Pacific Research Institute

Across the Country, Unions are Waging War on Charter Schools

March 18, 2019

Education

A combination of powerful aggressive teacher unions and compliant state and local politicians have produced a perfect storm that threatens to destroy the future of charter schools and the children who benefit from them. Charter schools are publicly funded schools independent of school districts, which have...

Medicare for All Won’t Result in Better Health Outcomes

March 18, 2019

Healthcare

New Jersey Senator Cory Booker claims Medicare for All would "save lives." Vermont's own Senator Bernie Sanders promises it would end "the disgrace of tens of thousands of Americans dying every year from preventable deaths." But a new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research finds little evidence to support those...

Green New Deal would cause a new Depression

March 13, 2019

Environment

Democrat firebrands Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed Markey just unveiled their “Green New Deal,” a multi-trillion-dollar effort to overhaul the energy industry and slash America’s net greenhouse gas emissions to zero within a decade. The legislation’s title is fitting. The original New Deal failed to...

America’s Citrus Fruits Are Being Decimated By An Incurable Disease — We Need GM Science to Save Them

March 12, 2019

Healthcare

Farmers in the major U.S. citrus-producing regions—Florida, California, Texas and Arizona, in particular—are facing a plague of epic proportions. Oranges and a range of other citrus fruits are being decimated by an incurable disease, a lethal, bacterial infection known as "citrus greening"—or Huanglongbing. It is spread by...

Feds battle opioid abuse with a circular firing squad

March 11, 2019

Healthcare

By Henry I. Miller, M.S., M.D. and Josh Bloom, Ph.D. The ongoing battle to control opioid addiction has not gone well. Many of the government’s efforts have been medically and scientifically flawed and unproductive. Some have even been counterproductive. Public policy is in disarray. A Feb. 1 article in...

Research integrity and why bad science has become such a problem

March 11, 2019

Healthcare

By S. Stanley Young and Henry I. Miller, M.S., M.D. Science depends on corroboration — that is, researchers verify others' results, often making incremental advances as they do so. The nature of science dictates that no research paper is ever considered to be the final word,...

Protect Patients By Repealing the Medical Device Tax

March 11, 2019

Business Economics

You don’t make health care more affordable by increasing its cost. Yet that is precisely what the currently suspended medical device tax threatens unless Congress permanently repeals it. Although permanent repeal failed in the last Congress, Senators Pat Toomey (R-PA) and Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) have...

The FDA has problems — Here are the qualities the next commissioner must have to fix them

March 10, 2019

Healthcare

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is the nation's most ubiquitous regulatory agency. It oversees a vast array of medical and food products that account for 25 cents of every consumer dollar, with a value of over a trillion dollars annually. And the agency has problems. It's...

Americans Who Want Socialism Should Consider Moving to California

March 10, 2019

California

Trump adviser and distinguished economist Larry Kudlow wants to put socialism on trial, challenge it, debate it, rebut it — and convict it. “I don’t want us to stand idly by,” Kudlow said at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Maryland. “I don’t want to let...

Medicare expansion would make socialized health insurance inevitable

March 07, 2019

Healthcare

Several lawmakers want to pull more people into Medicare. This would hurt anyone with private insurance, and it would inevitably lead to single-payer, government funded healthcare, which would deprive people of any choice over their healthcare. Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., recently introduced S.470, a bill that would...