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The Abstract
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> By Stephanie DiCapua Getman, Arnold Ventures
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Among the many systemic failures brought to light by this pandemic are out-of-control hospital prices. It’s hard to pause and shop thoughtfully for affordable health care when you are sick or injured. The past year saw countless stories of patients receiving exorbitant medical bills after seeking treatment (or even tests) for COVID-19. While infection numbers trend downward and the country reopens (this is the second of these newsletters written from my office rather than my home in more than a year), the problem of high hospital prices has not gone away. It remains a persistent threat to American household budgets, as well as a burden on employers and taxpayers. Just look at this $18,735.93 bill of the month from Kaiser Health News, where a hospital charged college student Claire Lang-Ree two $722.50 fees for the seconds it took a nurse to “push” drugs through her IV. It’s a clear example of the difference between cost — what it takes to provide a service — and price, or what the hospital feels like it can get away with charging. That is where the problem lies: Hospital executives are setting the highest prices possible to extract maximum profits from their patients — and they have little to no competition that prevents them from doing so, especially in light of the trend toward consolidation, in which big hospitals buy up smaller hospitals in a region and enjoy a health care monopoly. Even if you haven’t found yourself in a hospital in the recent past or staring down an astronomical bill, you are still paying for this problem — in the form of higher health care premiums and your taxpayer dollars.
Editor's note: We will be taking next week off from this newsletter and return after the holiday. Happy Fourth of July!
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Speaking of Health Care Prices...
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By Rhiannon Meyers Collette, Communications Manager
Voters are fed up. A new survey commissioned by Arnold Ventures and conducted by a bipartisan polling team finds that voters across the political spectrum want Congress to take action to lower health care prices — and they're willing to entertain aggressive ideas to rein them in. In fact, 3 out of every 4 people (78%) surveyed said they supported limiting the prices that hospitals can charge. Equally notable: This sentiment held true regardless of party affiliation. Among Democrats surveyed, 82% said they backed limiting hospital prices while 74% of Republicans expressed support.
Why It Matters: The national conversation around rising health care costs has centered in recent years on increasingly expensive prescription drug prices, but this new polling shows that voters are interested in broadening the lens to include excessive pricing throughout the entire health care system. Just how concerned are Americans about this issue? More voters (64%) said they were worried Congress wouldn't go far enough to limit prices, than those who expressed concerns about Congress setting prices.
Dive Deeper: Dig through the polling data and some enlightening charts, and spend your 2-minute stretch break watching our new animated video, where we break down why prices are the problem. (Sound on to fuel your holiday weekend vibe.)
Read the story >
Related: Axios offers more evidence of consolidation in the health care industry, with physician practices being gobbled up by hospitals and corporate entities during the pandemic. Studies have shown such consolidation leads to higher prices for patients. |
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Expanding Our Understanding
of Gun Violence
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By Evan Mintz, Communications Manager
The National Collaborative on Gun Violence Research announced eight new gun violence research projects this week and one new supplementary award. These projects, supported with nearly $1 million in new funding, will help fill the gaps in our understanding of how public policy can help reduce gun violence and save lives.
Why It Matters: Roughly 40,000 people die each year from gun-related injuries in the United States, yet we know far too little about ways to reduce this number because the federal government failed to properly fund gun violence research for nearly a quarter century. Congress has started allocating money to begin researching gun policy again, but private philanthropy can help us catch up with where we need to be.
What’s Next: This latest round of research will address issues like gun suicide risk among racial and ethnic minorities, intimate partner violence, and the impact of gun policy on firearm users. But there is still much further to go. The Biden administration has recommended doubling the federal funding for gun violence research, bringing the total to $50 million for the next budget.
Read the story >
Related: Inside Philanthropy reports on Arnold Ventures and other grantmakers partnering with the Biden administration to combat the rise in violent crime with community intervention strategies.
