Author: Star News Contributor

Commentary: Socialist Healthcare Reforms Are Closer in Tennessee than They Appear

Star News Contributor
Doctor and patient

As someone who grew up in Communist Cuba, I’ve seen the effects of socialism firsthand. When I moved to the United States, I saw what a free-market economy was capable of achieving. That’s why I’m disturbed at the rise in support for socialist reforms across our healthcare space. In Tennessee, we’re blessed with leaders who believe in allowing competition and the free market to set consumer prices, not the government. But no state, no matter how deep-red, is immune to the cancer of socialism. 

Rising healthcare costs – in large part due to insurance companies and hospital systems – are a legitimate concern for millions of Americans, including Tennesseans. Washington’s response for years has largely consisted of failed attempts at affordability. Those who support more government intervention in healthcare are too focused on drug prices as a fix-all solution. They don’t consider the total cost of receiving treatment. Insurance companies, government price-fixing, and abused federal government programs like 340B are the true causes of less access and higher costs.

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Commentary: Big Tech Needs to Follow Tennessee’s Lead on Kids’ Online Safety

Star News Contributor
kid phone

Parents across Tennessee sent a clear message in this election: they want leaders who will stand up to Big Tech and keep our state the best place in America to live, work and raise a family. 

Governor-elect Marsha Blackburn has led on keeping Big Tech accountable in Congress and she will do the same as Governor of Tennessee. She spent years in Washington taking on the most powerful companies in the world, often when it was unpopular – putting parents who lost children to online predators and sextortion front and center. Senator Blackburn’s Kids Online Safety Act, co-authored with Senator Richard Blumenthal, would require platforms to build in safety by design, enable the strongest protections for minors by default, and give parents real tools to manage what their kids see. Tech companies resisted tooth and nail, but her bill passed the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee with an overwhelming bipartisan majority. Blackburn extended the same protective instinct to Tennessee’s artists and creators through the NO FAKES Act.

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Commentary: Washington’s Drug Price Controls Threaten Medical Innovation

Star News Contributor

Tennesseans deserve access to reliable, safe, and affordable treatment options. After more than four years since the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) was signed into law under the Biden administration, it’s time for lawmakers to admit that the results are a disaster for the healthcare industry and patient access – along with long-term medical innovation and research and development.

Four years ago the IRA gave the federal government unprecedented control to set prices for certain Medicare prescriptions. Now it’s back for more. Earlier this year, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) proposed a rule to expand that control.

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Commentary: When Nonprofit Hospitals Take More Than They Give, Everyone Pays

Star News Contributor
Doctor patient

When my parents arrived in the United States from Cuba, they brought almost nothing with them except a hard-earned distrust of institutions that take the public’s money in the name of the public good. Castro’s Cuba was full of them. I still know one when I see it.

American nonprofit hospitals warrant that same scrutiny. They collect roughly $37.4 billion each year in federal, state, and local tax breaks. In exchange, they are expected to provide free care to qualified patients and to invest in the health of the neighborhoods they serve. Many of them unfortunately don’t.

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Marsha Blackburn Commentary: Help Is on the Way for Tennessee Families

Star News Contributor
Marsha Blackburn campaign event

Families are working hard, but too often they are finding that their paychecks do not go as far as they once did. Young Tennesseans are wondering whether they will ever be able to afford a home of their own. Seniors who spent decades working, saving and building a life in Tennessee are worried about whether they can afford to stay in the homes they worked so hard to purchase.

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Commentary: Proposed mRNA Ban Would Destroy Decades of Scientific Discovery, Patient Choice, and Years of Economic Development

Star News Contributor
medical science laboratory

As a physician, my top priority has been and will always be achieving the best outcomes for my patients. Many existing medicines and treatments are tried and true. Likewise, scientific research and development as well as innovative new technologies should not be overlooked or even rejected outright. After all, we know many advancements in medicine today were at one time revolutionary ideas.

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Commentary: Free Markets Beat Foreign Mandates in Drug Pricing

Star News Contributor

When I was five years old, my family fled communist Cuba. We left behind a regime built on government decrees, central planning, and the false promise that state mandates could magically cure economic pain. I learned a lesson early in life that has stayed with me ever since: government can order a price to be lower on paper, but it cannot order a scientist to discover a cure, an entrepreneur to risk capital, or a business to survive in a broken or fixed market.

That history drives my work today. At Latinos for Tennessee, our advocacy is rooted in free enterprise and free-market principles—limited government, fiscal responsibility, and individual liberty. When we talk about healthcare affordability, we have to be careful. Well-intentioned policy ideas can easily destroy the very engine of scientific progress that makes American medicine the best in the world.

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Commentary: Washington Has Another Job to Do for Tennessee’s Teachers and Nurses

Star News Contributor
students and teacher

Tennessee’s pension system is one of the best-funded in the nation, and that is no accident. Every session, my colleagues and I on the Finance, Ways, and Means Committee make hard choices, keep our commitments, and make sure the numbers pencil out because the people depending on Tennessee’s retirement system spent decades earning those benefits and deserve to know they’ll be there.

