Don’t Expand Medicaid—Improve It

What to Know: Texas Democrats are ready with bills that would expand Medicaid in the Lone Star State.

The TPPF Take: When it comes to the Texas health care system, expanding Medicaid is the wrong prescription.

“Medicaid is an important program that was instituted to provide health coverage for those most at risk: the elderly, the disabled, eligible women and children,” says TPPF’s David Balat. “But the more we ask of Medicaid, the less it’s able to perform its original mission. We can improve it, however. One way would be to allow Medicaid dollars to fund Direct Primary Care arrangements for Medicaid recipients.”

For more on Medicaid reform, click here.

DACA Deceit

What to Know: U.S. courts have fully reinstate the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program that protects young immigrants here illegally.

The TPPF Take: DACA, however good its aims, is not the right way to go about reforming immigration.

“Programs like DACA, which effectively granted amnesty to hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants, amount to lawmaking and ought to be passed by lawmakers, not decreed by presidents who can’t get their preferred policies through a divided Congress,” says TPPF Senior Fellow John Daniel Davidson. “After all, DACA is not law—not even an executive order. It is a memo.”

For more on DACA, click here.

Misreading the Moment

What to Know: Texas Democrats say they’ll do a “deep dive” investigation into how they—and the media—so misread the mood of Texans leading up to the Nov. 3 election.

The TPPF Take: It wasn’t just the Democrats who got it wrong. So did the media and the experts—who will now be telling us what massive changes Texans “want” from the Legislature.

“For months, we were told that Texas was turning blue,” says TPPF’s James Quintero. “The media was wrong. Wrong about Biden taking Texas. Wrong about Texas being a battleground. Wrong about the Texas House flipping. Wrong, wrong, wrong. And because they erred so greatly on politics, we ought not trust their instincts on policy. Remember that when they demand we solve problems by giving government more power and more money.”

For more on misreading the moment, click here.