Last week I went to my doctor for a check-up and took my family out to dinner. My experience as a consumer was very different between the two. The restaurant had total transparency. The menu not only had the prices of the items but pictures of most of them. We knew exactly what we were getting and how much it would all cost. I even mentally calculated the tip before I even received the bill.

At the doctor’s office, I had no idea what my procedures would cost. Even as the doctor was going over the tests they would run on my blood work, there was no mention of cost. I didn’t know what I would have to pay until I went to the receptionist’s desk and received the verdict. Fortunately for me, there was no “sticker shock.”

The Trump administration wants to change some of this. At the moment, administrators are considering a rule that would require doctors and hospitals to disclose rates they negotiate with insurance companies. This would be a small step in the direction of health care transparency.

Another problem with our health care system is the fact that someone else is paying for your medical procedures. If you go back to our family dinner, you can see the issue. If someone let us borrow their credit card and told us to have a nice dinner, we would probably spend most of our time looking at the left side of the menu. But when we pay for it, we also pay attention to the right side of the menu that has the cost.

Two years ago, I wrote about the major difference in cost for heart bypass in the county in which I live. At the time, the average cost for all of the hospitals in Collin County was $164,757. But one medical center in the area was charging nearly $80,000 more for the same procedure.

Getting some transparency is an important first step, especially since more and more of us are paying for health care procedures because of high deductibles. We expect to see prices on a restaurant menu. I think we should be able to see prices at a doctor’s office and hospital.

In a recent column, David French reminds us that not so long ago, “religious liberty lawyers were a quirky, somewhat cool, and tiny subset of the legal profession.” They were defending the rights of home-school families and the religious rights of Native American Indians. You could fit the “entire religious–liberty bar in a single mid-sized hotel conference room.”

That is no longer true today. He calls these conservative religious-liberties lawyers the “virtual Seal Team Six of the culture war, with multiple organizations raising collectively close to $200 million annually to do battle in courtrooms from coast to coast.” One lawyer on my radio program said he was going to frame this piece because it will be the only time someone will compare him to a Seal Team member.

The broader point is that America has changed. A few decades ago, you could assume that the US was largely a single-faith culture. Today it is a two-faith nation: the sacred and the secular. That is why religious liberties are so controversial. The secular world sees any attempt to provide a space for religion as a zero-sum game.

One illustration is the Religious Freedom Restoration Act that passed a few decades ago with only three dissenting votes. Chuck Schumer introduced it into the House, while Ted Kennedy introduced it the Senate. Bill Clinton signed it into law, with virtually no controversy.

Now Representatives Joe Kennedy and Bobby Scott along with Senator Kamala Harris have reintroduced legislation to amend the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. The “Do No Harm Act” would prevent individuals from getting a religious exemption from many of our federal laws.

Religious liberty wasn’t very controversial a few decades ago. Today it has become a major flash point in the culture wars.

In a previous set of commentaries, I talked about the interview Nick Pitts and I did with Jonathan Haidt on his book, The Coddling of the American Mind. Then I saw an essay that quoted his earlier book, The Righteous Mind, where he talked about “the conservative advantage.” As a liberal, he wrote the book because he “was convinced that American liberals did not get the morals and motives of their conservative countrymen.”

In one study he did with Jesse Graham and Brian Nosek, they tested how well liberals and conservatives could understand each other. They had the people fill out their Moral Foundations Questionnaire. One-third of the time, they were supposed to fill out the questions normally, answering as themselves. One-third of the time, they were asked to fill out the questions as they think a “typical liberal” would respond. And one-third of the time, they were supposed to fill out the questionnaire the way they believed a “typical conservative” would respond.

The design of the research allowed the researchers to examine the stereotypes that each side had about the other. And this also allowed them to see how accurate their answers were compared to people who were liberal and people who were conservative.

“The results were clear and consistent. Moderates and conservative were most accurate in their predictions, whether they were pretending to be liberals or conservatives. Liberals were the least accurate, especially those who described themselves as ‘very liberal.'”

I might add that the study was published ten years ago. I think it is even more likely that the gap in perception by liberals of conservatives has grown even more. Much of what Jonathan Haidt has written about in his recent book illustrates how millennial college students want even more “protection” from ideas they don’t like. They are less likely than before to engage foreign ideas. This is one more example of why we have such polarization in the political arena.

The political justification for more government intervention into America’s health care system is the claim that health care is a right. Proponents of the Affordable Care Act in the past made this claim. Current members of Congress pushing the Medicare for All Act also make the claim that health care is a right.

Let me start by saying that health care is not a right, at least as properly understood. But even if you accept that it is a right, it cannot be applied in the way it is being used in the current debate.

First, it is not a right if we use the past understanding of rights. The Declaration of Independence states that we have an unalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But that doesn’t mean people have to give us life or make us happy. It is understood as a negative right. You have the right not to be killed (unless you an unwanted, unborn child). You have the right to not have your liberties (like free speech) taken away from you.

These are what you might call negative rights. But the Left is now proposing what could be called positive rights. We supposedly have the right to housing, health care, maybe even the right to free college education. This is something fundamentally different.

Second, even if you accept that flawed view, you have a major problem. How do you have the right to something that is economically scarce? How does everyone have a right to kidney dialysis when we don’t have enough machines? How do we have a right to a doctor when there are more people who want a personal physician than there are doctors to go around?

Rejecting the idea that health care is a right doesn’t mean we should dismiss the importance of health care. It’s just the opposite. Trying to provide quality health care is so important it shouldn’t be left to bureaucrats working in an incompetent government agency.

