On Debt Ceiling, A Missed Opportunity

By Thomas Hanna, communications manager

A cohort of cities in North and South Carolina is successfully improving its first-response systems, according to a new report from RTI International. 

 

What’s Happening: Since summer 2020, seven cities in North and South Carolina have been working with RTI to analyze data on their 911 calls and understand the top reasons the public calls for help. Using this information, alongside an inventory of available programs and services from across the country, RTI worked with cities to develop new policies that meet mental health, behavioral health, and other needs. Each city was able to customize a pilot designed to improve its crisis response system. They were motivated by a common set of goals: improve community safety and well-being, save police the time and cost of unnecessary dispatches, and reduce the potential harms caused when police use arrest needlessly or simply can’t provide the services that citizens require. 

 

Why it Matters: The national 911 system receives 240 million calls each year, but most don’t concern crime, ranging instead from noise complaints to alarms, traffic accidents to mental health crises. For those events, police can be unnecessary and costly — or even harmful. Tragic cases in which citizens have been killed by police during mental health episodes or noncriminal encounters demonstrate the potential consequences of assigning overly broad roles to police.

 

“Law enforcement is not always the best response,” said Greensboro Police Chief John Thompson. “We need to address community issues, whether it's homelessness, behavioral health, or juvenile issues around school, and expand our ability to get resources out there.”

 

What’s Next: New 911 diversion pilot programs are up and running in the cohort of cities. Now city and agency leaders are prioritizing these programs as RTI evaluates them and aims to share its findings with other jurisdictions across the country.

 

Read the story >

By Michael Friedrich, ArnoldVentures.org contributor
 

The U.S. Department of Education is asking for expert feedback on how to create a watch list that will help students steer clear of low-value higher education programs and institutions. One expert who will be contributing ideas is Stephanie Cellini, a researcher and professor at the Trachtenberg School of Public Policy and Public Administration at George Washington University and an all-around guru in the higher education sector. Cellini, a world traveler with a deep commitment to equity in higher education, has done research that gives her unique insight into how the Education Department should identify low-value programs and make that information available to students and families.

 

What’s Happening: The Education Department confirmed that it will create a watch list that publicly names and shames programs and institutions that offer students junk degrees. We spoke to Cellini about the best metric to use in creating that list, how the list should work, and how it would help students make better-informed decisions about their higher education. 

 

Why it Matters: Some higher education programs and institutions are extremely expensive and fail to provide a strong return on investment. Students who attend often go into debt that they struggle to repay after graduating, leading to a range of financial troubles including delinquency and default, which can negatively impact their future. “The federal government has data on these programs, and it can use that data to look at the value that programs offer and protect students from high-cost, low-value programs,” Cellini said.

 

What’s Next: Comments on the watch list are due to the Education Department by February 10, 2023. From there, the Department is expected to make decisions that will enhance accountability for higher education programs.

Read the story >

 

By Thomas Hanna, communications manager

Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs this week addressed her state's ongoing prison crisis with an executive order creating an independent prison oversight commission. Alongside state officials and health professionals, it will include formerly incarcerated people and representatives of corrections workers, and it will have the authority to inspect prisons and records, interview staff and people inside prisons, and monitor prisons' health care, safety, nutrition and more.

“We can't deny that there's an urgent need to provide transparency and accountability in Arizona's corrections system,” Hobbs said. “Incarcerated Arizonans should be treated humanely and decently, and corrections administrators and officers should feel safe in their workplace."

 

What's Happening: Like in many states, Arizona is experiencing a crisis in its prison system. For instance, in 2022 a district court judge ruled that the Arizona prison system systematically violates the constitutional rights of incarcerated people by implementing harsh conditions and failing to provide adequate mental and medical health care.

Why it Matters: Lawmakers and advocates in the state have been seeking an independent oversight commission and other reforms for several years and see this executive order as an important first step in addressing the crisis.

As Kevin Ring, president of the AV-supported criminal justice reform group Families Against Mandatory Minimums (FAMM), explains: “You can’t fix problems without knowing they exist. Oversight will bring much-needed transparency and accountability. We are hopeful that this oversight program, along with the appointment of the new state prison director, signal a commitment to a safer prison system."

