Christians depend on their pastors for spiritual guidance. But if they are looking for guidance in how to think about cultural and political issues, most of them will be disappointed. That is what George Barna has found in his latest surveys.

Through the American Culture and Faith Institute, he has focused on what pastors believe and what they have been teaching. When it comes to cultural, social, and political issues there is often a significant disconnect. He found that an overwhelming majority of conservative pastors believe that the Bible addresses these issues. He has also found that only a small percentage of those same ministers preach on those issues.

Let’s look at the big “hot button issues” of abortion and same-sex marriage. A survey of 412 theologically conservative pastors found that nearly all of them (95%) believe that the Bible addresses these two issues. But only 47 percent of those same pastors said they had preached about abortion in the last 12 month. And only 50 percent of them said they had preached a message relating to the issue of same-sex marriage.

The percentages drop much further for other issues. Most conservative pastors (96%) believe the Bible addresses environmental care, but only 14 percent have preached on the subject of care and concern for the environment. Most pastors (90%) believe the Bible deals with the subject of gambling, but only 13 percent have preached on the subject in the last 12 months.

Three-fourths of pastors (78%) believe the Bible has something to say about the immigration debate. On the other hand, only 4 percent addressed the issue of immigration in a sermon within the last year. The same could be said about government spending. Three fourths (77%) believe the Scriptures provide insight into this topic, but only 4 percent shared those insights with their congregation.

Christians in these churches deserve to hear what the Bible says about every area of life. The congregation is not well served when pastors ignore important issues and topics. Pastors should not be reticent to share biblical insights with their congregation especially when we seem to be losing the culture wars.

As we are getting closer to the open enrollment period for Obamacare, it might be good to go back and evaluate the claims made during the debate on the Affordable Care Act. We were told that the costs would go down, competition would increase, millions would enroll, and policies wouldn’t be cancelled.

Robert Moffit, writing in The Daily Signal, says that health care costs have increased significantly. “Huge increases in deductibles in policies sold through the exchanges were a big story in Florida, Illinois, and elsewhere.” The promise during the congressional debate was the premium costs would drop by $2,500. They increased dramatically, and even doubled for many Americans, especially of younger age.

Robert Moffit also explains that the law actually reduced competition in many health-insurance markets. “A limited analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that in 2014, large states like California and New York were more competitive, but Connecticut and Washington were less competitive.” Another study found that on the county level, more than half (52%) had just one or two health-insurance carriers.

The Obama administration claims that over 8 million people enrolled in health-insurance exchanges. But we should remember that exchange enrollment is not the same as insurance coverage. And there are 700,000 fewer persons in the exchanges than previously thought.

Americans were also promised that Obamacare would stop health insurers from cancelling policies. Merrill Matthews, writing in Forbes, reminds us that: “more health insurance policies have been cancelled under Obamacare than ever before.” He also goes on to explain that more cancelations are on the way.

The president twice postponed the deadline to have Obamacare-qualified coverage in the small-group and individual markets, but only if states wanted to extend the deadline. Some did. Some did not. More cancellations are coming but “the notices will emerge in drips and drabs and likely won’t get as many headlines.”

I think it is safe to say that Obamacare hasn’t lived up to any of the promises made when the bill was being debated.

The influence William Shakespeare has had on the English language is well known. In a previous commentary, I talked about the number of words he created or coined. He also is responsible for so many everyday phrases we use. Christina Sterbenz provides the context for these phrases we often use and forget were from Shakespeare.

When we use the phrase “catch a cold,” we mean that we are getting sick. In one of Shakespeare’s lesser-known plays someone says that should head “straight away for Britain, lest the bargain should catch cold and starve.” In other words, if the deal takes too long, it will fall apart. This came to eventually mean someone would get sick.

If you say, “It’s all Greek to me,” you are referring back to a scene in “Julius Caesar. Cassius doesn’t understand because he doesn’t speak Greek. Today it means that you don’t understand something because it is foreign or confusing.

Someone who is able to take advantage of life’s opportunities may have someone say: “The world is your oyster.” That phrase of Shakespeare comes from “The Merry Wives of Windsor.

