Tom Church
Tom Church is a policy fellow at the Hoover Institution whose work focuses on health care policy, entitlement reform, and federal budgeting. He has discussed Medicare reform and Hoover’s Tannenbaum Program for Fact-Based Policy.
Medicare’s Fiscal Burden Extends Beyond the Part A Trust Fund
Hoover policy fellow Tom Church argues that Medicare’s fiscal problem extends beyond the projected shortfall in its hospital trust fund: taxpayer subsidies for Parts B and D are adding heavily to federal debt. Incremental savings, he says, will not resolve the program’s broader design questions, including how much beneficiaries should pay and whether subsidies should be reduced for higher-income seniors. Church also contends that reform is unlikely without bipartisan action led by elected officials, even as current political incentives favor expanding benefits or postponing hard choices.
Teachers’ Unions Remain Powerful as Membership Falls and School Politics Shift
Michael Hartney and Melissa Lyon argue that teachers’ unions remain central actors in American education, but their influence is harder to measure than collective-bargaining law alone suggests. In a Hoover Institution discussion hosted by Tom Church, they describe unions as layered national, state, and local institutions that shape spending, working conditions, strikes, COVID reopening decisions, and now debates over AI and the purpose of schools. Both see unions as durable, but increasingly defined by transparency fights, voluntary membership, and the politics of what schools are meant to do.