For the last few decades we have been scolded by everyone from radical environmentalists to simple back-to-nature advocates that we have an overly industrialized society. It must be dismantled. We need to adopt the ways of the past.

I thought about this when reading a commentary by Jeffrey Tucker. He was watching a video by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who was trying to explain why the earth is headed for an ecological disaster and why we probably shouldn’t be having any more children. But he says he was distracted because she was saying of this while carefully cutting sweet potatoes before putting them in the oven.

She put salt and pepper on them. Tucker reminds us that salt was so rare during most of human history that it was often regarded as money. Then we figured out how to produce and distribute salt to every table of the world.

She was cutting the sweet potatoes with a steel knife. It took generations of metallurgists to figure out how to make steel reliably and affordably. “Before steel, there were bodies of water you could not cross without a boat because no one knew how to make an iron bridge that wouldn’t sink.”

She would put the sweet potatoes in an oven. But Tucker reminds us that “she didn’t have to chop down trees and built a fire, like 99.99 percent of humanity had to until relatively recently.”

And where did she get those sweet potatoes? No one grows them in Washington, DC. Where did the store get them? Until fairly recently, the sweet potato was trapped in distant places. Now they are flown on planes and shipped on ocean liners and brought to the store by trucks. All of those modes of transportation run on fossil fuels.

His point is something I have also noticed. Many Americans (including members of Congress) enjoy the fruits of technology and capitalism but at the same time want to eliminate the technological developments and free market benefits that provided them. It is short sighted at best.

Is it possible that some time in the future, the US Senate will end the filibuster? When he was a Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid ended the filibuster for judicial nominees. That was done to help President Obama get nominees through Senate confirmation. Now it is helping President Trump with his nominees.

David French is concerned that Democrats might want to end the filibuster in the future, and that “could break American politics.” He raises this question because of an op-ed in The New York Times that has now led to other editorials and commentaries. The argument is simple. Even if Democrats elect a president and even if they are able to control both the House and Senate, they will never pass controversial legislation like the Green New Deal.

We are a divided country. The parties are polarized. Major pieces of legislation (especially controversial pieces of legislation) will not make it through the US Senate as long as a 60-vote requirement remains. That’s why some are ready to end the filibuster. They look at the facts and say, “Step on the gas.” David French looks at the same facts and says, “Tap the brakes.”

I have always had a problem with the filibuster because it allows a minority to prevent the implementation of the majority. A majority of Senators (as many of 59) cannot get legislation passed if 41 senators do not vote for cloture, which would end debate and allow a vote on a bill.

On the other hand, I see the value of keeping the filibuster. A Democrat Congress passed the Affordable Care Act without one Republican vote when the filibuster was in place. Imagine the legislation that might fly through the Senate if the Democratic leadership ended the filibuster!

It is worth having this discussion now. And it is worth seeing whether ending the filibuster makes it into the Democratic platform in 2020. We need to keep the Senate filibuster.

Venezuela is a total economic and humanitarian disaster. Inflation is rampant. The inflation rate has already exceeded two million percent. All supplies (including toilet paper) are in sort supply. Medicine is unavailable in most of the country. Food shortages along with the crumbling economy have forced people to change their eating habits. All are losing weight and battling malnutrition in what has become known as the “Maduro diet.”

President Nicolás Maduro is the one of the reasons for the economic devastation, along with the previous policies of Hugo Chávez. If you needed an object lesson on why socialism is bad for a country and its people, you need to look no further than Venezuela.

The economic resources are there. The husband of one of my colleagues used to travel to Venezuela with the major oil companies, which brought prosperity to many in the country. But the Chávez government started taking majority stake in various oil projects. Oil companies from the US and Europe left the country. Oil prices dropped, and today we have a crisis so bad that people are eating out of garbage cans and catching and eating zoo animals, dogs, cats, and birds.

Trying to get humanitarian aid to the people is difficult. Maduro has blocked aid from crossing the border arguing that it could be a potential “Trojan horse” that would lead to military intervention.

Earlier this year, leader of the legislature, Juan Guaido, declared himself the acting president, and has been backed by the Trump Administration. Vice President Mike Pence declared to the people of Venezuela, “We are with you, we stand with you and will stay with you until democracy is restored.” He also called for leaders in other countries to join the US. He said, “There can be no bystanders in Venezuela’s struggle for freedom.”

We need to pray for our leaders and pray for the people in Venezuela who are suffering through this crisis.

Not only is the U.S. government in debt, but many of its citizens are in significant debt as well. Economists announced that credit card debt for Americans has now reached a new height of $1.02 trillion.

Matt Schultz is a senior industry analyst at CreditCards.com. He says, “This record should serve as a wake-up call to Americans to focus on their credit card debt.” He adds, “Even if you feel your debt is manageable right now, know that you could be one unexpected emergency away from real trouble.”

While I am talking about credit card debt, let me also talk about other debts that Americans currently hold. The New York Federal Reserve recently released a report that estimated the collective U.S. household debt at about $12.73 trillion. Once again this is a record and surpasses the previous amount back in 2008 during the recession.

The report also provides some context to American debt. Housing-related debt is down nearly $1 trillion since the 2008 peak. However, auto loan balances are $367 billion higher, and student loans are $671 billion higher.

In the past, we have talked about the growing problem of student loan debt, so let me focus a moment on auto loan debt. Americans struggle with this form of debt, especially because there are often higher interest rates. Millions of these loans are in delinquency and many people report taking out a loan with a repayment period longer than the time they planned to own the vehicle.

In my book, Making the Most of Your Money in Tough Times, I talk about the dangers of debt. Proverbs 22:7 says, “The rich rule over the poor, and the borrower is a servant to the lender.” So many Americans are enslaved by debt.