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The Abstract
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> By Stephanie DiCapua Getman, Arnold Ventures
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As Texas dominates the news this week, my colleague Evan Mintz looks at one of the new laws on the books that hasn’t gotten as much play in the national media — permitless carry of handguns:
Texas’ unregulated firearms carry law went into effect on Wednesday, and you may have already heard some glib comparisons to the Wild West. But that’s not fair. Despite the myths about shootouts and gunslingers in places like Tombstone, Dodge City, and Deadwood, the reality is that outposts on the American frontier heavily regulated the carrying and use of firearms and routinely required visitors to disarm before entering town. By allowing Texans over age 21 to openly carry handguns in public without a background check or any safety training, the state isn’t returning to some idealized, conservative past. Instead, we’re lurching headlong into an unknown and, to me, terrifyingly radical future.
Arnold Ventures’ work on gun policy is aimed at answering many of these unknowns. Last year was one of the deadliest on record for gun violence: An estimated 44,000 people died by firearm — five people every hour. But for more than two decades, the federal government refused to effectively fund research into this bloodshed. This underfunding created a massive knowledge gap that leaves policymakers without a shared set of facts around gun violence and a lack of answers about ways to effectively save lives.
Longtime Texas journalist Scott Braddock made that astute observation in the middle of the legislative session.
“One of the disingenuous things that happens on that issue,” he said while discussing gun policy on the Texas Take podcast, “[is] one side will say ‘the other side is all emotional, and I have the facts on my side.’”
That’s the inevitable framing of too many gun debates.
But even the experts recognize that we shouldn’t need decades worth of research to try to implement gun policies that could save lives — or stop deregulation that could put lives at risk.
“I do not believe — and I doubt anyone on our team believes — that gun policies should not be tried if there is not yet rigorous evidence for their effects,” Andrew Morral, director of RAND’s GPIA said last week. “This idea is both impractical and illogical: How would you evaluate policies before their implementation?”
Still, I would like to think that better evidence could have changed some minds in the Texas Legislature. It’s not as if the bill was ever that popular. Only one-third of Texans said they supported the change, and nearly 60% opposed it, according to a poll by the University of Texas and Texas Tribune. Meanwhile, Texas continues to grapple with the COVID-era spike in homicides.
Maybe one day the Legislature will be convinced to roll back the bill. Until then, Texans won’t be living in the Wild West — we’ll be living in a policy lab with 29 million test subjects. Let’s hope there’s a high survival rate.
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A School Solution in Need of a Test
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The pandemic forced colleges and universities to abruptly shift learning to online. Now, what in many cases was a hasty and awkward experiment appears to be emerging as an enduring feature of higher education. AV's Higher Education team has issued a request for proposals to begin to identify what is working — and not — in students' online experiences.
Why It Matters: Eighteen months in, many students express dissatisfaction with their online experience, yet at the same time they expect to sign up for more. With such a broad implementation, it's too important for programs to be guessing what works. We sat down with the AV team to talk about education during the pandemic and how they hope to help students succeed by studying these programs. "We know that we need to support students better," says Kelly McManus, director of higher education. "But what we know is our schools aren't equipped to actually support students."
The Fine Print: Interested respondents can read the RFP; your school or program's letters of interest are welcomed until Oct. 11. "We are open to applications from anyone," says Chase Sackett, manager of higher education. "Any type of school, any type of provider, whether it’s the school themselves, a nonprofit or some other provider working with campuses. We are really, really open."
Read the Q&A >
Related: President Biden’s proposed $62 billion College Completion Fund could be a “game-changer,” writes APLU President Peter McPherson in Forbes, and "help support the scaling of innovations in the areas such as affordability, teaching and learning, and holistic student supports."
Related: Inside Higher Ed makes a bipartisan case for why college completion is just as vital as college access.
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Medicare Report Reveals
Serious Challenges Ahead
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This week, Medicare's board of trustees reported on the state of the Medicare program's finances. They projected that Medicare spending will continue to substantially increase over the coming decades and that the Medicare hospital insurance (HI) trust fund will become insolvent by 2026.
Why it Matters: This is just the third time in history that the HI trust fund has been projected to reach insolvency within five years. Over 60 million Americans rely on Medicare for their health coverage, and at the current pace, Medicare will not be able to fully pay health care providers starting in 2026.
