by Charles Katebi With just a few weeks until open enrollment, WINhealth has decided to leave Wyoming's health insurance exchange. The insurer hoped that Obamacare's federal bailout fund would pay for its losses. However, it only paid insurers a fraction of what it promised. Wyoming legislators rejected Medicaid expansion last year because they wor...

by Wyoming Liberty Staff "This is the biggest anti school choice vote by a local school board in state history." Sandy Shanor, Chair of Laramie County School Board #1 In a historic 5-2 vote last week in Cheyenne, the state's largest school district passed a solidly anti school choice resolution for use by the Wyoming School Boards Association (WSBA...

We struggle under the burden of ever-inflating government. Just let go! Down-to-earth free-market alternatives to ballooning government worked in the past and can work again. 

In a rare example of decision making, the Capitol Oversight Committee voted unanimously to approve a new design option for the Herschler building, one without an executive building. This will likely be the first of many reductions in the scope of the over-budget Capitol Square project. It's too bad it takes a fiscal crisis for our governing class t...

Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts, Antonin Scalia and Bryan A. Garner. Thomson/West, 2012. $69.93 new, $43.27 used, and Kindle edition at Amazon.com. As they say on the Internet, IANAL. I am not a lawyer. So what am I, a non-lawyer, doing reviewing a book on reading legal texts? A book that might well be a law school text or part of an...

This comic represents the Wyoming Liberty Index, maintained by the Wyoming Liberty Group but scored by volunteers. 

by Charles Katebi No single provision of Obamacare has been more disastrous than Medicaid Expansion. It's cost taxpayers billions more than promised and hurt the very people it was intended to help. Now Governor Mead wants to try yet again to expand this ruinous government program in Wyoming. Following an event at an oil recovery facility in Rivert...

When we spotted a flagrant example of media bias, we thought this cartoon would help explain it. 

Government-run health care. 

With federal funds come federal shackles. 

by Wyoming Liberty Staff Core property rights principles can help resolve Casper's ongoing debate about smoking in bars better than some one-size-fits-all regulatory regime. The right to exclude others can empower individual bar owners to sort out how much or little smoking occurs in bars across Casper. Therefore, Casper does not need a citywide ba...

by Wyoming Liberty Staff Wyoming is no stranger to the ugliness of the school choice battle. When it comes to the state monopoly over education, parents are almost always the losers. Currently, local school districts are the only body with the authority under the law to approve an independent public charter school. These elected school boards have ...

When the Wyoming Business Council proposes a handout for a private business, the focus is on the positive—jobs, economic diversification, the flag and apple pie. When it brings these proposals before the State Loan and Investment Board (SLIB), the costs of these handouts—wasted resources, cronyism and the damage to unsubsidized competition—go unmen...

Maureen Bader and Glenn Woods talk about Wyoming Business Council's funneling of public money for private benefit and in Gillette and other Wyoming communities. 

Wyoming faces a multi-million dollar deficit in the 2017-18 biennium and the specter of plummeting revenue looms large on the horizon. Why then, is the State Loan and Investment Board (SLIB) about to rubber stamp funding to help lift a new $18 million terminal off the ground at an airport that just last year lost 50 percent of its customer seating ...

by Charles Katebi Wyomingites pays more for health insurance than residents of any other state. And thanks to Obamacare, we're about to pay a lot more. Starting in 2018, employer-based health plans that exceed $10,200 in premiums for individuals and $27,500 for families will be hit with a whopping 40 percent "Cadillac Tax." If you receive health in...

This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill - the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill - you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes. – The Matrix, 1999 What if I were Morpheus, and you had just taken the red pill? Where...

Wyoming's Legislative Service Office (LSO) released a report evaluating Public Purpose Investments (PPI), the use of the Permanent Wyoming Mineral Trust Fund (PWMTF) to subsidize loans in the state. The report found that PPIs returned less financially than the Treasurer's regular portfolio. This is important because no matter how politicians try to...

by Charles Katebi In a promising moment of bipartisan agreement, members of Wyoming's Joint Labor, Health and Social Services Committee began drafting legislation that will allow patients and physicians to contract directly with each other and escape our disastrously overregulated insurance system. This legislation will strengthen every Wyoming res...

by Wyoming Liberty Staff This fall Wyoming legislators are busy attending interim Committee meetings on a variety of subjects, all of which will be addressed in the cold winter months of February and March during the 2016 Budget Session. Current trends indicate long-term budget problems for Wyoming. This April I wrote a blog entitled, The Urgent Ca...