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Arnold Ventures and the CUNY Institute for State & Local Governance have released 10 site reports from our Reducing Revocations Challenge on what drives probation revocations. Probation revocations are a key contributor to mass incarceration, and this work is geared toward identifying the best data-informed reforms that will reduce revocations.
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Millions of people who gained the right to vote after incarceration are not exercising it — because they don’t know they can, an analysis by The Marshall Project finds. The problem: States aren’t informing formerly incarcerated people about their new voting eligibility.
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Grandmother Gwen Levi was sent back to prison because she didn’t answer her phone during a computer class. She is one of about 4,500 federal prisoners who were released to home confinement amid the pandemic but face returning to overcrowded federal prisons. Families Against Mandatory Minimums is urging President Biden to act now and grant them clemency.
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Lack of access to menstrual products is rampant in women’s prisons, the 19th* reports, putting women in desperate and dehumanizing situations.
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During the pandemic, prison officials squandered an opportunity to prevent sickness and death by releasing older incarcerated people, who were most vulnerable to coronavirus and least likely to reoffend, The Marshall Project reports.
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Rep. Cori Bush has introduced a bill to establish a federal agency that would fund community-led responses to public safety, provide alternatives to police and prison, and treat crimes such as gun violence and drug abuse as public health issues, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports.
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Survivors of gun violence are using the power of social media to share their stories, via WHYY.
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Many patient advocacy groups are heavily reliant on financial support from big pharma, keeping them from speaking up for policy proposals opposed by industry but supported by Americans on both sides of the aisle, according to a revealing new report from Patients for Affordable Drugs, “The Hidden Hand: Big Pharma’s Influence On Patient Advocacy Groups.”
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Bloomberg reports on a new study that finds costs for common generic drugs can vary among hospitals by more than $50 a pill, and some health centers are ignoring federal rules designed to make pricing information more transparent and accessible to patients.
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Arnold Ventures has written a letter to the Office of Management and Budget urging the administration to focus on improving care for dual-eligible individuals — those who qualify for both Medicare and Medicaid — as it pursues equity in health care.
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A new report from the California Policy Lab analyzes recent unemployment claims data and finds a "mixed picture" for California workers in terms of returning to work and recent "entrances" and "exits" from the Unemployment Insurance system.
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I was on vacation last week when I stumbled upon an intimate guest essay in The New York Times by Thomas Page McBee, “What I Saw in My First 10 Years on Testosterone.” It led me to the 2020 Netflix documentary “Disclosure,” an eye-opening look at how society’s misunderstanding of transgender people has been shaped by decades of negative depictions in mass media. Only moments earlier my kids had been looking for a movie to watch among the free offerings on the condo TV. “Ace Ventura: Pet Detective” was one of them. I remembered seeing that film as a kid and thought the animal-friendly antics and Jim Carrey hysterics would make them laugh, but then I quickly recalled the not-so-hysterical ending. So it was fitting that this was one of the films called out in “Disclosure” for its transphobic storytelling that, as McBee writes, is “rooted in monstrosity and the idea of failed womanhood (and manhood).” “Disclosure” is one of the most illuminating documentaries I have watched in some time, offering insightful and profound perspectives on what it means to grow up transgender amid such a media landscape, a richer understanding of the diversity of the trans experience, and a deep appreciation of the impact such negative representations have had on the human experience.
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- Read a Q&A in The Undefeated with the “Queen of Basketball” Lusia “Lucy” Harris-Stewart, “the greatest living women’s basketball player who’s never graced a Wheaties box.”
- I love visiting Austin, Texas. I went to college there and met my husband there. But I prefer my much weirder and more affordable hometown of Houston (also the hometown of Beyoncé). My colleague Evan Mintz makes a compelling, detail-rich, and somewhat controversial argument in Texas Monthly that the solution to Austin’s unaffordable housing market is for “upwardly mobile geriatric millennials” to make Houston home instead.
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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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