What's Next: Arnold Ventures continues to call on Congress and the White House to collaborate on enacting Medicare reforms that will bolster the program's financial sustainability. Our team is facilitating research and advocacy efforts geared at strengthening Medicare by boosting the program's revenue as well as eliminating inefficient spending.
Read our full statement >
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Gun Violence is a Public Health — Not a Partisan — Issue
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By Evan Mintz, Communications Manager
Gun violence isn’t just an issue for the criminal justice system — it is a major public health concern. That’s why the AcademyHealth blog ran a post about research into gun violence by AV Director of Criminal Justice Asheley Van Ness. "With this year on track to become the deadliest in decades, it’s past time to treat gun violence like a public health issue and invest in data and research that will help curb mortality,” Van Ness wrote.
Why It Matters: Firearms are a leading cause of death in the United States. Each year, nearly 40,000 Americans lose their lives to homicides, suicides, and accidents. However, for two decades the federal government deterred research that could better help us understand — and prevent — this bloodshed. Despite being a top-20 cause of death in the United States, research into gun violence is only funded at about $63 per life lost. In contrast, the median research funding for other leading causes of death is nearly $5,000 per life lost. HIV is researched at $182,668 per life. Without funding for research and data infrastructure, we lack fundamental information about gun violence in the United States. For example, there is no reliable nationwide data on nonfatal gunshot victims and their injuries.
What’s Next: Congress has finally begun to resume funding this critical research, and a new report from Arnold Ventures and the Joyce Foundation estimates that it will cost roughly $600 million over five years in order to fund the data infrastructure and research necessary to close the knowledge gap. The report also calls on the federal government to:
- Empower researchers to fully explore all aspects of the nation’s gun violence epidemic
- Improve databases tracking things like nonviolent shootings
- Standardize and improve the collection of data by law enforcement entities
- Conduct annual surveys of firearm ownership and storage practices, among other recommendations
Read the story > |
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Professionalize Our Police Forces
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By Evan Mintz, Communications Manager
California needs to be able to hold police officers accountable for violations of the public trust, and that means passing Senate Bill 2, AV Vice President of Criminal Justice Walter Katz writes in an op-ed published in CalMatters this week.
What's Happening: California is one of only four states that cannot decertify police officers who fail to live up to the high standards communities should expect from law enforcement, and prohibit them from working at any agency in the state. “Right now in this state, an officer can get caught up in an FBI child pornography sting and be fired, then get rehired at some other law enforcement agency down the road,” Katz writes.
Why It Matters: Police decertification is critical to building safe communities. The Council on Criminal Justice Task Force on Policing has documented how officers fired for misconduct routinely end up in departments in smaller cities that have fewer resources and larger communities of color. “The most vulnerable neighborhoods, which have the greatest need for trustworthy policing, are often the ones most hurt when bad cops stay on the job,” Katz writes.
Their misbehavior then undermines trust in police, leading to fewer people cooperating with law enforcement in solving crimes and making it difficult for prosecutors to convince jurors based on the testimony of rogue cops with long rap sheets.
What’s Next: If the bill passes the California Legislature and is signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom, professional investigators with the Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training will be allowed to make findings based on their own investigations or investigations by law enforcement agencies. Then a nine-member advisory board will be able to review the findings and make recommendations to the commission, which would make the ultimate decision on decertification.
Read the story > |
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Criminal Justice
- To support prosecutors, the Biden administration needs to create a commission on criminal justice data, Jeremy Travis, AV’s executive VP for criminal justice, writes in a letter to the Washington Post.
- This Washington Examiner opinion piece from the “unabashedly conservative” Right On Crime’s Lars Trautman and Brett Tolman argues that criminal justice reform is not to blame for the rise in violent crime.
- Families Against Mandatory Minimums responds to a report in The New York Times that President Biden may consider clemency for only certain people who were sent to home confinement during the pandemic.
Related: FAMM recently tweeted this video about the case of Raquel Esquival, who was sent home under the CARES Act and is now back to prison for failing to notify her halfway house as she moved between job sites. Seven months pregnant, Esquival was transported to FMC Carswell in Fort Worth, Texas, the same prison where mother of five Andrea High Bear died of COVID-19 just after giving birth to her baby. Dive Deeper: Andrea High Bear’s death could have been prevented with compassionate release.
