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Here is the Heritage Take on the top issues today. Please reply to this email to arrange an interview.
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- At present, the U.S. military is roughly half the size it needs to be.
- Moreover, most of its primary equipment (planes, ships, tanks, etc.) is 30 to 40 years old, and soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines, and guardians are training only a fraction of what they should to be competent in battle.
- Yet senior leaders in the Pentagon, White House spokespeople, and even members of Congress who have access to the facts (and who should know better) continue to say we have the best military in the world, as if saying so makes it so. It does not.
- The point of The Heritage Foundation’s recently released 2024 Index of U.S. Military Strength is two-fold: to inform Americans about the state of their military and to prompt Congress and the administration to do something about correcting the multitude of problems in our country’s ability to defend itself and its interests in a very dangerous world that seems to be spiraling out of control.
- That our military is weak is not an indictment of the men and women who have volunteered to serve. It is an indictment of a system largely defined by the government and those elected to high office. That includes senior military officers whose primary obligation should be to ensure our men and women have what they need to win in war – which is, after all, the primary purpose of our military.
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- Medicare Advantage (MA), a system of competing private plans, is America’s best bet for reforming all of Medicare, but it isn’t perfect.
- Last month, the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC) – one of the panels that advises Congress – had an intense internal debate that demonstrates how susceptible MA is to bureaucratic efforts to undermine the market-driven dynamics that have made it so popular and successful.
- The Commission showed that over 99 percent of Medicare enrollees have access to a private health plan, enjoy an average choice of 41 plans, including plans that offer $0 premiums.
- While largely successful, MA, as Heritage analysts and others have noted, has two specific weaknesses: an unnecessarily complex health plan payment process and a flawed risk adjustment system.
- MA undercuts price competition, inaccurately accounts for beneficiary health risks, encourages health insurer “gaming” of the system, and thus leads to higher government payments to health plans.
- While proponents claim additional government benefit standardization for private plans would improve competition, it would, in fact, have the opposite effect: making MA more like the traditional, single-payer Medicare – the Left’s out-of-date model for government-run, national health insurance.
- Good policy would reverse consolidation both locally and nationally, but government benefit standardization will do the opposite.
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- Business headlines say that inflation is down, yet countless Americans are struggling, particularly with finding somewhere affordable to live.
- How do we reconcile these seemingly contradictory notions? First, lower inflation means prices are rising slower but still rising. Second, housing inflation is being undercounted by official government metrics as much as 4-to-1.
- The consumer price index (CPI) from the Bureau of Labor Statistics is designed to measure the cost increase of a common basket of goods. But neither the exorbitant cost of owning a home nor the drop in insurance coverage is incorporated in the CPI.
- This undercounting of inflation is a key reason why so many people disapprove of the economy despite the official metrics improving.
- Flawed statistics won’t help cover your unaffordable mortgage.
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