Giving Away Money Won’t End Poverty, but It Will Destroy Something Special About America

COMMENTARY BY

Jarrett Stepman

One of the left’s hot new policy ideas is simply to give money to everyone to end poverty.

And of course, California is leading the charge.

Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., proposed a national plan last week that would give families making under $100,000 a tax credit of $500 per month, which adds up to $6,000 a year.

Harris’ plan, though vague on details, is quite similar to a policy idea that’s becoming increasingly popular.

Universal basic income, or UBI, has a wide variety of supporters from radical leftists to tech CEOs. It’s essentially a no-strings attached money giveaway to ensure that nobody falls below the poverty line.

Even a few conservative and libertarian-leaning thinkers, like Charles Murray, argue that the universal basic income could be an improvement over the current welfare system. Their reasoning is that it essentially does a better job of cutting out bureaucratic middlemen—though that rests on the unlikely assumption that all other welfare programs would get eliminated.

Proponents of UBI argue that it will stave off the effects of automation and provide an efficient way to prevent poverty in the turbulent, globalized economy of the future. The idea is that middle and working-class jobs will simply disappear, leaving wide swaths of society unable to make ends meet.

It has certainly been gaining steam as a serious policy proposal.

Stockton, California, is set to roll out a UBI program in November, though it will generally be limited to a few families. Other cities might experiment with it too. Chicago aims to be the largest city to try such a program.

Even former President Barack Obama jumped in on the idea and voiced support for a basic income in a July lecture in South Africa.

But the concept of the universal basic income isn’t a new one. It has been tried already and hasn’t exactly met the grand expectations of its advocates.

Finland launched a basic income program in 2017, which was set to run for two years. It gave 2,000 unemployed people a monthly income equivalent to $678 with no strings attached.

The program was ditched before it was ever completed.

One of the primary reasons Finland pulled the plug is that taxpayers simply became fed up with paying people not to work—especially with the looming threat of huge tax increases to enlarge the program.

As The New York Times noted: “Many people in Finland—and in other lands—chafe at the idea of handing out cash without requiring that people work.”

In addition, taxpayers balked at a 30 percent tax increase that was suggested to make the program universal.

A study by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development suggested that the program would require a 30 percent tax increase to be made universal, and that it would actually raise Finland’s poverty rate from 11.4 percent to 14.1 percent.

Unsurprisingly, people love giving away money until they realize they are the ones footing the bill.

After just a year, the Finnish government put a halt to the program and added basic work requirements to unemployment benefits to encourage recipients to find a job.

But one op-ed in The New York Times denied that UBI was the problem, arguing instead that Finland simply failed to implement it correctly. The authors wrote that if the government had just expanded the program, it all would have succeeded.

This is a pretty common fallback for all of those who prefer big-government solutions to solve all of our problems.

But, as President Ronald Reagan once said, “the more the planners plan, the more the plans fail.”

Given the bad early warning signs from the program, it makes sense to pull the plug and not risk a catastrophic and incredibly costly failure.

The U.S. has also experimented with basic income policies. The federal government created a test program used across many states in the 1970s. The result was that they created a disincentive to work, and wages dropped.

A study of the results found: “For each $1,000 in added benefits, there was an average $660 reduction in earnings, meaning that $3,000 in government benefits was required for a net increase of $1,000 in family income.”

Currently, most basic income proposals are at the local level, but some argue that it would be a good idea on a national scale.

Of course, creating such a program would be astronomically expensive.

One estimate by the investment management firm, Bridgewater Associates, put the cost at $3.8 trillion per year if each citizen is to get a basic income of $12,000, according to the New York Post. The entire current federal budget is just over $4 trillion.

The largest problem with the basic income is ultimately not the cost, but its potential impact on American culture. What happens after we’ve had a generation, or multiple generations, being rewarded for not working?

Certainly, we’ve seen this problem with welfare in general, which is why we’ve seen a continual push for work requirements which have successfully moved able-bodied adults off the public dole and back into the workforce.

Giving a check to every American, regardless of need or situation, risks creating a kind of warehoused society whereby one class of people works while the other skates by mostly on public money, seeing no incentive to work and better their condition and status.

The Wall Street Journal’s Andy Kessler said it best, calling UBI essentially the gateway drug to socialism.

