The Road to Revival

Policy experts and academics look at ways to put America back on track in four crucial areas.

Support Small Business in Health-Care Debate

Our health care system is broken, but for Virginia’s small, family businesses, health care reforms that saddle them with higher taxes and burdensome mandates would make things worse, not better.

Unless changes lead to more affordable insurance, more choices for employers and employees, and more competition among health plans, reform legislation will hurt small business—and that, in turn, will hurt all of Virginia.

READ MORE

Julia Ciarlo Hammond is Virginia state director of the National Federation of Independent Business. She lives in Richmond.

Respect Madison’s Republic

If the American people know more today than they ever wanted to know about financial markets, corporate compensation practices, the mortgage and automobile industries, the national cost of health care, and consumer indebtedness, public officials have done little to heighten our collective understanding of the constitutional system—and especially the federalistic side of that system. This is discouraging and dangerous.

We have become increasingly nearsighted when it comes to our wants and needs, and exceedingly myopic when it comes to understanding constitutional values and institutions.

READ MORE

David Marion is Elliott Professor of Government and director of the Wilson Center for Leadership in the Public Interest at Hampden-Sydney College.

Preserve Medicare Reform for Seniors

Something in the congressional health reform plans will require you to change the coverage or the doctor you have. You will be affected if you are among the growing number of Medicare beneficiaries who have chosen a Medicare Advantage private health plan. If certain provisions become law, Medicare payments to these plans will be cut, causing a reduction in benefits and physician networks.

More than 150,000 Medicare beneficiaries in Virginia would be subject to these restrictions. Sens. Mark Warner and Jim Webb will soon vote on the proposed payment cuts.

READ MORE

Louis F. Rossiter, Ph.D., is a research professor for the Thomas Jefferson Program in Public Policy at the College of William and Mary.

Recognize Government’s Housing Policy Mistakes

Recent reports that the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) will suffer default rates of more than 20 percent on the 2007 and 2008 loans it guaranteed has raised questions once again about the government’s role in the financial crisis and its efforts to achieve social purposes by distorting the financial system.

The FHA’s function is to guarantee mortgages of low-income borrowers (the mortgages are then sold through securitizations by Ginnie Mae) and thus to take reasonable credit risks in the interests of making mortgage credit available to the nation’s low-income citizens.

READ MORE

Peter J. Wallison is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. This column originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal.