Healthcare Affordability
What to know: Texas lawmakers are holding hearings on healthcare costs, and are now zeroing in on insurance costs and practices.
The TPPF take: Insurer-controlled healthcare has hidden costs.
“Patients should be able to shop for high-value care without monopolistic restrictions, whether at an independent clinic, hospital, or through a direct-pay or health-sharing model,” says TPPF’s Dr. Cliff Porter. “If we reformed or eliminated network restrictions, insurers would finally have to compete based on value, not contracts and gatekeeping. That would open the door for alternatives like Crowd Health or health-sharing ministries, thereby restoring price transparency and personal liberty and agency.”
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Never Enough
What to know: On Monday, public education apparatchiks complained to the House Committee on Public Education that last session’s record-breaking $8.5 billion budget boost wasn’t enough, despite declining school enrollment. One superintendent even grumbled that: “We live, figuratively speaking, paycheck to paycheck.”
The TPPF take: No matter how fat public education budgets become, it’ll never be enough.
“Public school officials constantly complain about a lack of funding, but the data shows ample funding. For instance, in the 2023-24 school year, ISDs received more than $16,000 in total funding per student, which is a 53% increase over the last decade. That increased funding came despite waffling student enrollment,” says TPPF’s James Quintero. “Public education doesn’t have a revenue problem. It has a big, big spending problem.”
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Healthy Masculinity
What to know: Nature magazine has a new report out on the nation’s masculinity crisis, but wonders if talking about it will “further sideline women and girls.”
The TPPF take: Young men are looking for heroes; we’re villainizing them instead.
“If there is such a thing as toxic masculinity, there must also be a healthy form,” says University of the Incarnate Word Professor John Kainer , writing in The Cannon Online. “Articulating what that looks like is not nostalgia, it is a social necessity. Regardless of one’s views of gender roles, it is surely significant that all cultures have felt compelled to define them.”
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