By Thomas Hanna, communications manager

Two new studies from MDRC’s Pretrial Justice Collaborative are providing insights into the effectiveness of some widely used pretrial supervision methods.

What's Happening: The first report found that across PJC sites, no supervision and minimal supervision led to similar pretrial outcomes. It also found no evidence that requiring people to meet more intensive pretrial supervision requirements improves outcomes. The second report found that across PJC sites, neither sobriety monitoring nor electronic monitoring had an effect on court appearances. Their effects on re-arrest were more complicated, including some evidence that they can actually be associated with an increase in re-arrests. 

 

Why it Matters: Pretrial services entities provide supportive services and various types of supervision for people released pretrial. However, until now, little rigorous research has emerged to guide how this growing field mitigates risk.

By Juliana Keeping, communications manager

> $150K per year
Price tag of almost half of all new drugs launched between 2020 and 2021

The price tags new drugs carry when they launch onto the market have been rising for years, and the trend is expected to continue in 2023. New drugs’ “launch prices” increased 20% per year between 2008 and 2021, and almost half of all new drugs launched in between 2020 and 2021 carried price tags above $150,000 a year, according to research The Wall Street Journal cited from AV grantees the Program on Regulation, Therapeutics, And Law (PORTAL) at Harvard Medical School Brigham and Women's Hospital.

The WSJ piece shared an overview of the current drug pricing landscape and what 2023 may bring. What can we expect? More high prices for new drugs. Lawmakers in 2023 must understand their job to bring down prescription drug prices is not done and must continue to train their focus on evidence-based policies that lower the prices of prescription drugs.

Last year, federal lawmakers made a strong start in drug pricing reform in passing the Inflation Reduction Act, which imposes penalties on drug companies that raise the prices of drugs in the Medicare program faster than the rate of inflation. But, as the WSJ points out, inflation is high, opening a window for comparably high drug price hikes, too. Lawmakers must consider opportunities to reform the U.S. patent process, which drug companies routinely game with anti-competitive tactics that extend their monopoly status, and look to the supply chain to fix issues that lead to higher drug prices. 

Patent reform and lower drug prices should be bipartisan priorities, write Tahir Amin and Priti Krishtel of drug-pricing watchdog the Initiative for Medicines, Access & Knowledge (I-MAK) in The Hill. “Our leaders can — and must — work across the aisle to bring down the cost of health care through patent reform, an area where our elected representatives can find common ground and deliver for the common good.”

We could not agree more.

By Juliana Keeping, Communications manager

 

Historic drug pricing reforms a decade in the making and a new law to guard patients against surprise medical bills are just two bright spots among significant areas of progress in the health care reform space in 2022. More than 12 million Americans are getting closer to better integrated care; billions in government spending in the Medicare Advantage program is increasingly under the microscope; and progress is being made toward encouraging physicians to participate in models of care that advance health equity and control health care costs. Read the 5 Big Wins in 2022 for Health Care

Related:
5 Big Wins for Criminal Justice in 2022
6 Big Wins Elsewhere in 2022 

 

Criminal Justice

• Reason Magazine published a gut-punch of a story about how probation has become a quagmire that keeps Americans trapped in the criminal justice system.
  
  Related: The Revolving Door: Probation, Incarceration, and the Opportunity for Reform

• As Dallas has seen its violent crime rate drop alongside a decline in arrests, the Dallas Morning News editorial board is bringing attention to the city's "kitchen sink" strategy to violence reduction.
   
• The CUNY Institute for State and Local Governance, an AV-grantee, has published a series of fact sheets exploring what went right and wrong with bail reform implementation in New York.

 

Health Care

• Health Affairs launched a series on the prices charged by hospitals, physicians, and other health care providers in the commercial sector. Erin Fuse Brown defines key terms related to health care costs in the policy debate, and Michael E. Chernew and Victoria Berquist co-author an analysis and discussion on hospital, physician, and other provider prices charged in the commercial market, and how those prices contribute to spending. The series will publish throughout 2023; find the call for submissions here.
  
  Related: Arnold Ventures Commercial Sector Prices Fact Sheet

 

Higher Education

• The U.S. Department of Education announced the institutions awarded grants from the College Completion Fund: The Florida International University Board of Trustees ($975K), Passaic County Community College (~1$M), Claflin University ($1M), Orangeburg-Calhoun Technical College ($950K), and Austin Community College ($770K).
  
