Opinion

THE POSTSCRIPT, Carrie Classon

Yesterday, I saw a bunch of cousins.

I have a lot of cousins. A few have died by now, but I started out with 36 cousins, and only two were on my father’s side.

My mother came from a large farm family, and her brothers and sisters had a lot of children, and so I got to have a lot of cousins while I was growing up. I thought it was normal, having this second layer of siblings that I would see up at the farm. We ate sitting on the stairs, because there were many more people than chairs. We picked eggs and played in the haymow together.

GUEST COLUMN, Dave Trabert, Kansas Policy Institute

How do you go from having a $3 billion budget surplus and stable tax revenue to broke in just a few years? By repeatedly spending more than you take in.

General Fund spending has pretty much been out of control since 2018, the year after the Legislature passed the largest tax increase in state history. There was a brief dip in 2022 during the Great Recession; however, spending subsequently exploded.

Spending would have been approximately $8.4 billion in FY 2025 (the year ended June 30) if it had merely increased in line with inflation, but actual spending was $10.9 billion. That’s a 64 percent jump over seven years, while inflation was 27 percent.

GUEST COLUMN, Peter Rheinstein, Severn Health Solutions

Roughly 30 percent of American patients have skipped doses of their medicines, cut pills in half, or declined to fill a prescription due to cost concerns in the past year.

These affordability struggles aren’t merely personal tragedies. They’re a threat to public health. My fellow doctors know all too well what happens when patients don’t adhere to their prescribed treatment regimens — their health spirals, and they often need more expensive interventions.

Reforms to make medicines more affordable are urgently needed. But unfortunately, both Republicans and Democrats keep embracing a proposal that, though well-intended, would unintentionally make American patients, doctors, and biotech workers worse off.

GUEST COLUMN, Dane Hicks, Kaninfo.com

Among the most ignored stories of Trump II is the administration’s confrontation of the stifling abuse of the federal Medicaid program – a story being buried by the mainstream media in hopes you’ll ignore this reality and obsess about Sydney Sweeney’s American Eagle Jeans commercial right up to the 2026 midterms.

It’s also set to be the round robin issue of the coming Kansas Legislative session, as Governor Laura Kelly takes one final shot to convince or cajole the Republican-dominated state legislature to allow 130,000 new and able-bodied Kansans a place on the state Medicaid rolls.