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The Abstract
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> By Stephanie DiCapua Getman, Arnold Ventures
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The ousting this week of Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney from GOP leadership for her repudiation of the big lie that the election was fraudulent portends a frightening future for democracy, one where leaders are willing to embrace extreme views and dangerous falsehoods to secure their own political power. This reality is a symptom of our broken political system, writes Nick Troiano of the Unite America Institute, one where candidates are incentivized to campaign on such extreme views in order to appeal to a small fraction of primary voters (and are disincentivized toward compromise on policy). We are seeing lawmakers today gaslight the American public by casting the Jan. 6 insurrection as a “normal tourist visit” and painting the insurrectionists as the real victims, rather than the injured police officers and terrified Capitol staff. Our primary system rewards these extremist voices, and too often the primary is the only election that matters. ("Primary the hell out of 'em — that's a threat.") Unite America reports that in 2020, thanks in part to partisan gerrymandering, just 10% of all voters casting ballots in primaries effectively decided the winners of 83% of all congressional seats. A clear and viable path to ensuring more voices matter in our elections are reforms like ranked-choice voting and open primaries that make primaries less partisan, promote greater voter participation, and encourage candidates to appeal to all voices rather than just the extremes. Like Cheney, Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski voted to hold President Trump accountable for Jan. 6, but because her state adopted open primaries and ranked-choice voting, she is less vulnerable to being “primaried” for that vote (although it’s not a guarantee). Cheney’s state of Wyoming used ranked-choice voting during last year’s Democratic presidential primary and is considering reforms to its primaries that could include replacing the current plurality system with runoffs, and the Wyoming Legislature is also exploring ranked-choice voting and open primaries. From the New York City mayoral race to the Virginia GOP gubernatorial nomination to a record 23 cities in Utah passing ranked-choice voting ordinances for elections in 2021, ranked-choice voting is enjoying more wide acceptance as a way for more voter voices to be heard. As Troiano says: “The most important thing we can do to protect our democracy is to exercise it –– by adopting nonpartisan electoral reforms at the ballot and through state legislatures across the country to abolish partisan primaries and give all voters more voice, more choice, and more power in their elections. In a political system where elections truly represent the will of the people, big lies won’t have such long legs.”
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Who's Maximizing Opportunity
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Litigators with The Project on Predatory Student Lending (PPSL), who are keeping the heat on the Department of Education as they fight for the rights of former students defrauded of their college tuition money.
What’s Happening: Even as some students misled by for-profit schools are getting relief from the Department in the form of discharged debt, a solution for many thousands of others remains elusive. Theresa Sweet is among those waiting. Cheated by her school, she was left with $120,000 in federal and private student loans. That number compounded over time to $470,000. Her credit was ruined. Her financial situation ended one long-term relationship. For a time, she lived in a hotel, since no landlord would rent to her. “I basically discovered how predatory and awful this whole system was,” Sweet said. “It was years of hell.”
What’s Next: Defrauded students are hopeful that Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, above, will be more proactive in relieving their debt than former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. And Sweet is now the lead plaintiff in PPSL's Sweet v. Cardona, a class-action case representing over 200,000 students seeking debt relief following abuse by their schools. The ongoing lawsuits alone won't solve the problem, so PPSL and others are calling on the federal government for stronger oversight and stiffer penalties.
Read the story > |
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Eynelys Garcia, who is part of the Project on Predatory Student Lending's class-action case Sweet v. Cardona mentioned above, which represents students who have had decisions on their borrower defense applications wrongfully delayed or improperly denied. Garcia attended DeVry University, which misled her about their financial aid plan and job placement services, leading her to drop out of her program. “All of what they promised me was a lie.”
Read the Q&A >
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Rethinking Long-Term Care
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By Rhiannon Meyers Collette, Communications Manager
The COVID-19 pandemic spread like wildfire through nursing homes, forcing policymakers to rethink how long-term care services are provided in the United States. In an effort to shift resources toward services that allow people to remain in their homes and communities, the federal government announced that it is planning to allocate hundreds of billions of dollars to states to strengthen care delivery.
