It’s Time for Police to Step Up

By Rhiannon Meyers Collette, Communications Manager

A bipartisan group of lawmakers on Thursday reintroduced the Elijah E. Cummings Lower Drug Costs Now Act to answer the clamor for drug pricing reform. This piece of legislation aims to end price gouging by requiring drugmakers to reimburse taxpayers when drug prices rise faster than inflation, empowering Medicare to negotiate lower drug prices with pharmaceutical companies, and limiting drug prices to the cheaper rates paid in other developed nations.

Why It Matters: Nearly three out of every 10 Americans say they can’t access their medications because they simply cost too much. That’s unacceptable. Drug pricing reform not only makes necessary prescription drugs affordable and accessible, it allows people to truly reap the benefits the drugs offer.

What’s Next: The Energy & Commerce Health subcommittee will host a hearing on the legislation May 4, and we expect continued conversations about the need to lower drug prices. We look forward to seeing more momentum on this from Congress and the administration.

Read our statement >

Related: This Kaiser Family Foundation analysis shows that a relatively small number of drugs account for a large share of Medicare prescription drug spending.

By Rhiannon Meyers Collette, Communications Manager

Health care is complicated and difficult to navigate — that's even more true for the more than 12 million people across the United States who have both Medicare and Medicaid coverage and tend to experience more complex health conditions. This fragmentation is problematic for a number of reasons: Dual-eligible individuals have a harder time coordinating care, tend to experience worse outcomes than those who are enrolled in Medicare only, and drive higher spending. One solution is to integrate care between Medicare and Medicaid — but only 10% of dual-eligible individuals are enrolled in fully integrated models. Nearly one-third of states don't have integrated care options, and the ones that do have plans that are limited in scope or availability.

Why It Matters: As the pandemic disproportionately impacts dual-eligible individuals, and states increasingly look for ways to improve their care and outcomes, they must tackle the barriers standing in the way of rolling out fully integrated care models. "If we want all dual-eligible individuals to have access to an integrated model, something is going to have to change," my colleagues Amy Abdnor and Emma Liebman write in a new piece.

Bottom Line: States need support implementing integrated care models — making them universally available and ensuring that they have the services people need to stay in their own homes and in their own communities, rather than institutional care settings. And we are committed to helping states successfully implement and sustain integrated models over time.
 

By Adrienne Faraci, Communications Manager

Among the unfortunate records set over the past year is one for drug overdose deaths. Such deaths had been increasing before COVID-19 hit, but the latest numbers suggest that the pandemic made the problem worse.

What’s Happening: Isolation, depression, anxiety, job loss, and disruptions to state budgets for services have had a devastating effect, writes AV grantee Dr. Richard Frank of Harvard Medical School in a new op-ed in the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Illicitly manufactured fentanyl and other synthetic opioids were the primary drivers of overdoses, reminding us once again that the opioid epidemic is far from over.

What Can Be Done: Frank says we have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to flatten the curve of overdose deaths. The arrival of new funds from the American Rescue Plan can transform our approach to the persistent and vexing problem of substance use disorders, but we must spend the money wisely — on evidence-based solutions that account for the diversity of communities and their needs, values, health care infrastructure, and resources. He points to a menu of proven interventions collected in “Evidence-Based Strategies for Abatement of Harm from the Opioid Epidemic,” as a first step.

Read the op-ed >

Related: Drugmakers are going to trial in California in a $50 billion case over the “deadly legacy” of promoting opioids, Reuters reports. 

John Engberg and Shamena Anwar, RAND Corporation economists who are studying the impacts of providing people with a public defender for bail hearings held during the evening, overnight, and on the weekends in Pennsylvania’s Allegheny County. Around the country, about half of people at bail hearings do not have access to public defense attorneys. Allegheny County launched a pilot in 2017 to make attorneys available for bail hearings held during regular business hours. Impressed with the drop in the use of monetary bail and pretrial detention, the county expanded it to off hours. Engberg and Anwar offer background on the project, its implementation, and how public defenders can help advocate for people during their bail hearings.

Read the Q&A >

“Philly D.A.,” an Independent Lens series on the election and tumultuous first term of Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner. The eight episodes give you a fly-on-the-wall view of Krasner’s top-to-bottom efforts to reverse the decades-long culture of an office that has contributed to Philadelphia's status as one of the most incarcerated cities in America. Watch as his team navigates the politics and policies of police misconduct, bail reform, juvenile justice, drug penalties, and probation and parole. He must answer to frustrated citizens and detractors, and he doesn’t always get it right. It’s compelling viewing — so much so that Vulture calls it the “second coming of ‘The Wire,’ in docuseries form.” 

Related: Krasner’s office this week released a new report on the impacts of policies aimed at reducing probation and parole, addressing systemic racism, and improving public safety in Philadelphia. It found a dramatic reduction of those under community supervision, shorter supervision lengths for those on probation, and no notable increase in recidivism. Read it here.

This Cato Daily Podcast episode featuring AV Vice President of Research Stuart Buck, who talks to host Caleb O. Brown about the critical need for credible data in our criminal justice system to make reform successful. To illustrate the current status of data collection, Buck uses the example of misdemeanors: It’s impossible to estimate how many occur across the country each year because some states don’t report the number of misdemeanors they prosecute in a given year, and others use wildly inconsistent methods and categories of reporting. How can we improve a system when we don’t know basic information about what’s working? Buck discusses how the Biden administration can help guide serious improvements to modernize our data collection by pushing for transparency, quality, and connections between data — necessary first steps toward reform.  

Also: The price of the HIV prevention drug PrEP plummeted this month as generics hit the market. This new Tradeoffs podcast episode asks why this critical drug stayed so expensive for so long and examines whether cheap generics will be a game-changer in the fight against HIV. Learn more about the affordability fight around PrEP in this AV piece: “A Drug is 90 Percent Effective at Preventing HIV. It Costs Up to $1,800 Per Month.”
 

• Archaeologists say they have found Harriet Tubman’s lost Maryland home. “Think of it as a place where [Harriet] came of age in a loving household within a close knit community,” Tubman biographer Kate Clifford Larson tells The Washington Post. “That landscape became her classroom. Those years she lived with her father were absolutely crucial to the development of Harriet Tubman.”
   
• NASA's Perseverance rover just made oxygen on Mars.
   
• Scientists announced this week that a tiny subatomic particle seems to be disobeying the known laws of physics, “a finding that would open a vast and tantalizing hole in our understanding of the universe,” The New York Times reports.
   
• Feeling blah as 2021 trudges along? There’s a name for that: languishing. And there are ways to deal with it.
   
• Take a virtual tour of the perfectly preserved La Casa Azul, the home where artist Frida Kahlo was born and died in 1954. (I’ve seen it in real-life, and this may be the next best thing.)