“Progress is about incentives,” Kessler wrote. “The reason UBI will fail is the cycle of dependency built into it. It is a gateway drug to collectivism. Turning the U.S. into Venezuela is a universally bad idea.”

If something like this were implemented on a national scale, it would pull us far away from the culture of hard work and the self-made man that has defined the best in American civilization.

Trump’s Proposed Rollback of Transgender Policy Is Good News for Many Who Are Suffering

By Walt Heyer  The Daily Signal

Thank you, Mr. President, for moving to make male and female great again.

In the last few years, biological girls have seen their rights violated in school bathrooms and in sports. National confusion has ensued ever since the previous administration decided to reinterpret Title IX’s sex anti-discrimination clause to include self-proclaimed “gender identity.”

That may soon come to an end under the Trump administration.

The Department of Health and Human Services has drafted a memo that would reverse the Obama administration’s action and return the legal definition of “sex” under Title IX civil rights law to what its authors meant: sex rooted in unchanging biological reality. According to The New York Times, the memo was drafted last spring and has been circulating ever since.

Title IX bans sex discrimination in education programs that receive government financial assistance, meaning schools have to abide by the government’s interpretation of Title IX or risk losing federal funds.

When the Obama administration announced it was including “gender identity” under the word “sex,” many schools felt they had to treat gender identity as the standard for determining access to bathrooms, sports teams, etc. The result was headlines like “Transgender Athletes Dominate High School Women’s Sports.”

The memo spells out the proposed definition of “sex” as applied to federal statutes as “a person’s status as male or female based on immutable biological traits identifiable by or before birth.” The proposed definition won’t include a “select a gender” option, as was offered under the Obama administration.

>>> A Former Transgender Person’s Take on Obama’s Bathroom Directive

This is simply a return to reality. Sex is an immutable biological reality, while gender identity is a social construct that can change over time. The two terms are not interchangeable. The authors of Title IX meant biological sex, not gender identity.

The Obama administration’s conflation of the two was not just legally problematic—it also pushed transgender ideology further into the mainstream. That’s regrettable, because transgender ideology has real and harmful effects on people who are suffering and need help.

When individuals try to live out life in an ideology that has no basis in biological fact, the consequences are stark.

I know, because I lived the trans life for eight years.

I have received hundreds of regret letters from trans people who now realize—too late—that gender-pretending is damaging. Regretters have called gender change “the biggest mistake of my life.” The late transgender movie actress Alexis Arquette called her gender transition “bulls***” because no one can really change their gender.

So many have written me personally about the unhappy consequences of imitating the opposite gender for so many years, telling of lives needlessly torn apart and thoughts of suicide. I put those emails into a book, “Trans Life Survivors,” which shows the human toll caused by encouraging distressed people to undergo permanent surgeries and take powerful hormones without considering other causes and treatments.

>>> My ‘Sex Change’ Was a Myth. Why Trying to Change One’s Sex Will Always Fail.

This past weekend, I opened my email as I do each morning and found another message from a person who had ignored biology and went head-first into trans ideology. Now, this person wants out:

I am now 40 years old, post op male to female transgender person. And to put it simply, very miserable in life now. I have followed you on YouTube … and totally agree with your theories! I am at my wits’ end with life and what I have done to myself. It’s an inspiration to see and read about what I would call “survivors!”

Many trans folks, after years of “living the life,” now want to detransition. Many report to me that they were sexually abused, raped, or molested at a young age—in one case, as a toddler.

Teenage girls are flocking to gender change as an escape. One 15-year-old girl, who the gender experts diagnosed with gender dysphoria, explained to her mother that she wanted to “erase my past” because she was sexually abused by her dad.

In another case, a young 14-year-old girl confessed that “I used being trans to try and escape being scared about being small and weak. I thought that if I presented myself as a man I’d be safer.”

Another girl’s mother wrote that her daughter was raped at age 19 and desperately “is trying to remove any connection to her being female visually or sexually.”

This is the kind of suffering that has driven many to change genders. As a society, we need to honestly consider: Is changing genders an effective long-term treatment for past sexual abuse and feelings of insecurity?

Obviously not.

