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By Rhiannon Meyers Collette, Communications Manager

In his address to Congress on Wednesday, President Joe Biden called on lawmakers to rein in out-of-control prescription drug prices. This isn't the first time a president has demanded drug pricing reform — former President Donald Trump last year urged the same action — but policymaking has stalled amid partisan disagreements and heavy lobbying by Big Pharma. A recent poll of more than 1,200 voters shows 90% believe it's important for the government to lower the price of drugs.

What's On The Table: House Democrats reintroduced the Elijah E. Cummings Lower Drug Costs Now Act. It proposes to lower drug prices by implementing an inflation rebate — requiring drugmakers to reimburse taxpayers when drug prices rise faster than inflation — and giving Medicare the power to negotiate lower prices with pharmaceutical companies. Biden threw his support behind the proposal on Wednesday. "Let’s give Medicare the power to save hundreds of billions of dollars by negotiating lower prices for prescription drugs. That won’t just help people on Medicare – it will lower prescription drug costs for everyone," he said.

What's Next: Medicare negotiation hasn't been popular with Republicans, and it’s unclear whether the Lower Drug Prices Now Act has the votes to pass the Senate. But the pressure is on Congress to pass meaningful drug pricing reform. Voters — and the administration — are clear where they stand. “We’ve talked about it long enough – Democrats and Republicans," Biden said. "Let’s get it done this year.”

Related: President Biden just signed into law two pieces of legislation aimed at strengthening competition in the prescription drug market in a broader attempt to lower prices. But they are only incremental steps in the right direction. 

Related: The U.S. Government Accountability Office confirms that Americans pay more for the same drugs than other developed nations.

By Evan Mintz, Communications Manager

RAND’s Gun Policy In America initiative has published a first-ever state-by-state estimate of nonfatal firearm injuries. The Database of Hospitalizations for Firearm Injury, which provides estimates of state-level hospitalizations for firearm injury from 2000 through 2016 for all 50 U.S. states, is free to the public and will serve as an important resource for researchers, advocates, and policymakers.

Why It Matters: Looking at gun deaths alone fails to capture the sobering breadth of gun violence in the U.S., and information on nonfatal injuries is not collected in a systematic way. With this new data, researchers can better answer fundamental questions about gun violence, such as trends in nonfatal gun shootings and changes in the lethality of firearms.

What’s Next: With this information now publicly available, policymakers, researchers and activists can begin to analyze the full impact of state-level strategies and policies aimed at reducing gun violence. “Through the work of RAND’s Gun Policy in America initiative, researchers can evaluate the impact of state firearm policies, and the estimates can also be used to calculate the total cost of firearm injury at the national or state level,” says AV’s Asheley Van Ness, director of criminal justice.
 

By Adrienne Faraci, Communications Manager

Whether it's addressing how to better adapt to climate change or strengthening rainy-day savings policy to help budgets through lean years, scenario planning has become a familiar practice for state governments. More recently, that concept of stress testing has expanded to pensions, and it’s having practical and immediate results. 

What’s Happening: Stress testing, which essentially throws different economic scenarios at a system to see how it would be impacted, is becoming a vital tool in the decade following the Great Recession. Pew Charitable Trusts has a framework for stress testing pensions that several states are using. “This kind of analysis is extremely important during times of economic uncertainty, which is what we’ve been experiencing over the past year,” said Greg Mennis, Pew’s director of public sector retirement systems. “The economic outlook has improved [since the start of the COVID-19 crisis], but it still demonstrates the need to think long term.”

How It’s Working: Pew piloted its pandemic-era framework with a stress test of New Jersey’s pension system in the fall of 2020. The results of that test helped policymakers move forward with paying their full pension bill, $4.7 billion, even as the state was facing a revenue shortfall because of the pandemic. Some stakeholders were questioning whether the state would be better served by reducing or skipping the fiscal 2021 payment. But better-than-expected revenues in the current fiscal year have spurred the state to seize the opportunity and start paying its full pension bill one year ahead of schedule.

I was blown away by this short but impactful video from REFORM Alliance that puts into stark relief how life’s ordinary, everyday occurrences can be treated like a crime — considered technical violations of probation or parole — and send someone to prison. It’s part of their Give Life Back campaign to change a system that is a major driver of mass incarceration. 

Also: “Why Is It So Expensive?,” an opinion video in which The New York Times shows people from around the world how the U.S. health care system works, from the complexity of insurance plans to the high price of insulin to outrageous hospital bills (including one that charged a mother to hold her baby after childbirth). Their response? Shock and heartbreak, especially at the news that Americans turn in droves to GoFundMe campaigns for medical expenses and that the U.S. spends in some cases twice as much on health care than other countries for worse outcomes — including a shorter lifespan. “To know that I can get sick, I can get injured, but I will still be taken care of, that is freedom. This is not freedom.”

Related: “I think of Shane. I think of Shane dying. I think of $50.” This eye-opening comic strip from The Nib offers another way to explain the plight of accessing medical care in this country.