Opinion

GUEST COLUMN, David Eagle, M.D., President, American Independent Medical Practice Association

Imagine ordering your favorite entree at the neighborhood restaurant you've gone to for years. It's the same dish, off the same menu, delivered by the same server. But suddenly, it costs 800 percent more – because the place just got new owners.

Few diners would accept such naked price-gouging.

Unfortunately, what's unthinkable in the restaurant industry is standard fare in health care. Federal law and regulations allow hospitals to charge Medicare much more than independent physicians charge Medicare for the exact same procedures and health care services.

This structural inequity costs taxpayers and patients billions of dollars each year – and it will only get worse if Congress doesn’t act.

GUEST COLUMN, Glenn Brunkow, Kansas Farm Bureau

We are well past the midpoint of fall and closing in on winter. It is not an official thing but to me the defining point on the calendar between fall and winter is Thanksgiving. Generally, it is the time of the year when harvest is at least winding down, if not done, and the livestock are all in their wintering places.

I think Thanksgiving comes with extra meaning this year. It has been quite a year, especially for those of us in agriculture during the past 12 months. We have had a lot of, because of the lack of a better term, stuff going on in agriculture. Some of the stuff is good but a lot this stuff is not so rosy.

For many of us this has been a hard year with lots of challenges, and that is what makes Thanksgiving so important. No matter how bad things are, we still have a lot to be thankful for in the farming and ranching community.

GUEST COLUMN, J. Basil Dannebohm

On March 31, Democratic Senator Cory Booker arrived on the floor of the United States Senate, determined to protest the Trump Administration.

“Our constituents are asking us to acknowledge that this is a crisis. So, I am going to stand here until I no longer can,” the Senator from New Jersey said as he began his marathon protest speech.

A little more than a day later, having spoken for over 25 hours, he broke the floor speech record.

A few months later, on July 9, Booker was one of 14 senators who enjoyed lunch and posed for a photo with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a man who is wanted by the International Criminal Court on charges of war crimes.

L&T Publisher Earl Watt

America is a nation of immigrants, or so the saying goes.

And there is a lot of truth to it. People from all over the world have sought a better life in the United States for a variety of reasons.

Call it colonization if you will, that has been the case of migrating to North and South America throughout history.

The first were herders who crossed the Bering Strait between modern day Russia and Alaska. From there they populated the Americas and became known as “Native Americans.” They weren’t native, they were just earlier than most other peoples who found their way to the undiscovered continents.