You have probably have heard that “love is blind.” You may not know that the phrase appears in “The Merchant of Venice” by Shakespeare. Jessica says that “love is blind and lovers cannot see, the pretty follies that themselves commit.” Lovers often have the inability to see shortcomings in the one they love.

Someone might say that your have “a heart of gold.” They are using a phrase from Shakespeare found in “Henry V.” King Henry disguises himself as a commoner and asks Pistol if he considers himself a better man than the king. He answers using this now common phrase.

In order to start a conversation with someone, we explain that we need to “break the ice.” That phrase can be found in Shakespeare’s “Taming of the Shrew.” And if you express your emotions too freely, someone might say you “wear your heart on your sleeve.” We find that phrase in Shakespeare’s “Othello.”

As you can see, we owe so much of our English language and common everyday phrases to William Shakespeare.

Yesterday I talked about why millennials might not buy insurance. The cost under the Affordable Care Act is much more than what they would have paid in the free market. But there is another reason why they (and many others) might not buy insurance. They won’t need it because of provisions requiring insurance companies to cover pre-existing conditions.

While that is an admirable requirement, it leads to a fear many proponents and opponents of Obamacare have about how Americans will try to game the system. Millions of healthy people may not decide to enroll. The process seems confusing and there have been glitches, but that is not the main reason they will not enroll. They may merely wait until they have a health problem and then decide to get insurance.

We don’t have to guess how this would happen since we already have a state that has implemented a form of Obamacare known as Romneycare. In the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, the insurance companies call these people jumpers and dumpers. When they have a medical problem or medical emergency, they jump into the insurance pool. They can’t be denied because of a pre-existing condition. They stay in the plan until their medical bills are paid. Then the dump the plan and go on about their life. I predict that one of the problems that will develop with Obamacare is the problem of jumpers and dumpers.

But let me mention one other issue. In order for insurance companies to survive, they will have to do all they can to attract healthy people and dissuade sick people. So I also predict that the plans they provide on the state exchanges will be structured so they can attract more healthy people and discourage sick people.

Forcing insurance companies to take people with pre-existing conditions may have been a laudable goal, but we should also expect a number of unintended consequences. We should have known to expect them if we just observed what was happening in states that had the precursor to Obamacare.

Lexi Cory titled her article: “Wake Up Millennials, We’re the Ones Paying the Bill.” The bill she was talking about is the Affordable Care Act. She wonders if her fellow millennials really understand the consequences of Obamacare.

Many articles and commentaries have documented the costs and subsidies in the Affordable Care Act. There were promises of lowering the premiums by up to $2,500. That hasn’t happened. There were those who argued that it would harm the economy and increase the deficit. But often lost in the calculation was how it would impact the youngest generation that has entered or will be entering the job market.

Before the implementation of Obamacare, there was a rational relationship between individual premiums and expected health care costs. The young and the healthy were charged less for insurance because they were less likely to consume large amounts of health care. The premiums were actuarially fair.

The Affordable Care Act changed all of that. Insurers are now required to practice a form of community rating in which the healthy and sick are charged the same. The young must pay more than they would normally pay in order to cover the costs of the old and sick. In some states the increased premiums that millennials will have to pay are more but potentially possible to pay on a limited budget. In other states the increase premiums are triple or quadruple what millennials would currently be paying.

Zack Toombs argues that “Millennials Could Wreck Obamacare.” He noted that
They initially approved of the law but may quickly sour on it when they see how much more they have to pay. They could break the program if they choose to pay the relatively small penalty fee rather than sign up for insurance.

I believe he is right simply because many millennials won’t have a choice. They graduated from college with lots of student loan debt and are now headed into a bleak job market.

Most of the concern expressed about Obamacare focuses on the immediate impact while ignoring the long-term effects of the law. Dr. Merrill Matthews explains in a recent column that the bigger problem will arise in a few years. Insurance actuaries call this problem a health care “death spiral.”

In the near term, many will experience “sticker shock” when they discover how much their insurance premiums will cost them. Those most affected will likely be young and healthy people who live in states that managed to keep health insurance premiums relatively low.

