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Connecting today’s news with the research & opinion you need.

The Future of Healthcare?

What to Know: Canada’s health care system is often mentioned as a desirable model for the U.S., so why are so many Canadians coming here for surgeries?

“Canadian Medicare, our northern neighbor’s universal health care system, generally receives rave reviews from proponents of nationalized or socialized health care, but the Fraser Institute found that more than 63,000 Canadians left their country to have surgery in 2016,” the Foundation for Economic Education reports. “As Americans contemplate overturning our health system in favor of one similar to Canada’s, we must ask why so many leave. The Canadian system consistently ranks low or lowest across numerous metrics in the Commonwealth Fund’s extensive survey on health care. With regards to specialists and surgeries, the United States ranked best or nearly best.”

The TPPF Take: The reality of single-payer health care systems is rationing.

“In single-payer systems, the government saves money not by more efficient administration, but by controlling both the budget and by limiting allowable treatments,” says TPPF’s David Balat. “In the U.S., we already have a single-payer health care system, called the Veterans Administration Hospital system. A 2015 internal audit of the VA reported, ‘307,000 veterans may have died waiting for care.’”

Hand Over Your Lunch Money

What to Know: School officials in a Pennsylvania district threatened to report families with $10 or more in unpaid school lunch accounts to Child Protective Services.

“Dozens of families in Pennsylvania received an alarming letter from their public school district this month informing parents that if their kid’s lunch debt was not settled, their child could be removed from their home and placed in foster care,” NPR reports. “Wyoming Valley West School District, one of the poorest districts in the state as measured by per-pupil spending, is located in a former coal mining community in Northeastern Pennsylvania, known affectionately by locals as ‘The Valley.’ When officials there noticed that families owed the district around $22,000 in breakfast and lunch debt, they tried to get their money back… That's when district officials sent out the now-infamous letter to about 40 families deemed to be the worst offenders in having overdue cafeteria bills — those were children with meal debt of $10 or more.”

The TPPF Take: What happened in Pennsylvania shows just how easy it is to weaponize the child protective services system.

“Decades of government overreach, policies that encourage anonymous reporting, and virtually nonexistent penalties for those who make false reports created an environment where school officials apparently felt these threats were an appropriate strategy for collecting lunch money,” says TPPF’s Andrew Brown. “Getting rid of anonymous reporting in favor of confidential reporting and providing victims of false reports with a meaningful way to get justice can help prevent future incidents like this and better protect kids who are in actual danger.”

Abusing The System

What to Know: Advocates of the bone cave harvestman spider are abusing the Endangered Species Act and the U.S. Constitution’s commerce clause. The Washington Times recently featured a Texas family, the Yearwoods, and their fight (with TPPF’s help) against the ESA.

“The spider the government says it is protecting has no commercial value and has never been in interstate commerce,” the Times reported. “As a practical matter, it cannot even exist outside the caves in which it lives and thus has little if any interaction with other creatures that might somehow find themselves in interstate commerce. The Yearwoods’ lawyers want the spider removed from the endangered list, which recent science shows is not, in fact, endangered, and are arguing that the Fish & Wildlife Service is basing its claim of jurisdiction on an absurdly broad 2003 Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals decision declaring that all species are interconnected and that as a result anything that affects any one species affects all.”

The TPPF Take: TPPF will continue to fight this abuse of power.

“Our government is intended as one of limited powers,” says TPPF’s Rob Henneke. “It is not the federal government's role to regulate everything—including what Mr. Yearwood does on his private property that has no relation to interstate commerce.”