>>> I Wish I Had Been Told About These Risks Before I Had Gender Surgery

Billy, another trans life survivor, had been sexually abused at age 11 during a summer swimming camp by his diving coach. Billy explained to me that after the abuse, he hated his genitalia and wanted to become a female. Abuse can do that.

Billy, like so many abused as children, was diagnosed by the “gender specialist” with gender dysphoria and given cross-sex hormones and reassignment surgery. He lived fully as a transgender female until regret set in.

Now he has detransitioned back to male and is married—a true trans life survivor who prefers to live a biologically authentic life.

Trans ideology ruined the life of another friend, born male and now living as a trans female. After being diagnosed with gender dysphoria, his excellent employment allowed him financially to transition from male to female. But sex change regret has set in, and now he wants to detransition.

This nice-looking, tall, slender, intelligent transgender person is another who had been sexually abused as a child.

Too many people tell me that even when they establish a history of sexual abuse and communicate that to the gender therapist, the therapist disregards it. If a client wants to change their gender, the therapist will affirm them without reservation and help them down that path.

As a former trans person, and as someone who daily receives stories of physical and emotional devastation wrought by trans ideology, I look forward to a federal definition of sex as being rooted in immutable biology, without the option of being self-selected.

The science is absolutely clear. Sex doesn’t change over time, even with hormones and surgery—and that’s a good thing.

Caravan Migrants Coming ‘From All Over the World’ for jobs

Judicial Watch EXCLUSIVE Video: Caravan Migrants Coming ‘From All Over the World’

October 23, 2018

Large numbers of migrants from various countries–including Brazil and even as far as China & India–are traveling through Central America to the United States.
Judicial Watch is currently reporting on the ground in Guatemala.

Honey, we broke the Democrats

By Ben Crystal

Honey, we broke the Democrats 

Welp, it looks like we broke the Democrats. I assumed they wouldn't handle the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh well; after all, they haven't handled anything well since Nana Hilldawg's campaign turned in to a Buster Keaton routine. But their spectacular failure to keep Kavanaugh off the Supreme Court has them a pair of rocket-powered roller skates away from going full Wile E. Coyote. And if their plan for lurching farther left in the future is anything to go by, they're already thumbing through the ACME catalog.

After weeks of accusing Kavanaugh of everything short of the rape of the Sabine women, our liberal friends have resorted to ploys like sending beheading videos to Senator Cory Gardner's (R-CO) wife. And don't think whichever unhinged lefty who sent it along is some kind of outlier. We've already watched as Democrat-incited wingnuts have done everything from doxing conservatives' kids to opening fire at baseball practice. And we've already heard their leaders, from Rep. Maxine Waters to Nana herself, using the most dehumanizing language possible to openly encourage violent reprisals against anyone who strays too far to starboard.

But Kavanaugh booked their tickets to Crazytown. Their theatrics over the past weeks have been cringe worthy. And to be honest, given their close association with Hollywood, there's just no excuse other than a complete and total mental breakdown. For the love of all that is holy, Senator Dianne Feinstein (D- Beijing) planted Alyssa Milano behind Kavanaugh during his second appearance. These people hold fundraising dinners at the Malibu palaces of studio heads with more money than Croesus, and the best the woman — whose own ham-fisted attempt at subterfuge created this debacle in the first place — can come up with is a cameo by Sam from Who's the Boss?

We're a month away from the latest midterm election to be called "the biggest election of our lifetime," and the left has come up with "shriek like banshees while cut-rate comediennes control our messaging." That's terrific, as long as your goal is to dominate the "shrieking banshees who take cut-rate comediennes seriously" voting bloc. But that shrieking is a big part of why Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) told the left to get bent over Kavanaugh. If a milquetoast Republican like Collins was fed up enough with the threats and insults, imagine how the 70 million or so Americans to Collins' right must be enjoying them. And if a milquetoast Republican like Collins standing up to Amy Schumer and a bunch of hate group sheep dressed like extras from a Hulu miniseries can put one guy on the Supreme Court, imagine what those 70 million Americans can — will — do.

Before the summer began, most pundits figured the Left would swing Congress back to port; a combination of the usual midterm blahs that always affect the party in the White House and overconfidence in the effectiveness of the liberals' outraged bleating. Even as the bleating turned to beatings and Democrat control of the Senate began to fade from "daydream" to "fever dream" they actually ramped up the crazy, as evidenced by The New York Times' editorial over the weekend, "White Women, Come Get Your People." The paper of record, likely the most respected of the liberal mouthpieces, called Senator Collins a "gender traitor," and proclaimed white women "...the kind of women who think that being falsely accused of rape is almost as bad as being raped." I don't even know any men who think that.