Why It Matters: This investment would be an unprecedented infusion of dollars from the federal government to states to incentivize home- and community-based services. These services not only promote independence for elderly people and individuals with disabilities, research shows that they also help prevent adverse outcomes in a medically fragile population.
What's Next: To help guide states in making decisions about how to use and apply the funding, AV grantee ATI Advisory recently released a new resource outlining near-term and longer-term opportunities for states to reshape long-term care. Steeped in research of existing literature and an analysis of existing approaches, ATI Advisory provides a helpful framework for how states can better serve those with complex care needs.
Read the story > |
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The number of COVID-19 deaths of people granted parole but not yet released or awaiting trial while in prisons and jails is raising troubling questions about the criminal justice system’s response to the pandemic, the New York Times reports.
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A complicating factor in efforts to bring more accountability to American policing? The size of most police departments across the country: “You want to change American policing, figure out how to get to…departments of 50 officers or less,” Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, tells The Washington Post. “How do you reach them?…That’s what the American people keep wondering.”
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First-person accounts of why Black mothers are the real experts on gun violence, via The Trace.
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Washington Gov. Jay Inslee has signed a bill aimed at preventing tens of thousands of people a year from having their driver’s licenses suspended for failure to pay fines, the Associated Press reports.
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The stories of two sons lost to overdose share a common thread: “Like Axel’s, Max’s fentanyl overdose was precipitated by a jarring separation from a job that made him feel grounded and valued,” Jacobin Magazine reports.
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CMS implementation of a payment rule on breakthrough medical devices may be further delayed amid opposition from health care professionals, MedTechDive reports.
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Congress is renewing its scrutiny of private equity investment in nursing homes in light of COVID-19 deaths, Modern Healthcare reports. Read more about this issue in our three-part series exploring private equity's expanding role in health care — and its consequences.
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Several states are investigating the business practices of pharmacy benefit managers, alleging a lack of transparency that led to overpayments under state contracts, The Wall Street Journal reports.
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Alex Gibney’s HBO documentary “The Crime of the Century,” a chilling two-part installment that posits the opioid crisis is not an accident but rather a reprehensible crime. (Half-a-million Americans have died from opioid-related overdoses since 2000). In the first episode, Gibney singles out Purdue Pharma — founded as Purdue Frederick by Arthur Sackler and his brothers — for its development and marketing of the drug oxycontin as spawning today’s epidemic. (The Sacklers and Purdue Pharma have denied wrongdoing.) Sackler was a pioneer of the Madison Avenue style of drug advertising we are so familiar with today, and he used doctors (real or fictional) to promote his drugs. Oxycontin originated when Purdue’s expiring patent and profits on MS Contin, derived from morphine, were threatened by generic competition. So Purdue took the idea behind MS Contin — delayed absorption — and applied it to oxycontin. With supporting documents, Gibney alleges that to make the new drug a blockbuster — to make sure it was prescribed not just for end-of-life cancer pain but marketed to the widest possible audience — Purdue got help drafting its FDA application from FDA employee Dr. Curtis Wright, who bolstered unbacked claims that its delayed absorption technique lessened the potential for abuse. (Wright later went on to work for Purdue). And this is just the first 20 minutes. Then comes the marketing blitz, the sales bonuses (“they called me easy money”), farming incentives from Johnson & Johnson (labeled the opioid “kingpin”) — and the devastation. Watch this documentary.
Also: The New York Times’ latest op-doc takes on policing, this time asking law enforcement officers around the world how American policing looks from abroad. They look at training (hours required to be a police officer in the U.S. are less than to become a barber), sheer size (18,000 departments across the U.S.), and accountability (or lack thereof). It didn’t go well.
Related: Our Vice President of Criminal Justice Walter Katz discusses what the data tell us about over-policing within communities of color with Renee Shaw on Kentucky Tonight.
Watch Today: Join Katz and a panel of experts for an update on the potential for a federal, bipartisan policing reform deal at 3 p.m. ET.
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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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