Our discipline has paid off. In fiscal year 2025, the K-12 teachers’ pension plans were funded at approximately 106%. We’ve made a secure retirement a top priority, and we need Washington to do the same.

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Commentary: Chaz Molder’s Recent Poll Gives Voters a Big Reason to Not Trust the Columbia Democrat

Star News Contributor
Chaz Molder

Mark Twain famously published that “There are three types of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” Were Twain with us today he might add a fourth type of lie – political polling. Specifically, those polls released for public consumption.

Most campaign polling is internal, unpublicized, and genuinely used by campaigns to understand where a race stands. You will likely never hear about most of it, because that isn’t its purpose. These are legitimate benchmark and brushfire polls. 

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Commentary: Tennessee’s Veterans Have Found Community and Connection in an Unexpected Place

Star News Contributor
Video Gaming

I spent 21 years in the Army before I spent years representing Montgomery County, a district shaped by Fort Campbell. In that overlap, I sat with more veterans than I can count who told me some version of the same thing. The hardest part of coming home wasn’t the transition itself. It was learning to live without the people who understood them.

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Commentary: Tennessee’s Legal Victory Against Meta Now Means Other Social Media Platforms Need to Step Up

Star News Contributor
Tiktok user

Tennessee just took Big Tech to task. 

Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti negotiated a historic $17 billion settlement with Meta, delivering real money, real platform changes and real accountability. As a school board member in Williamson County, I’ve spent the past year immersed in the research and the reality of what these platforms are doing to our kids: the anxiety, the sleep deprivation, the self-worth tied to a Like count. Each one of the settlement’s painstaking concessions – platform curfews, screen time limits, non-personalized feeds, and disabled Like counts – are the kind of baseline protections I’ve been waiting years to see implemented.

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Commentary: Government Regulations Won’t Solve Knox County’s Housing Shortage

Star News Contributor
Housing construction

Knox County takes pride in creating a favorable environment for businesses. However, the housing market has been hampered by unnecessary red tape, resulting in a housing shortage. That’s why I am concerned that the Knox County Commission is considering adding more regulations that will not improve housing affordability.

Rather than encouraging the market to build more homes, county commissioners proposed a cap on the number of single-family rentals that larger housing providers can purchase. The real issue facing Knox County isn’t who owns homes; it’s that we don’t have enough of them. Working families need more housing options, not additional government restrictions.

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Commentary: Warning Signs for Deep Red Williamson County, Tennessee

Star News Contributor
Judson Phillips

On August 6, Tennessee held primary elections for statewide offices and the general election for county offices. In Williamson County, Tennessee, the results were shocking, to put it mildly.  

To begin with, some background is in order.  I moved to Williamson County in 1997.  While Tennessee had been a blue state for over a century, things were changing, and Williamson County was already bright red. The county officials were almost all republicans. Democrats ran as independents because they would never be elected as democrats.  The Williamson County Republican Party was very dynamic. It had an office on Main Street in Franklin. It was staffed full time, and the location was a can’t-miss location. 

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Marsha Blackburn Commentary: Congress Must Pass the SAVE AMERICA Act

Star News Contributor
People voting

For our republic, nothing is more fundamental than the principle of one person, one vote. During his Thursday night address, President Trump revealed deeply troubling information showing that this bedrock of our election system is under attack.

Citing recently declassified documents, President Trump disclosed that Communist China in 2020 stole 220 million U.S. voter files, including data containing names, addresses, and party affiliations. Yet when Deep State actors discovered the breach, they concealed it from President Trump during the closing months of his first term. Rogue bureaucrats even buried intelligence that China attempted to manufacture fraudulent ballots supporting then-candidate Joe Biden.

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Commentary: Dieselgate’s Legacy Is Still Suffocating A Decade Later

Star News Contributor

Nearly 11 years ago, Volkswagen admitted to covertly installing “defeat devices” in millions of its vehicles as part of a ploy to evade government emissions tests. This scandal, infamously known as “Dieselgate,” resulted in vehicles emitting up to 40 times more nitrous oxide (NOx) on the road than legally permitted by the US Environmental Protection Agency. Dieselgate rocked the global automobile industry, embroiling several of the world’s leading car manufacturers in legal troubles, including the conviction of four former Volkswagen managers.

As litigation efforts for Dieselgate ramp up overseas, experts are questioning whether the cheating scandal deserves renewed scrutiny from U.S. regulators and courts. For the people of Tennessee, the answer to that question should be a resounding “yes.”

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Marsha Blackburn Commentary: Birth Tourism Undermines U.S. Citizenship

Star News Contributor
pregnant woman

As Americans, few things are more sacred than our citizenship. It’s what empowers us to defend our freedoms, choose our elected representatives, and serve our nation. It’s what delineates our rights and responsibilities as Americans. And it’s what makes us We the People. Yet for years, one industry has undermined this cherished institution: birth tourism.

