by Charles Katebi With just two weeks remaining in the legislative session, the forces of socialized medicine were defeated, at least for now. After losing decisively in the Wyoming Senate and finding no traction in the Wyoming House, Medicaid Expansion supporters tried to ram this policy through with an amendment to the budget bill. Amendment 31 o...

If the proponents of Medicaid Expansion get what they want, and if the SHARE Plan developed by the Wyoming Department of Health is enacted, we can - the report says - expect approximately 17,600 Wyomingites to enroll at an annual cost of $110 million. That is a cost of $6,250 per enrollee per year, or $520.83 per month. There was a point in time, n...

One of the biggest problems with tax-paid, government-provided entitlements is that government makes promises without a credible source of funding. The universal approach to entitlements is that legislators identify a problem, assume government is the best vehicle for a solution, then craft a bill, pass it into law and go home to their voters and t...

It was painful to sit in December's Labor Committee meeting and listen to the Department of Health and others advocate for Medicaid expansion. This is such a terrible idea in so many ways that it is hard to know where to begin explaining what is wrong with it. We get help from Gillette's Doctor John Mansell, who is on the front lines treating patie...

Happy New Year, taxpayers! If you live in Wyoming you are probably very happy not to have to pay income taxes. Make the most of it for now - you never know when the state may find itself at a point where it needs to introduce a personal income tax. Actually, strike that. We can foresee the income tax with fairly good accuracy. Let me first stress t...

On November 26, 2014, the Wyoming Department of Health presented its SHARE report, a 32-page long argument for Medicaid expansion. The report makes a pro-expansion case that appears to sprawl in all directions, but perhaps the biggest selling point is that Medicaid expansion will create hundreds of new jobs and add millions of dollars to the state'...

Lorraine Quarberg and Glenn Woods from Boldrepublic.com discuss Gov. Mead's position on Medicaid expansion, and what to do if you are unhappy about what your state government is doing. 

In 2012 the Supreme Court ruled that the individual mandate in the Affordable Care Act - Obamacare - was constitutional. This was not surprising: after all, since the 1930s the federal government has mandated that Americans buy retirement benefits through Social Security. Now there is another legal challenge to the ACA on its way through the court ...