I was already dubious about their prospects of retaking the House, much less the Senate, especially if they're going to stick with hurling histrionic epithets at everyone who thinks Americans can do better than a hissy-fit of a political party led by the chick from Trainwreck. These people are cracked eggs. Forget the House; they need a hospital.

Claim From Left: Requiring Voter Registration Is ‘Voter Suppression’ Tool

Hans von Spakovsky The Daily Signal 

As Election Day rapidly approaches, the radical Left is making yet another absurd claim: that requiring voter registration is a “voter suppression” tool.

Registration is essential to assure the integrity of elections. It allows election officials to verify the eligibility and identity of voters. It also enables them to make sure they will have enough ballots in polling places that use paper ballots — and that’s the majority of jurisdictions across the U.S.

The Washington Times recently reported that the Texas Democratic Party “asked noncitizens to register to vote, sending out applications to immigrants with the box [on] citizenship already checked ‘Yes.’” And Texas is not the only state where the accuracy and integrity of the voter-registration process is imperiled.

To improve the accuracy of the state’s records, Georgia legislators last year passed a law requiring voter-registration-application information to match a “driver’s license, state ID card or Social Security record.” Inconsistencies can cause a voter’s registration to be flagged as “pending” while the discrepancy is investigated.

Stacey Abrams, the Democratic candidate for governor, accuses the Republican candidate and current secretary of state, Brian Kemp, of “voter suppression” simply for complying with this law.

But here’s the rub: A “pending” status does not bar anyone from voting. All they need do is “show a government photo ID that substantially matches the registration application.” Even if the voter’s information can’t be verified on the spot, the voter can cast a provisional ballot that will be counted once the registration information is verified by local election officials.

How can that be “voter suppression?”

So why the uproar about voter registration? Abrams claims that Kemp’s effort to enforce the law is an “intentional move” to suppress votes, especially of minority voters. Kemp has refuted those claims and says that application discrepancies that make registrations “pending” are due to “sloppy forms” submitted by the New Georgia Project, a group founded by Abrams herself in 2014 that “set out to sign up 800,000 new young and minority voters.”

The real issue here is a disregard for election integrity. And that includes those who are calling for an end to traditional voter registration in favor of automatic voter registration based on government databases such as driver’s licenses and property-tax records.

While government records are useful for verifying voter registrations, research shows they would be ineffective in creating accurate voter rolls. One of the most glaring problems with these databases is that they cannot verify a basic eligibility requirement for voting — citizenship. Noncitizens can receive driver’s licenses in all 50 states, and illegal aliens are receiving licenses in more than a dozen states, including California. Noncitizens also pay property taxes. Automatic voter registration would register all such ineligible individuals.

Moreover, individuals can be listed multiple times in different government databases that would be a source for automatic registration. For example, one person may pay taxes in multiple counties and multiple states, raising the possibility that he could vote multiple times, in multiple jurisdictions.

Also, voter registration requires a signature to verify petitions, ballot initiatives, and absentee ballots. Many government databases don’t contain signatures and thus would be useless for verifying signatures.

Such issues came to light recently in California, where the DMV admitted that, in just the last two months, it had mistakenly registered 24,500 ineligible individuals, including noncitizens. The problem arose because of the state’s new voter-registration process, which automatically registers people who renew or replace their driver’s licenses. The error came to light only after a Canadian citizen told the media he had been improperly registered by the state.

No evidence exists that eliminating voter registration will increase turnout. In fact, Census Bureau data from the 2008 election found that individuals who were not registered to vote did not cite registration problems as the reason for not voting. Instead, 46 percent were not interested in the election and 35 percent listed other reasons, such as “not being eligible to vote, thinking their vote would not make a difference, not meeting residency requirements, or difficulty with English.” The biggest reason for individuals’ not registering and not voting is a lack of interest in politics and candidates, which has nothing to do with registration.

