Jan. 6, 2026

Permission to republish original opeds and cartoons granted.

 

 

Trump Is Delivering Real Savings For American Patients. Congress Needs To Follow His Lead.

By Robert Romano

President Donald Trump is moving mountains to reduce health care costs for the American people. In recent months, he struck agreements with several pharmaceutical giants to offer medicines at lower prices. He issued an executive order forcing hospitals to disclose their prices to patients so Americans who need non-emergency procedures can compare costs and save their hard-earned dollars. And he championed direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical sales that cut out price-gouging middlemen.

But despite President Trump’s tireless efforts, the executive branch can only fix some of what’s wrong with our health care system. The power, and the responsibility, to make transformative and permanent changes largely rests with Congress. With health care affordability at the top of voters’ list of concerns, it’s critically important for congressional Republicans to spend 2026 tackling the rampant fraud, waste, and abuse within our health care system. The health insurance industry should draw the brunt of Congress’s efforts.

Consider the recent debate over the Obamacare “temporary” enhanced subsidies, which nominally funnel taxpayer dollars to individuals, but in reality send the payments straight to insurance companies. This extra spending was part of the Biden-era stimulus bills — the ironically-named American Rescue Plan and Inflation Reduction Act — which used Covid-19 as a pretense to massively increase federal spending.

Democrats are committed to maintaining the truisms that no federal spending program is ever temporary, and subsidies rarely benefit their intended recipients. As Johns Hopkins professor Ge Bai has noted, a West Virginia couple earning over $500,000 could receive subsidized coverage thanks to this taxpayer largess. So could an Arizona family of four making $600,000.

It is absurd that a government $37 trillion in debt is sending money it doesn’t have to the wealthiest one percent. Yet Democrats want to make these “temporary” enhanced subsidies permanent. That would mean pouring more public dollars — about $350 billion by 2035 — into an insurance system plagued by fraud, waste, and abuse. But for a party that dreams of a single-payer, socialist health care system where taxpayers fund every expense, this is perhaps unsurprising.

Last year, insurers pocketed Obamacare subsidies for nearly 12 million exchange enrollees who were not using their coverage at all. Many of these individuals were “phantom” enrollees — people who didn’t even know they had been signed up for plans, and in some cases were simultaneously enrolled in entirely different plans.

This improper enrollment across the Obamacare marketplaces cost taxpayers $27 billion in 2025 alone, according to one recent estimate.

But as bad as the fraud, waste, and abuse are within the Obamacare exchanges, it’s arguably even worse in other corners of the insurance market.

Consider Medicare Advantage plans, which enroll more than half of Medicare beneficiaries. The program was originally designed to save taxpayers money while offering seniors additional options by harnessing the power of competition and forcing insurers to compete for seniors’ business.

But here too, insurers have found a way to game the system.

In one scheme, insurers try to attract seniors — especially healthy ones with lower costs — to higher-cost plans with unnecessary benefits like ski passes, pet food, and golf clubs.

But even as they attract healthier patients, insurers make them look sicker. They “upcode” patients, making diagnoses appear more severe in order to assign them higher risk scores. On average, Medicare Advantage enrollees’ risk scores are almost 20 percent higher than traditional Medicare enrollees. That allows insurers to extract more money from the younger workers who pay for the program.

Because of these kinds of abuses, Medicare Advantage spends upwards of 20 percent more on its enrollees than traditional Medicare does. One report estimates that spending amounted to about $83 billion in extra taxpayer funds.

As Republicans shape their health care agenda in the new year, they would be wise to put these problems, and the insurance industry masterminds behind them, front and center. Combating insurers’ fraud, waste, and abuse is the most straightforward way to lower costs for families, restore integrity to federal programs, and fulfill Republican campaign promise to reduce the federal deficit.

President Trump has demonstrated the courage required to demand better for the American people and to deliver on his promises. The time is now for congressional Republicans to follow his lead.

Robert Romano is the Executive Director of Americans for Limited Government.

To view online: https://dcjournal.com/trump-is-delivering-real-savings-for-american-patients-congress-needs-to-follow-his-lead/ 

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Cartoon: No Dictators Day

By A.F. Branco

Click here for a higher level resolution version.

