Here is the Heritage Take on the top issues today.Please reply to this email to arrange an interview.
Health
Insurance Enrollment in 2021 and Its Implications for 2023 <[link removed]> - In 2021, enrollment in employment-based group coverage declined while enrollment in individual-market (non-group) coverage and Medicaid increased. Those coverage gains were primarily driven by temporary, COVID-19-related increases in federal funding and subsidies, accompanied by rules that likely kept many no-longer-eligible individuals on Medicaid. Even before those temporary changes, the data show that the main effect of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) has been to increase enrollment in Medicaid. The increased Medicaid funding will phase out in 2023 and lawmakers should also end the excessive ACA subsidies enacted in response to COVID-19. Congress should instead reduce health care costs by expanding competition and price transparency and eliminate anti-competitive regulations and business practices that protect favored health care providers. Heritage Expert: Ed
Haislmaier <[link removed]>
South
Dakota Bans Affirming Treatment - “Gender ideology” displaces the sexual binary of male and female—which describes all mammals including humans—with a subjective notion of “gender identity” that is independent of the body. Hence, champions of this ideology avoid references to sex. They typically define “gender identity” as … one’s internal sense of gender. Note that this is both circular and unfalsifiable.
The most toxic fruit of this ideology, however, is in medicine. For minors, it involves refashioning the body with drugs and scalpel to fit a distorted idea in the mind. In the US, gender transition surgeries for adolescents increased
nearly fivefold <[link removed]> from 2016 to 2019. Starting a child down the “gender affirmation” pathway makes it far more likely he or she will go all the way, even if he or she later comes to regret it. Here’s the dirty little secret: There’s no reliable scientific evidence that these treatments improve the long-term mental health of these minors, let alone that the benefits outweigh the many risks. Heritage Expert: Jay Richards <[link removed]>
The American left is Pushing ESG Policies That Would Force Businesses and Financial Institutions To Bow To Their Radical Agenda <[link removed]>– From requiring NASDAQ-listed companies to appoint board members based on race and sex, to requiring onerous greenhouse gas
emission reporting, ESG is destroying economic freedom and undermining America’s cultural fabric of freedom. ESG policies are a thinly veiled attempt to radically transform American businesses into social justice warriors that can shut conservatives and others who don’t comply out of the public square. Pro-ESG businesses support the left's “woke” culture war to redefine sex, promote critical race theory, and cancel conservatives. ESG is being weaponized against both businesses and individuals who don’t comply with the left’s radical policies. Low ESG scores threaten law-abiding Americans, with everything from denial of loans to de-platforming from financial services. Heritage Experts: Andy Olivastro <[link removed]> and Joel Griffith <[link removed]>
Another
Study Refutes Left’s False Claims Against Voter ID and Secure Elections <[link removed]> - In other words, voter security benefits both parties and all Americans. The new study points to numerous reasons why this is the case. The researchers’ conclusions emphatically demonstrate that Republican support for an issue doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s bad for Democrats. In fact, in contrast to the myth of voter suppression, the study found that both parties saw an increase in voter turnout after implementation of voter ID laws. This mutual increase is itself a benefit worth pursuing. Not only is this a refutation of the Left’s claims that these commonsense reforms amount to “Jim Crow 2.0, <[link removed]>” but the increased voter turnout actually strengthens diverse voter representation in our country by including more citizens in the election process. Heritage Expert: Hans
von Spakovsky <[link removed]>
Public
policy hitting Americans hard <[link removed]> - If you think public policy doesn’t really affect you or your family, take a quick glance at your retirement account – but you may want to sit
down first. Those accounts have taken a beating lately because of the misguided policies emanating from Washington, D.C., and the result is a dramatic reduction in wealth for the average American family. Heritage Expert: EJ
Antoni <[link removed]>
North
Korea’s Growing ICBM Threat: How America And South Korea Should Respond <[link removed]> - North Korea’s steadily expanding long-range missile arsenal <[link removed]> risks overwhelming the limited number of ground-based interceptors defending the American homeland. This, in turn, will magnify escalating allied concerns that Washington, if faced with a credible nuclear threat from the regime, may not come to their defense against North Korean aggression. Heritage Expert: Bruce
Klingner <[link removed]>
Maintain
Tight Banking Controls On Iraq To Defund Iran <[link removed]> - Iraqi Foreign Minister Fuad Hussein is in Washington, D.C., to, according to a White House statement <[link removed]>, “ensure that Iraq’s economy is delivering for the Iraqi people.” Translation: The Iraqi delegation wants the U.S. Treasury and Federal Reserve Bank of New York to relax stringent rules recently imposed on Iraq’s dollar transactions. Heritage Expert: Max
Primorac <[link removed]>
Conservatives
must wake up to the threat of government-endorsed racial categorization <[link removed]> - Conservatives haven’t been as interested as progressives are in capturing the federal bureaucracy, or at least have been much less successful. That goes double for the Census Bureau <[link removed]> , whose committee on race has long been the play-thing of sociology professors and affinity groups. Heritage Expert: Mike
Gonzalez <[link removed]>
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