The registration fight in Georgia is just part of a larger effort by the Left to undo any reforms that increase the security and integrity of the voter-registration and election process. Ensuring election integrity begins with creating and maintaining accurate voter rolls. Voter registration is an essential part of the process, and it should be a bipartisan effort.

Originally published by National Review.

Kavanaugh hearing confirms the existence of the Deep State

Kavanaugh hearing confirms the
existence of the Deep State  By Bob Livingston
The Kabuki act that was the confirmation process of Brett Kavanaugh revealed something far more important than that underaged children of privilege growing up in the shadows of the District of Criminals were undisciplined and regularly engaged in parent-endorsed, if not parent-encouraged, debauchery. Unfortunately, not one in a million have grasped it, focusing instead on the licentious details Democrat senators directed them toward and whether one story was more credible than the other.

I have told you before that there are two governments in America; the one you see and the one you don't. The one you see is the politicians and the courts. They are actors who give the illusion that you have a constitutional republic based on the rule of law and that you have some input in governmental processes.

The other government is unseen. It has many names and many elements that work against the best interests of the people. It is incestuous. Among its names are shadow government, powers that be and the simple term "they." I call it the Deep State.

It is made up of faceless bureaucrats, crony corporations, the power elite, behind-the-scenes political operatives and lawyers, the banksters, the vast U.S. intelligence apparatus, the military-industrial complex (as revealed by President Eisenhower) and the globalists found in think tanks, the Council on Foreign Relations and Trilateral Commission.

The cover was pulled off a few of them these last days and weeks. They've been circling around the Christine Blasey Ford narrative like flies around a carcass. And, she, in fact, may even be one of them.

Despite hours of investigation by the Senate Judiciary Committee and the FBI, none of Ford's accusations could be corroborated. The witnesses named by Ford – and by the second Kavanaugh accuser, Deborah Ramirez – denied knowledge of the activities the two women described, according to released or leak portions of the FBI investigation.

One of Ford's witnesses is Leland Keyser, the sole female "witness" Ford named. Ford described Keyser as her best friend in their high school days at Holton-Arms preparatory school. Keyser is a former professional golfer who is now in poor health. Her health was the excuse Ford used to explain away Keyser's refusal to corroborate Ford's claims.

Keyser's friends told The Daily Mail that Keyser was "blindsided" by Ford's pulling her into the case. Ford friend Keyser was married to Bob Beckel for 10 years until they divorced in 2002.

Beckel worked for the State Department under Jimmy Carter, managed Walter Mondale's president campaign, managed other Democrat politico campaigns and worked as a lobbyist for many years. He now works as a political pundit on Fox News.

Ford's friend Monica McClean is one of the "beach friends" with whom she discussed the possibility of coming forward with her accusations against Kavanaugh. She's also the woman Ford coached on how to take a polygraph, according to a former Ford boyfriend.

McClean worked at the FBI for 24 years, retiring in 2016. She was a FBI field rep in the office of former U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara. Prior to becoming U.S. Attorney, Bharara was chief counsel to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (Communist-NY), and played an important role on the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Keyser told investigators this week that McClean had been pressuring her tochange her story and admit that she knew about Kavanaugh's attempt to assault Ford 35 years ago. Her former partner in New York is Jim Margolin. Margolin is still with the FBI and is part of the Robert Mueller investigation into former Donald Trump fixer Michael Cohen.

Ford's lawyer, Debra Katz, is a longtime leftist political operative and fundraiser for SHillary Clinton. She is also vice chair of the George Soros-funded Project on Government Oversight. Soros money has gone to protestors interrupting the Kavanaugh nomination, and those women who cowed Senator Jeff Flake (Coward-Arizona) in an elevator last week were Soros operatives.

Ford's brother, Ralph Blasey III, was formerly a lawyer with the leftist law firm Baker, Hostetler, which created Fusion GPS, the Democrat opposition research organization that employs or employed the wife of FBI agent Bruce Ohr and which created the phony Trump-Russia dossier. Blasey left Baker, Hostetler in 2004. The building in which the offices of Baker, Hostetler reside include CIA front companies Red Coats, Inc., Admiral Security Services and Datawatch. The building is owned by Ford's father, Ralph Blasey II.

