In The News

President Donald Trump on Tuesday signed an executive order that may slow the closure of some US coal-fired power plants and will begin a lengthy process of rescinding much of former President Barack Obama's climate change policies.

“As humans change the landscape through urbanization, the mosquito populations also change, favoring those feeding on humans, which also appear to be major disease carriers,” said Matthews. “DDT was used heavily in the 1940s to the 1960s because it was cheap and very effective, and it apparently decimated some U.S. mosquito populations so they are only just now recovering. But even though several countries are using DDT, at least in a restricted way, there remains heavy international pressure for them to not do so.”

Although legislative efforts to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act have stalled, the Trump administration can make regulatory modifications to the health care reform law to keep insurance companies in the individual exchanges and strengthen the markets, observers said.

As Republican leaders continue to work to garner support from the House Freedom Caucus for the American Health Care Act, IPI resident scholar Dr. Merrill Matthews said the Freedom Caucus is "doing exactly the right thing."

As Institute for Policy Innovation scholar Merrill Matthews recently noted in these pages, a number of states have tried to impose single-payer health plans on their citizens and failed.

The state of Texas has a compelling interest in protecting its residents against municipal actions that erode economic and social freedom, including municipal do-gooders. The legislature should craft alternate legislation that is at the same time broader and better than the well-intended but wrongly targeted bathroom bill.  

Republicans need a new revenue stream to pay for their health care bill, and expanded oil and gas exploration could provide much, and perhaps most, of that funding.

The GOP plan could just repeat the same ACA mistakes, said IPI's Dr. Merrill Matthews. "Instead of letting health insurers do what insurers do underwrite Republicans are retaining Obamacare's guaranteed issue provision."

Leaders on the Hill, in industry and some in public health praised Trump's pick of Gottlieb — a former FDA and CMS official, who's also a physician and a prominent health policy commentator — to run the agency. "The reason I voted through my objections with Trump is that a presidential election selects a team, not one person," said Tom Giovanetti, head of the conservative Institute of Policy Innovation. "Scott Gottlieb is another example."

Political pressure from environmental groups likely trumped science in the agency’s latest report examining fracking and its risks to drinking water, according to the Institute for Policy Innovation (IPI), a Texas-based think tank.