Each year, tens of thousands of foreign visitors give birth in our country with the intention of securing U.S. citizenship for their children. These tourists—often wealthy nationals from China and Russia—typically return to their home countries as soon as they receive their child’s U.S. passport. Many return to America multiple times to repeat this process. Behind this appalling practice is a multimillion-dollar industry that coaches clients on how to exploit our nation’s immigration laws.

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Commentary: Tennessee Needs to Stop Supporting China-Linked Microvast

Star News Contributor
Microvast

In 2021, Governor Bill Lee and state officials celebrated Microvast’s announcement of a $220 million battery manufacturing facility in Clarksville, promising nearly 300 jobs and positioning the state as a leader in the electric vehicle and energy storage supply chain. The project, which received significant economic development incentives and was sold as a win for American manufacturing and clean energy jobs, has become a troubling example of how Chinese-linked companies continue to benefit from U.S. taxpayer incentives despite serious national security and human rights concerns.

Microvast Holdings, Inc. has long derived most of its revenue and assets from operations in China, previously raising $400 million in funding from state-run CITIC Securities and Chinese private equity firm CDH Investments, which holds roughly 11% through affiliated entities, with board representation. While Microvast maintains a U.S. headquarters and public listing, its supply chains and core production remain heavily dependent on China, with almost all its manufacturing capacity, a 75,000 square foot R&D center and four subsidiaries in China. These connections raise legitimate questions under evolving U.S. policy aimed at strengthening national security by reducing reliance on adversarial supply chains.

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Commentary: Gray Market GLP-1 Medications Put Lives at Risk, Especially in the Latino Community

Star News Contributor
person working out

The obesity crisis sweeping across the United States is profound. However, with the advent of GLP-1 medications, Americans have a real chance to combat chronic illnesses like heart disease and other obesity-related complications. While GLP-1 medications are incredibly effective, patients need to make sure they are getting the real FDA-approved version and not a counterfeit, copycat or illicit compounded material, which could jeopardize patient health and safety.  

Unfortunately, between non-FDA approved compounded versions, aggressive digital marketing campaigns of GLP-1s that might appear to be FDA approved, but really aren’t and an illicit and counterfeit market of drugs coming across the border that oftentimes contain active pharmaceutical ingredients from China that are mislabeled, aren’t intended for humans (e.g. made for animals), have major safety violations and countless other issues endangering patient safety. 

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Commentary: FCC Decision Holds Monopoly Utilities Accountable

Star News Contributor
Broadband Installation

Tennessee has received $813 million in federal taxpayer money to expand broadband access across our state under the Broadband, Equity, Access and Deployment Program (BEAD). Nationwide, the federal government is dispensing nearly $43 billion across all 50 states and six territories. 

When Governor Bill Lee took office in 2019, 20 percent of Tennesseans lacked high-speed broadband internet – including the Governor at his farm. A few months ago at the AI Summit in Nashville, Tennessee Economic and Community Development Commissioner and Deputy Governor Stuart McWhorter estimated that less than two percent of Tennesseans currently lack access to broadband. The gap has seriously been closed. 

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Commentary: When City Officials Play Politics, State Officials Have Every Right to Step In

Star News Contributor
nashville airport

Tennessee has sent a message that local officials across the country would be wise to hear. When city leaders put partisan politics ahead of the people they serve, state officials have every legal right – and increasingly, the political will – to step in and set things right.

Last month, the General Assembly passed legislation giving state leaders greater, and frankly fairer, control over Tennessee’s airports. Going forward, the governor, lieutenant governor, and speaker of the state House will appoint six of the nine members on each major airport authority board. Local officials will still appoint three.

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Commentary: The Secret Service Needs a Course Correction to Ensure President Trump’s Protection

Star News Contributor
President Donald Trump

Every American should be grateful that President Trump, Vice President Vance, Cabinet officials, and the thousands of other attendees at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner were unharmed during last month’s disturbing shooting. It is clear that the shooter attempted to kill the President in yet another assassination attempt on his life since he returned to office. In a manifesto, the alleged shooter, Cole Tomas Allen, wrote that he intended to target administration officials, “prioritized from highest-ranking to lowest.”

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Commentary: Trump and Tennessee Republicans Delivering Affordable Energy

Star News Contributor
Donald Trump

The Trump administration and state leadership are working relentlessly to obtain private, federal and state investments and grants, as well as foreign direct investment in new enrichment technology, advanced nuclear power plants, and other innovations that are being built and deployed in partnership with the Tennessee Valley Authority and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL).

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Commentary: Digital Communication Platforms Are Fueling Economic Growth—Let’s Not Lose Sight of That

Star News Contributor
Child learning online with mother next to boy

There’s a growing concern about how young people are experiencing the digital world. I have spoken out about this very issue myself. I’m relieved to see parents, educators, and especially policymakers are focusing on the risks and emerging challenges posed by artificial intelligence and social media addiction. These are serious issues, and they demand thoughtful, effective solutions.

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