Weekly Writers Round-Up: Fixing Health Insurance, the Harm of Vaping Bans, and Federal Overreach in Education

Each week, we’ll be featuring opinion pieces from the alumni and current participants of AF’s Writing Fellows Program. A few highlights from the past week are below. Do you dream of having bylines like these? Learn more about how the Writing Fellows Program can help boost your writing career!

Health Insurance Is Killing Us Softly by Elise Amez-Droz (Summer 2019) in The National Interest
Healthcare has always been a crucial area of policy, but after coronavirus swept through America, it suddenly became paramount. Headlines everywhere lamented the number of people losing coverage after suddenly finding themselves unemployed—blaming the economic downfall resulting from the pandemic and lockdowns. Of course, the thought of swaths of Americans losing health insurance is nothing to sneeze at, but restrictions on access to care are far more damaging. Our weird obsession with how we pay for care is making us blind to the cold hard truth: we’ve lost care itself…

Banning flavored vaping products in Montana would risk driving people to more harmful cigarettes by Guy Bentley (Spring 2017) in The Missoulian
Before the COVID-19 pandemic, one of the most heated debates in public health was over the role of e-cigarettes in helping smokers kick their habit. Supporters argued millions of Americans had quit smoking thanks to e-cigarettes, which have been conclusively proven to be substantially safer than cigarettes. Skeptics, however, countered that while vaping may be safer than smoking, the number of young people vaping more than offset the benefits from adults switching from traditional cigarettes to vaping.

Montana enacted a 120-day ban on flavored vaping products that ended in April. Now, Montana’s Department of Public Health and Human Services is pushing to permanently ban e-cigarette flavors in the state…

Tom Cotton’s About-Face on Education Policy by Grayson Logue (Fall 2019) in RealClearEducation
Congress is attempting again to control what’s taught in public schools, circumventing state and local authorities. This time, however, the charge is led by a Republican Senator. 

Last week, Senator Tom Cotton introduced a bill entitled the Saving American History Act 2020 which would bar federal funding from elementary and secondary schools that use the New York Times’ 1619 Project in their curriculum. In our fiercely partisan cultural climate, the federal government should not attempt to control American history curriculum or dictate what is taught in K-12 classrooms…