According to business some business leaders, a nonprofit could run a health insurance exchange and bring free-market solutions to the issue.

According to a conservative lobbying group, the business folks are wrong about what constitutes a free-market solution.

If you want to sort out the back and forth, here are the dueling news releases.

Up first, a group calling itself the Idaho Association of Health Plans:

For more than 30 years, Garden City officials have blocked the creation of a bicycle path through Garden City, says cycling advocate Gary Segers.
On Nov. 6, voters can and should take matters into the own hands by approving a pair of ordinances allowing cycling on all city Greenbelt paths.

UPDATED, 5:20 p.m. Friday, with more filings.

Wednesday was a key deadline for legislators and legislative candidates to file campaign finance reports.

And based on what has been posted on Secretary of State Ben Ysursa's website by this afternoon, the costliest legislative race in the Treasure Valley is the Senate race in West Boise’s District 15.

Jason Monks of Meridian won a four-person GOP primary in May, collecting 942 votes out of just 2,373 ballots cast.

But even as one of the winners in the GOP’s historic closed primary, Monks’ support for the idea is qualified. He told the Statesman editorial board that he was “very frustrated” during door-to-door campaigning in the spring, as he heard from voters who were staying home because of the closed primary.

The Statesman will begin publishing fall election endorsements Friday, running through Nov. 2.

Here is the schedule:

Friday, Oct. 12:
Ada County sheriff (Gary Raney, Ted Dunlap)
Canyon County sheriff (Kieran Donahue, Robert Muse)

Sunday, Oct. 14:
Ada County commissioner
• District 1 (Jim Tibbs, Larry Rincover)
• District 3 (David Case, Thomas Howell)

Tuesday, Oct. 16:
Ada County Highway District
• District 1 (Jim Hansen, Carol McKee, Neil Piispanen)
• District 2 (Rebecca Arnold, John Carver)

(UPDATED, 1:14 p.m. Wednesday, with new filings.)

Today is a key deadline for legislators and legislative candidates to file campaign finance reports.

I’ll be poring over the results and analyzing the trends, but I thought it would be useful to post some data from the reports already filed.

The dollar figure reflects money raised so far this calendar year (and does not reflect carryover money from before 2012, or cash on hand heading into the final four weeks of the campaign). If you’d like to dig in deeper, I’ve attached links to all the reports.

Here's a draft of our Wednesday editorial:

How’s this for running politics like a business?

Flush with Super Tuesday fever, but not exactly flush with cash, Ada County Republicans decide nonetheless that they want to hold a presidential caucus unlike any other. They plan to hold one single caucus in a county of 400,000 people — an event, with 9,000 participants, that goes down as the biggest caucus of the year.

Here's a draft of our Tuesday editorial.

The gift that keeps on giving, the J.R. Simplot mansion has provided Idaho plenty of headaches over the past eight years.

Now, Idaho is in a no-win situation: figuring out what to do with an unoccupied and all-but-unused mansion. The decision falls to a five-member governor’s housing committee: Sen. Chuck Winder and Rep., Max Black, both R-Boise, Sen. Les Bock and Rep. Phylis King, both D-Boise, and Administration Department Director Teresa Luna.

Idaho’s kids should expect more from the grownups.

The Students Come First debate has gone schoolyard. Perhaps the low point came Tuesday, when state schools superintendent Tom Luna and state Rep. Brian Cronin debated the laws at a Boise City Club forum.

After making his opening remarks, Cronin sat down and was confronted by a visibly agitated Luna. Cronin says he was cursed out. Did Luna actually cross the fine line of debate between calling B.S. and actually uttering the word? Luna denies it.

Did too. Did not.

A couple days back, I posted the Idaho School Boards Association's argument for Proposition 1, the Students Come First collective bargaining rewrite that will appear on the Nov. 6 ballot.

Agree or disagree with the conclusions, it was a reasoned argument for local control, and for allowing locally elected trustees the latitude to craft contracts. (I will rerun the piece in Sunday Insight.)