Ideally all business would take what they pay for insurance and stick it in the employee's paycheck and then the employee would buy insurance with that money. Reality says, a lot less people end up having insurance if you do it that way. Maybe force companies who once offered insurance to fund an employee HSAs and change the HSA rules so it can be used to buy insurance. It would take some thoughtful design to actually pull off the transition while keeping people on insurance.

Yes, for places with sizeable hydropower. You simply hold the water for longer.

Probably yes, for places where the need for redundancy is rare. Natural gas peaker plants are cheaper to build and simpler to operate with the tradeoff of being less efficient than combined cycle plants.

Representational democracy is far superior. Decisions need to be weighed against both their popularity and their effect with input from experts and other affected parties.

Grocery inflation is not nearly as bad as the food inflation overall, which is driven by food-away-from-home just absolutely skyrocketing.

Billions of words have been spilled about housing, so I will boil it down simply. It is a mixture of policy and preference. It doesn't have to be the way it is, we just need to collective will to change things.