mark Alexander recently warned.

          California lawyer Lisa Bloom received significant amounts of funding as she sought “to encourage victims to bring forward similar claims against Republican politicians.” Her efforts “included offering to sell alleged victims’ stories to TV outlets in return for a commission for herself, arranging a donor to pay off one Trump accuser’s mortgage and attempting to secure a six-figure payment for another woman who ultimately declined to come forward after being offered as much as $750,000,” The Hill reported. Bloom justified the funding claiming that it was needed in order “to ensure the safety” of the accusers.
          The fact of the matter is, this has nothing to do with concerns over the problem of sexual assault or harassment against women. Instead, it’s all about politics. In an American Bridge 21st Century Foundation internal memo from last year, Brock explains, “We are going to resist the normalization of Donald Trump. Trump has the legal authority, but we have the moral authority — and the moral responsibility to oppose him.” In other words, let the witch hunts begin.
          Ron Rotunda, a professor at Chapman University School of Law, noted, “These victims have serious stories to tell and we have to get justice for them. But we undercut that when people are paid for their testimony. It taints it. … The problem is, if a real victim accepts a payoff it undercuts their story. That’s just a fact of life.” The truth of the matter is, by politicizing the issue, Democrats are guaranteeing that it will be immediately assumed that every accuser must have some political motivation rather than a genuine pursuit of justice. In other words, fewer people will believe them. How does that help women who are real victims?  ~The Patriot Post
https://patriotpost.us/articles/53279