Free Republic

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...

EL PASO, Texas (KTSM) - A little more than a year after El Paso's first toll road became history, it's resurfacing as part of a new construction project. This time it's going to be part of the Border West Expressway, an extension of Loop 375. It'll be going from West El Paso to Downtown El Paso, but many don't know this new stretch of highway is set to be a toll road. "The Border West Highway is what not enough of your viewers understand is being developed as a complete tolled project," said State Rep. Joe Pickett, (D) El Paso....

While there’s been much discussion about the pending plan to widen Interstate 10 through Baton Rouge, the $360 million earmarked for the project is not expected to cover all four phases of the work. Following a speech to the Baton Rouge Rotary Club today, Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development Secretary Shawn Wilson said state officials are confident the first two phases of the project—first widening and replacing the aging elevated portions of the highway from the I-10/I-110 merge to the City Park Lakes, then replacing the bridges over the lakes—can be completed within four years using federal Grant Anticipation...

The media’s lies have a price.Politico, the media outlet of choice for flacks and hacks, has declared that Ron DeSantis, the conservative Republican running for Governor of Florida, against the media’s favorite new socialist, suffered his “fifth race-related” controversy.  That fifth “controversy” is about something that somebody who isn’t DeSantis tweeted. The fourth controversy also involved a DeSantis donor. The third controversy falsely smeared the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s Restoration Weekend attended by DeSantis (and Medal of Honor winner Clinton Romesha). The second involved a GOP official who also isn’t DeSantis. And the first was that DeSantis had been added...

Socialism: Since the Democratic Party took a turn for the worse toward so-called democratic socialism, the party's leading lights have laid the promises on pretty thick. Free Medicare for all! Guaranteed income! Guaranteed jobs! Subsidized housing! Free college! Universal pre-school! Wow, and all for free. Well, not exactly. In a devastating piece that appeared on the left-of-center web site Vox (to its credit), Manhattan Institute fellow Brian Riedl went through the simple math of what free actually costs. It's a lot. It's not just the free aspect, but the fact that the democratic socialists have made so many promises that...

The space agency has always coughed up the extra cash, but some politicians wonder if the contractor responsible for major errors should pitch in.If everything had gone according to plan, the most powerful space telescope would be in orbit right now, perched about 1 million miles from Earth, peering deep into the universe, and returning home mesmerizing photos of glittering stars and galaxies. Instead, it’s still in a factory in California, waiting to receive more money so engineers can finish building it. The James Webb Space Telescope, NASA’s next big astronomy mission, has been in the works for two...

How else to account for the state's wondrous physical beauty and gentle climate, on the one hand, and its ludicrously irrational political majorities and execrable public officialdom, on the other? God gave Yosemite Valley but then inflicted Nancy Pelosi. He created the Big Sur coastline, then dropped Jerry Brown into Sacramento. He graces the state with the sweetest September-Octobers north of the equator but requires that they be shared with the likes of Oakland mayor Libby Schaaf. The list of nature's spectacular bounty, paired with California's unmatched human folly, is endless. Another week in the Golden State, another rich display...

That may sound like a clickbaity headline, but it’s proving to be literally true. Apparently, no one can guess it, least of all the California High-Speed Rail Authority that is running the bullet-train project. Their latest projection shows total predicted cost has jumped 20% to $77 billion, with a completion date moved out four years to 2033.For now, anyway. Be sure to check back next week in the Boondoggle Lotto! The price of the California bullet train project jumped sharply Friday when the state rail authority announced that the cost of connecting Los Angeles to San Francisco would be...

The final leg of Interstate 69 from Martinsville to Indianapolis will cost nearly $1.6 billion.ThatÂ’s according to the Final Environmental Impact Statement for I-69 Section 6 the state released Thursday. The analysis says construction could start in 2020 and wrap up within six years.Section 6 will run along the existing route of State Road 37. That means some of the many businesses that line the highway in Morgan, Johnson and Marion counties will have to move.The FEIS says more than 80 businesses, including a non-profit and fire station, will need to relocate. ThatÂ’s in addition to nearly 200 residences that...

Editor's Note: This article was originally published in June 2012 and has been updated with the most recent information. After the construction of the Bay Bridge in 1933, San Francisco began considering duplicating the bridge and running a second one further south across the bay. Enter Frank Lloyd Wright, a little-known architect whose idea and design for a second Bay Bridge never came to fruition. The noted architect hated the idea of a second steel structure similar to the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge. Partnering with engineer Jaroslav J. Polivka, Wright proposed a concrete "Butterfly Bridge,” spanning from Army Street (now...

The Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission authorized nearly $34 million in final design contracts Tuesday for an eight-mile stretch of the Mon-Fayette Expressway from Jefferson Hills to Duquesne. If final design goes as expected, construction could begin in 2022 for the first of three remaining segments needed to finish the last 14 miles of the highway from Jefferson Hills to the Parkway East in Monroeville at a projected cost of $2.1 billion. That’s more than the $1.68 billion cost of the first 60 miles of the highway, started more than 40 years ago in northern West Virginia. The commission’s action Tuesday increased...

Broadly, the costs include $29 billion in free medical care, $23 billion for law enforcement and $46 billion for free education. So says the Federation for American Immigration Reform in its report, titled "The Fiscal Burden Of Illegal Immigration on U.S. Taxpayers," which is the most comprehensive cost tally from FAIR.

Deporting the country’s estimated 11 million illegal immigrants would cost nearly $125 billion, but allowing them to remain in the U.S. could cost taxpayers far more, according to a new report being released Thursday by a think tank that wants to see stricter immigration limits. Steven A. Camarota, research director at the Center for Immigration Studies, crunched the numbers and found that the current population of illegal immigrants will drain nearly $750 billion from taxpayers over their lifetimes — amounting to six times the deportation costs. “Sometimes people say look, we couldn’t deport everybody because it’s prohibitively expensive,” Mr. Camarota...

A whopping $7.4 trillion will be spent globally on new green energy facilities in the coming decades, but another $5.3 trillion is needed to meet the goals of the Paris climate accord, according to a new report. Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) is out with a new long-term energy outlook report, this time projecting a total of $12.7 trillion to keep projected global warming below 2 degrees Celsius by the end of the century — a goal of the Paris accord. BNEF projects $7.4 trillion will be invested in new green energy capacity by 2040, and that global carbon dioxide...

After years of angst over whether to extend Route 53 north into Lake County, the Illinois tollway moved with dizzying speed last week approving a $25 million study of the project. But while the board's vote took seconds, there were hours of fraught testimony from environmentalists fearful of pollution, residents worried about losing their homes, commuters sick of sitting in traffic and construction industry representatives lobbying for jobs. Here are five take-aways from a momentous week: 1. Promising to pay for the extension could be a game-changer. Unlike his predecessors, Chairman Bob Schillerstrom pledged that if Route 53 is extended,...

Syracuse, N.Y. --There's not a lot tunnel building going on in the United States. Four highway tunnels have been completed over the last 10 years in the U.S. Four more tunnel projects are under construction or in design. And one long discussed project that would have tunneled underneath a national forest in California was dropped. Could be a tunnel in Syracuse's future for Interstate 81? After a tunnel was initially rejected, a tunnel or depressed highway is back on the table as an option to replace Interstate 81's 1.4 mile section of raised highway in Syracuse. The DOT at first...

As the debate over President Trump’s travel ban rages in courts of law and public opinion, one new book reminds Americans what’s at stake if the nation’s leaders allow nearly unchecked immigration from Muslim countries to continue on its current path.

I told you recently that the Office of Refugee Resettlement had published its 2015 Annual Report to Congress Below are some charts from the report (beginning on page 16) that are very instructive. By the way, when the Leftist Open Borders gang publishes economic studies that claim that refugees bring economic boom times to struggling communities, they surely don’t factor in the cost of welfare use by refugees (or the education costs, or the criminal justice system costs). LOL!, maybe they figure federal welfare dollars (grown on trees in Washington) flowing to certain communities are income to the community. Let’s...

The 2010 health law, also known as Obamacare, forced insurers to sell coverage to anyone, at the same price, regardless of their risk of incurring big claims. That provision was popular. Not so were rules requiring nearly everyone to have insurance, and higher premiums for healthy people to subsidize the costs of the sick. If policyholders don’t pick up the tab, who will? Letting insurers refuse to sell to individuals with what the industry calls a “pre-existing condition”—in essence, forcing some of the sick to pay for themselves—is something both parties appear to have ruled out. Insurers could charge those...

Oct 24 (Reuters) - The average premium for benchmark 2017 Obamacare insurance plans sold on Healthcare.gov rose 25 percent compared with 2016, the U.S. government said on Monday, the biggest increase since the insurance first went on sale in 2013 for the following year. The average monthly premium for the benchmark plan is rising to $302 from $242 in 2016, the Department of Health and Human Services said. The agency attributed the large increase to insurers adjusting their premiums to reflect two years of cost data that became available.