In The News

“So much of our land was closed to development,” President Trump observed in a recent energy speech. “We’re opening it up.” If he makes good on that promise, it will give the economy a major boost, along with millions of royalty owners.

To be clear, this is not the free-market approach that many of us would like, but neither the House nor the Senate has enough votes to return health insurance to a free market, said Merrill Matthews. What Cruz is trying to do is create a situation where the vast majority of people in the individual health-insurance market would have a wide range of affordable health-insurance options — just like they used to before Obamacare.”

Trump administration officials have drafted a presidential executive order intended to address the cost of and access to prescription drugs.  That’s good news, because the left plans to make drug costs and access one of its major political bludgeons.

If Republican lawmakers had stuck to their first strategy of immediately repealing the Affordable Care Act without worrying about a replacement that bill would probably be law by now, said Institute for Policy Innovation resident scholar Merrill Matthews.

Failing to gain the votes needed to repeal and replace Obamacare, President Donald Trump and some Senate Republicans, including Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), are today calling for a return to the original Republican strategy of passing repeal legislation immediately, and then put together a replacement bill, perhaps in August.

The Trump administration’s ambitious agenda for unleashing, rather than obstructing, U.S. energy is a game-changer for not only promoting the U.S. economy and creating jobs, but a stabilizing factor for peace around the world, said IPI's Merrill Matthews, Ph.D.

The Senate may come to terms on a healthcare bill, but one observer warns it won't stop the collapse of the individual health insurance market.

As countries try to reduce their carbon emissions in accord with their Paris agreement commitments, transitioning to natural gas power generation may be one of their first steps. 

The individual mandate has not been effective in convincing healthy people to buy insurance, especially if they don't qualify for subsidies, or have smaller subsidies, experts agree.

"I was never optimistic that was going to work," said Merrill Matthews. "My statement is most major legislation starts out asking what's good policy and ends up asking what's good politics," he said. "We're at the what's good politics now."

The information about Californians moving to Texas confirms what some people already know. "We've been identifying that situation for some time," says Merrill Matthews, PhD, a resident scholar for the Texas-based Institute for Policy Innovation.