Editorial

October marks the middle of harvest season for crops like corn, soybeans, and sorghum here in Nebraska. This process, the culmination of many months of work, also highlights how we rely on infrastructure for irrigation, transportation, and bringing products to market. Infrastructure has a hand in just about everything we do, including making agriculture more efficient. By prioritizing rural infrastructure, we lay a foundation for national economic growth.

There are two approaches to meet the health care needs of Americans. The first way is a command economy approach, such as the Medicare for All effort, which uses mandates to force patients, providers, and insurers to take action – demonstrated under Obamacare to worsen access and drive up costs. The second way is to use the marketplace to drive down costs and improve consumer access like we used in constructing Medicare Part D to improve prescription access for seniors. An important part of this process is Medicare Open Enrollment, which runs from October 15 through December 7.

In 2016, the last year of the Obama administration, 3,853 federal regulations were issued. While some regulations, such as those explaining how the executive branch will implement new laws or setting how much Medicare pays medical providers each year, are necessary, many merely pile new bureaucracy onto old in an effort to micromanage our nation from Washington. Fortunately, Congress has a mechanism to provide expedited consideration of disapproving of overreaching regulations, and in 2017 we passed and President Trump signed into law 14 bills repealing many of the most egregious overreaches of the outgoing Obama administration. The Trump Administration has also rolled back many of these regulations, such as Waters of the United States, or WOTUS, which we could not repeal legislatively because the resolutions were vetoed by President Obama.

In a typical year, the six months from the start of spring to the start of fall fly by: we celebrate summer breaks, family vacations, weddings, and graduations; crops are planted and grown, and harvest begins. These last six months could not have felt more different. Almost every portion of our lives was somehow impacted by the coronavirus and our efforts to fight it. To get back to “normal,” we have work to do.