- "Unfortunately, current bills working their way through the legislature right now will not improve public safety and will only make the justice system even more of a two-tiered system: one for those who have money; and one for those who don’t." Jake Lilly of the Law Enforcement Action Partnership lays out the flaws of Texas “bail reform” efforts in this Austin American-Statesman op-ed.
- Cash bail criminalizes race and poverty and disproportionately impacts the LGBTQ+ community, write J. Bennett Guess of the ACLU of Ohio and Alana Jochum of Equality Ohio in this Columbus Dispatch op-ed. But bipartisan reform bills in the Ohio Legislature “promote smart policy by ensuring release decisions for legally innocent people are based on individual circumstances, not whether someone has money.”
- A man who spent nearly two years in solitary confinement at Maine State Prison has settled a lawsuit against the Department of Corrections, Bangor Daily News reports. Dive Deeper: A staggering number of people are held in isolation for months, years, even decades in U.S. prisons, and many leave broken in mind and body.
- A Colorado grand jury indicted three police officers and two paramedics in the 2019 death of Elijah McClain, a 23-year-old Black man who was stopped by police while walking home from a store, placed in a chokehold, and injected with the sedative ketamine, The Colorado Sun reports.
Health
- Here are four things to know about Sutter Health's $575 million antitrust settlement, via Becker Hospital Review. Dive Deeper: The Sutter Health case reinforces how aggressive hospital consolidation leads to higher prices. Read why this case matters amid growing consolidation.
Related: Sutter Health also just agreed to pay $90 million to settle allegations of Medicare fraud, the Associated Press reports.
- Ely Bair was shocked when the second part of a jaw surgery with the same insurer at the same hospital resulted in a $27,119 bill, Kaiser Health News reports. “Bair hit two maddening health system pitfalls here: He expected his new plan to behave like his previous one from the same insurer — and he expected his mouth to be treated like the rest of his body. Neither commonsense notion appears true in America’s health system.”
- States are increasingly pursuing solutions for health care affordability, with Nevada becoming the third to pass a public option. A Health Affairs analysis explains why these experiments are worth watching to help inform federal action and other state efforts to lower health care prices.
- Pharmaceutical companies are using the pandemic as an argument to stall drug pricing reforms that could save taxpayers billions of dollars and make health care more affordable, Politico reports.
- Pharma Purdue, maker of OxyContin, has been dissolved and the Sackler family will pay $4.5 billion for opioid use disorder treatment and prevention programs across the country in a settlement that absolves the family of liability in the opioid epidemic, The New York Times reports. “This is a bitter result,” the judge overseeing the case said. “B-I-T-T-E-R.”
Also...
- In “Beyond Atonement,” the Columbia Journalism Review takes stock of how it covered race over six decades. “It is at times a dispiriting read. Over the past six decades, CJR has too often been deficient at covering institutional racism in the country and in media,” writes editor Kyle Pope.
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CBS News shines a light on America’s other epidemic, gun violence, in this short but impactful segment with special contributor Ted Koppel. He spends time in Baltimore talking to those most impacted: victims’ family members, police, and the community violence interrupters who are working to end the cycle of violence. Nationwide, Black men are 14 times more likely to be killed by a firearm than white men, according to Centers for Disease Control data. “There is almost a contagion phenomenon that one shooting will lead to another, it leads to another,” Daniel Webster, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Prevention and Policy, tells Koppel. The guns are coming from outside of Baltimore, says Police Commissioner Michael Harrison, and “about 50% are coming from outside of the state.” Hear from a mother who has lost a husband and twin sons to gun violence, and from Corey Winfield, a site director for Catholic Charities: Safe Streets. He works alongside others who were pulled into violence in their youth to prevent the same fate for their neighbors. “I have a vision; that's what keeps me working. My vision is that one day we’re going to have no murders for a whole year. Not just Baltimore — I'm talking about gun violence — not just Baltimore, but the United States, my country. I vision that. I vision that."
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Have an evidence-based week,
– Stephanie
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Stephanie DiCapua Getman develops and executes Arnold Ventures' digital communications strategy with a focus on multimedia storytelling and audience engagement and oversees daily editorial operations and design.
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