Articles

Writing today in the Enid News & Eagle, OCPA president Jonathan Small critiques the Oklahoma Health Care Authority's latest proposal to expand Medicaid in the state and explains options to reform the program instead.

Want to hurt kids? Put state bureaucrats in charge of evaluating the schools in school choice programs.

We hear a lot of talk these days about popular anger at elites. This rage has surprised not a few of our leaders. They, including the members of the Oklahoma Supreme Court, were especially shocked by the popular revulsion at the Court’s Ten Commandments decision. We witnessed a genuine “pitchfork” moment, where ordinary people are outraged by policies imposed on them by elites and moved to loudly say so.

There are a number of good reasons to support creation of an Education Savings Account program that provides Oklahoma parents a portion of their child’s per-pupil allocation for education to use for public or private school tuition and other services. But one of the best reasons is that no one school can meet the needs of all children who live in the local area, regardless of the best efforts of those who work in that school.

The Oklahoma Health Care Authority (OHCA) has proposed a plan to “rebalance” Medicaid eligibility in the Sooner State. But this “rebalancing” is really just an Obamacare expansion by another name. The plan has three major components: (1) increasing taxes to raise reimbursement rates for traditional Medicaid, (2) shifting enrollees (women and children) out of Medicaid in 2019, and (3) expanding Medicaid eligibility to a new class of able-bodied adults under Obamacare.

If you’re white you shouldn’t sing a Rihanna song. That’s what a white student in a human relations theory class at the University of Oklahoma was told during a recent lesson on “privilege” and “microaggressions.”

In the Tulsa World this last weekend, OCPA’s Brandon Dutcher wrote about the fiscal impacts of educational choice programs, pointing to the cost savings happening for choice programs at the higher-ed level.

Oklahoma has become known for a number of efforts recently to implement policy with the intention of promoting freedom in the delivery and payment of health care. Oklahoma lawmakers have passed laws that protect the ability of medical providers and their patients to negotiate with each other and set up payment arrangements that benefit both parties.

Recently, the Oklahoma Health Care Authority announced another scheme to entangle Oklahoma with the Medicaid expansion proposed in the federal Affordable Care Act. The OHCA has attempted this a few times, and policymakers have wisely rejected the various proposals, refusing to repeat the mistakes of history.