To view online: https://dailytorch.com/2026/01/cartoon-no-dictators-day/ 

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The Globalist Primal Scream As Maduro Falls

By Bill Wilson

Of all the cascading fallout from the action to arrest former Venezuelan President Nicholas Maduro, the most important and telling I believe came from the pages of the neo-Marxist London paper, The Guardian. In an opinion piece penned by Sudanese journalist Nesrine Malik, the ultimate rebuke from someone of the globalist order was hurled — the action, she scolds, threaten the end of the “international law and rules-based order.”

If so, then the President Donald Trump has scored a huge win for liberty and struck a hopefully mortal blow to the global nightmare of international “governance.”  

The entire appeal of the globalist order has always been that nations will be dissolved and governance and enforcement of the rules dictated by so-called “experts” will be achieved through collective action by international entities. Forget for a moment that citizens in any country would not have a direct say in the formulation of these “rules” or would have any recourse from harm done to them by those rules. Those were deemed minor problems that might or might not be addressed by the very same international experts.

The end of this charade is what Ms. Malik is mourning. She obviously couldn’t care less for the impact on the people of Venezuela, a people who have suffered greatly under the boot of Maduro and his mentor Hugo Chavez. No, what she cares most about is that nations will return to looking out for and representing the interests of their own people.

Ms. Malik states, “there is barely any effort to situate the ‘coup’ (sic) in any reasoning other than the U.S.’s interests.” Yep, that hits the nail on the head and is exactly what has needed to be done for a very long time. U.S. interests are the proper domain of the U.S. government including the American president. The fact that administrations going back 40 years have failed to protect the American people and put the interests of international eggheads and corporations over those of the United States is not a reason to think doing so now is somehow wrong. What the Trump administration did, in its determination, was in the best interests of the American people. It is the only standard by which any actions of our government should be judged.   

She shows her hand when in the next breath, Ms. Malik says, “Nor are there any attempts to solicit consent from domestic or international law-making bodies and allies.” And why should the United States adhere to the whims of “international law-making bodies”? Someone from Sudan should know full well the answer to that. Putting any necessary action to the approval of lawyers results in nothing but delay, diversion and dilution. Insanity is the only way to describe this.

You can hear the echo of socialist protestors when she writes that the administration’s post action statements are “in the very rebuke of the notion that the U.S. actions are subject to due process.” What is she talking about? “Due process” is a term that the left uses to blind the citizen with false assertions. There are no issues of “due process” in the apprehension of a charged felon. Whether it takes one sheriff deputy on a moped or a carrier group and the world’s best special forces, the situation is the same.

The neo-Marxists use the same slogan of “due process” in the arrest of illegal aliens inside the U.S. It is only designed to divert the attention of the citizenry away from the primary fact of illegal acts and the proper role of law enforcement. As a very smart and glib partisan has said, due process for illegal aliens is the same thing as a shoplifter demanding a refund for the item stolen. In any event, Maduro will get his “due process” in U.S. courts befitting a drug trafficker who was responsible for the death of thousands of American citizens.

After all the rhetorical tricks and sleights of hand we get to the heart of the matter.  Ms. Malik sees the impact of the Trump assertion of sovereign rights as the death knell for the globalist cause. She rebukes the British, the very place from where the global governance nightmare originated. She has no kind words for the EU either. She opines that this will make the situation in her home country of Sudan much more perilous by empowering the United Arab Emirates. And, of course, there is the usual blather about Israel and Gaza.

At the end of her tome, Ms. Malik tries to excuse the timidity of the Europeans by asserting that they are simply “lying low” for now, letting Trump be Trump and will come back soon with their schemes. But she isn’t buying it:“Lying low and hoping that this too shall pass is cowardice, denial and historical illiteracy.”  

Again, Ms. Malik is correct but not as she intends. Lying low, hoping the globalist experiment will dissipate is denial. Pretending that the EU is really a good guy making a few bad mistakes is cowardice. And believing that unelected bodies of self-appointed “experts” is better than the educated will of the People is historic illiteracy.  

So Ms. Malik and the readers of the Guardian put on your best black clothes and go to Karl Marx’s grave to mourn. The globalist nightmare is dying before your eyes.

Bill Wilson is the former president of Americans for Limited Government. 

To view online: https://dailytorch.com/2026/01/the-globalist-primal-scream-as-maduro-falls/