  Related: How the Education Department’s College Completion Fund Gets it Right

• At AV grantee the Century Foundation, Stephanie Hall argues that online program management companies (OPMs) use fast-paced, pressurized sales tactics — instead of screening and assisting prospective students through an enrollment process — because they are financially rewarded for successfully recruiting students. She encourages the Education Department to rescind the OPM loophole, which will result in increased student protection.
  
  Related: Online Program Management Companies: A For-Profit Pocket Within Higher Ed

• AV grantee Third Way's Michelle Dimino looks at three different ways to define an earnings threshold, or minimum earnings, to use when determining whether a school or program is able to provide gainful employment to its students — meaning students earn enough money with the degree to justify the cost of the degree. An earnings threshold may be part of the negotiated rulemaking for gainful employment this spring.

• Accreditors for colleges and schools must hold low-quality schools accountable — and they haven’t been — argues Jay Urwitz in Inside Higher Ed.

 

Public Finance

• The Government Accountability Office (GAO) this week found $60 billion in unemployment fraud during the pandemic, Reason reports. Republicans on the House Oversight Committee will hold a hearing Feb. 1 to investigate. Exactly how the fraud was perpetuated — and how to stop it in the future — has yet to be made clear.

 

Boys in Blue, a gripping four-part documentary series directed by Peter Berg of "Friday Night Lights" movie fame, follows a football team at Minneapolis’s North Community High School as they pursue the state championship in the aftermath of George Floyd's death. For these players, football is a way of life — a way to stay safe and out of the line of fire. For the coaches — many of whom are police officers — football may protect their kids from an upbringing more violence-plagued than their own. A warning: The ending of this story is not like those happy ones you find in most movies. It is available on Showtime, Paramount Plus, and Hulu.

 

What we will be watching: "The 1619 Project," based on the work by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, debuts on Hulu today with an exploration of democracy and race.

• More than half of the nation’s 5,000 hospitals are nonprofit. This week, The Daily features investigative reporting from The New York Times on one such hospital in Washington state, detailing.how some nonprofit hospitals don’t operate much differently than their for-profit counterparts and are a huge part of the problem when it comes to driving up the cost of care. 
   
• Slavery may have been officially abolished with the 13th Amendment, but the practice persisted for more than six decades as states — primarily in the South — imprisoned mostly Black men for minor infractions and leased them out to private companies under a system of forced prison labor. A new investigative series by the Associated Press, supported by Columbia University’s Ira A. Lipman Center for Journalism and Civil and Human Rights in conjunction with Arnold Ventures, dives deep into the dark history of convict leasing, where prisoners were forced to work in inhumane conditions to mine coal, build railroads, and harvest cotton and sugar for major corporations. In a new podcast, AV journalism grantee Reveal features the AP's reporting examining how "private companies built empires off the forced labor of Black men through a corrupt legal system." Listen to it here.

• "Views on First," a new podcast from The Knight First Amendment Institute, explores the intersections of social media and the First Amendment. The inaugural episode is a deep dive into Twitter and explains why the Institute felt compelled to file a landmark lawsuit Knight Institute v. Trump, which established that constitutional law prohibits public officials from blocking their critics on social media accounts.

• People on Twitter are urging others to share videos of Tyre Nichols "living joyfully" as a reminder of a life "cruelly taken too soon." Five Memphis police officers have been charged in Nichols' death. 
   
• This game where you guess the year a photo was taken is an interesting way to spend a few minutes.
   
• Behold, a restaurant where grandmothers cook an Italian feast every night. (This is a normal Sunday at my mother's house.)

The Higher Education and Evidence-Based Policy teams have created a request for proposals for rigorous impact evaluations of programs and practices (“interventions”) to promote college success in the United States.

The Criminal Justice and Evidence-Based Policy teams at Arnold Ventures are teaming up to learn more about what works in criminal justice reform in an ongoing request for proposals for randomized controlled trials (RCTs) that will test programs and practices. There is no deadline for submissions.

The Evidence-Based Policy team invites grant applications to conduct randomized controlled trials (RCTs) of social programs in any area of U.S. policy. Details are here.

View our RFPs here.