But Kavanaugh himself is a Deep State swamp creature. As told by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, the international business editor of The Daily Telegraph and long-time reporter on American government, while Kavanaugh worked for Ken Starr on the Bill Clinton Whitewater investigation, Kavanaugh actively worked to discredit a witness in the Vince Foster death case. The witness, Patrick Knowlton, was the first person at the scene of Foster's death at Fort Marcy Park.

Knowlton later sued FBI agents he claimed were working for Kavanaugh, alleging witness tampering and conspiracy to violate his civil rights. Kavanaugh later wrote the Starr Report on Foster's death, covering up the fact that Foster was murdered and his body was dumped in the park.

Kavanaugh, while working as legal counsel in the White House of George Bush the lesser, also helped push the PATRIOT Act, which destroyed due process and 4th and 5th Amendments.

Kavanaugh's lawyer for his Senate Judiciary process is Beth Wilkinson, a longtime Democrat lawyer who represented several top aides to Hillary Clinton during the FBI investigation into Clinton's homebrew server. She is married to David Gregory of CNN. Wilkinson was also on the prosecution team that convicted Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh.

That implicates her in the coverup of this false flag operation, protecting the FBI and then-U.S. Attorney Eric Holder, who provided the explosives for McVeigh and his partner, Terry Nichols.

That there exists a nebulous group or groups actively working against the wishes of the American people is a difficult concept for a people as conditioned as Americans are to grasp. But anyone telling you there is no Deep State is either blind and ignorant or is lying to you. 

Congress Can Slash the Cost of Health Care Premiums by as Much as a Third

COMMENTARY BY

Doug Badger  The Daily Signal

A proposal to repeal Obamacare entitlements and replace them with grants to states would reduce premiums for individual coverage by as much as 32 percent, according to an analysis by the Center for Health and Economy.

The Health Care Choices Proposal also would modestly reduce the deficit, increase the number of people with private health insurance, and cut Medicaid spending, according to Center for Health and Economy.

The proposal, the product of national and state think tanks, policy analysts, and others in the conservative community, embarks on a new path to empower consumers and return authority to the states to provide people with better and more affordable health coverage options.

The Center for Health and Economy developed the study, at the commissioning of The Heritage Foundation, by applying its independent model to the published Health Care Choices Proposal.

Unlike previous Obamacare replacement proposals, which the Congressional Budget Office forecasts would increase the number of uninsured by 20 million or more, coverage would dip by less than 1 million under the proposal in 2028, and enrollment would hold steady earlier.

The proposal’s consumer-centered policies also would induce changes in consumer behavior that would reduce health care consumption and lead to greater medical productivity, the study found.

The plan calls for repeal of the Obamacare Medicaid expansion and entitlements to premium subsidies, to be replaced with grants to states to assist the sick and needy.

Unlike current law, where federal spending increases dollar for dollar with premium hikes and Medicaid spending is unlimited, states would receive fixed amounts of federal money, which they would use to develop consumer-centered approaches to make health insurance affordable regardless of income or health status.

The proposal would free states from Obamacare regulations that dictate the kinds of products consumers can buy. States no longer would have to require insurers to charge unfairly high premiums to young adults or group all customers into a single risk pool.

Instead, states would use a portion of their grant to establish high-risk pools, re-insurance, or similar arrangements to protect those with burdensome medical care costs without saddling the healthy with unaffordable premiums. These reforms are the major reasons premiums would drop by 15 percent-32 percent, according to the Center for Health and Economy.

New choices for consumers would increase private coverage and reduce reliance on Medicaid. The proposal would allow people who qualify for subsidies to apply the assistance to the arrangement of their choice, such as short-term limited duration policies and direct primary care. Those changes would reduce Medicaid enrollment and increase the number of people with individual insurance.

The net result, according to the study, would be that 245.6 million nonelderly people would be insured in 2028, compared with 246.4 million under current law, a reduction of fewer than 1 million covered.

Congressional Republicans, who abandoned efforts to repeal and replace Obamacare more than a year ago, are weeks away from a midterm election in which voters have identified health care as their top concern. Democrats have put Republicans on the defensive by accusing them of wanting to scuttle federal pre-existing condition regulations.

Candidates looking for a plan to regain voter trust on health care need look no further than the Health Care Choices Proposal, which will reduce costs, increase choices, empower consumers, and protect the sick without making coverage unaffordable for people who don’t qualify for government subsidies.