This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2015, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

Last week, the World Congress of Families IV and Utah's Arches Health Care both retired from the field.

Not related events. Except the coincidence should raise a crucial question: Who can afford to have more children, as the WCF keeps calling for, if so many people cannot afford health care, which Arches was set up to provide?

Yes, that's yet another matter of crucial importance to real, live families that the WCF went nowhere near.

End of Arches points to single-payer — Salt Lake Tribune Editorial

" ... All of this fiddling with rival steampunk assemblages of subsidies, mandates, taxes, exchanges and co-ops continues to burden Americans because Republicans have never accepted, and Democrats have never fully sold, the realization that a country where millions of people do not have access to affordable health care is the skunk in the garden party of First World nations. No truly civilized society would tolerate such a condition. ..."

In its short life, Arches proved it was an innovator — Shaun Greene | Arches Health | For The Salt Lake Tribune

" ... Without the federal reimbursements which we earned and were promised, our position for 2016 greatly concerned the insurance department. We don't fault the Utah Insurance Department for that decision; rather, the outcome is the result of a tough political climate in Washington that prevented the payment of millions in reimbursements that Arches had earned. ..."

An alternative to Obamacare? — Washington Post Editorial

"Jeb Bush released a health-care plan last month that would disassemble Obamacare's "three-legged stool" — its federal mandate requiring all individuals to carry health insurance, its ban on insurance companies denying or pricing out people with preexisting conditions, and its subsidies to help people buy coverage. In its place, he would assemble a flimsier one. ..."

Financial health shaky at many Obamacare insurance co-ops — Amy Goldstein | The Washington Post

The market will decide what a family is — George Pyle | The Salt Lake Tribune

"If your family is sacred, why are all those old busybodies out there telling you how to run it?

"Just this past week, the World Congress of Families, assembled in Salt Lake City, told all the households in its domain that they could start having more than one child.

"Oh. Wait. It was the government of the People's Republic of China, sitting in Beijing, that issued that edict. Sorry. I get them mixed up. ...

" ... telling people to get married sooner and have more kids, no matter whether it is the state or the church that is doing the telling, is cruel to those listening and self-deceiving to those talking.

"Considered statistically, in the aggregate, families are indeed economic units. But people are not statistics. The idea that families are created and run for the benefit of the state is downright feudal. ..."

China damaged by one-child policy — Washington Post Editorial

" ... There's a broad lesson in this about simplistic Malthusian thinking — as well as a very specific lesson about the characteristic mind-set of totalitarian states. As anthropologist James C. Scott put it in his classic critique of large-scale social engineering, 'Seeing Like a State': 'Progenitors of such plans regarded themselves as far smarter and farseeing than they really were and, at the same time, regarded their subjects as far more stupid and incompetent than they really were. ... [P]lanners ignore the radical contingency of the future ... whatever awareness they had ... seemed to dissolve before their faith.' ..."

Why many families in China won't want more than one kid even if they can have them — Ana Swanson | Wonkblog | The Washington Post

" ... But how much will scrapping the one-child limit really change the size and makeup of China's population? Not as much as you might think. There are deeper and more permanent reasons, beyond the one-child limit, that China's families have gotten so small.

"One is that, for many couples, it has become very costly to have kids in China. ..."

Why young adults are waiting to grow up — William Kremer | BBC World Service

"Young people all over the world are struggling to save enough money to move out of their parents' homes, get married and raise families. No longer children, but not yet regarded as adults, they are stuck in a period of 'waithood' ..."