On the other hand, people with chronic illnesses or other expensive medical conditions will be joining exchanges. Many of the larger health insurers are avoiding these exchanges because they believe that just such people will be joining the exchanges and have medical conditions that will be expensive to treat. The costs might exceed the premiums they were able to collect.

Meanwhile the young and healthy are likely to avoid joining an exchange since they will be charged much more under Obamacare than they would have paid in the past. The law is designed to overcharge the young and healthy so that older and sicker people can be charged less. The latest HHS ads are an attempt to get young people to sign up.

The problem only gets worse in subsequent years. As a disproportionate number of sick people enroll in the pool, the cost of an insurance policy will rise. These premium increases will drive healthy people out of the pool looking for lower rates that match their healthy condition. As the pool get smaller and sicker, rates will go up once again. That will drive out another wave of people until the pool is very small and very sick. This is what insurance actuaries call a “death spiral.”

Put simply, the challenge at the moment is to get young and healthy people to sign up for exchanges. But the bigger challenge in the future will be to get them to stay once they find out how unaffordable Obamacare is for them.

In his book, Godonomics, Chad Hovind finds engaging ways to illustrate economic facts. In his book and on my radio program he answered question like: What would God say to Adam Smith? What would God say to John Maynard Keynes?

In a chapter on the money supply he compared inflation to the experience parents and kids have at Chuck E. Cheese. You and your kids arrive at the arcade restaurant and purchase twenty dollar’s worth of tokens. The kids spend their tokens and win certain games. At the end of the adventure, the kids count their tickets and take them to the toy counter to purchase a prize.

Along the way they are thrilled that they have 1,700 points in children’s currency. Their eyes gleam with hopes of trading for some real treasures. The toy counter is stocked with iPods, stuffed animals, and all sorts of prizes they are ready to take home.

But their excitement fades quickly when they realize that it takes 500 points just to purchase a Blow Pop. It takes 1,000 points to earn a Chinese handcuff. The prizes they want require hundreds of thousands of points.

Chad Hovind believes that the way the government prints money is similar to this experience at Chuck E. Cheese. The issuers have tinkered with the value of the tickets (at the arcade) or the value of the dollar (at the government). The dollar has lost as much as 98 percent of its value over the past hundred years. In most cases the goods and services aren’t really more expensive. It is the dollars in our pockets that have lost so much value.

You can go to a federal government website to see how much your money has been devalued. Use a search engine to find “government inflation calculator.” A car that cost $10,000 in 1980 today would cost nearly $27,000.

This is what happens when we let government tinker with the value of our money. It’s like standing at the toy counter of Chuck E. Cheese.

Perhaps you have read the short story “I, Pencil” by economist Leonard Read. He takes you through all the steps necessary to make a pencil and concludes that “nobody knows how to make a pencil.” To make something as simple as a pencil requires knowledge and technological expertise in fields ranging from forestry to mining to engineering to chemistry.

And yet pencils are made day after day, even though no one knows the whole process from start to finish. The worker on the assembly line doesn’t know all the steps. Even the president of the pencil manufacturing company doesn’t really know all of the steps necessary to make a pencil. There is no central authority. All of the necessary steps come together in a free market through what looks like spontaneous order.

Kevin Williamson in a recent column talks about how the market worked to provide us with much more than pencils. When he is speaking to students, he shows them a still from an Oliver Stone movie, Wall Street. The financier Gordon Gekko is talking on a cell phone, a Motorola DynaTac 8000X. The student always—always—laugh. There is good reason. The phone is more than a foot long and weighs a couple of pounds.

But here is the point. In the day in which that movie was shot, you had to be a millionaire to have one. The phone cost the equivalent of $10,000. It also cost about $1,000 a month to operate. You couldn’t put it in your pocket. You couldn’t text on it. You couldn’t get on the Internet with it. You couldn’t play Angry Birds on it.

Most of the students have a smart phone that does all that and much more. Everyday they hold in their hands a technological wonder, especially compared to what only a rich and privileged few could use a few years ago. And while the price of nearly everything is going up, the price of these phones has dropped dramatically. It is also worth mentioning that if “nobody knows how to make a pencil” it is certainly true that “nobody knows how to make a smart phone.” Yet we have it in our hands because of the free market.