Postponing Women’s Access to Care

By Evan Mintz, director of communications

Headlines have fueled a call for more pretrial detention in New Mexico, but research shows proposed rules would unnecessarily crowd jails with people who don’t reoffend.
 

What's Happening: In 2016, New Mexico voters approved a constitutional amendment to replace cash bail with a risk-based system. However, some politicians have responded to a spike in violent crime by unsuccessfully trying to roll back those reforms and expand pretrial detention.

Why it Matters: More pretrial detention would simply fill jails with people unlikely to reoffend. Researchers found that only 13 out of more than 10,000 felony cases studied involved someone committing a new first-degree felony while waiting for trial. And a proposed expansion of pretrial detention would detain roughly two dozen people who don't reoffend for each violent felony prevented.

What's Next: The New Mexico Criminal Defense Lawyers Association is urging lawmakers to rely on the available data when writing policy about pretrial detention.

 

Read the story >

By Juliana Keeping, communications manager

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, is a deadly and devastating illness that robs those with it of their ability to speak, move, eat, and eventually breathe. The FDA recently approved a new drug from a company called Amylyx to slow its progression under a pathway dubbed accelerated approval.
 
The treatment is considered safe – but is it effective? The drug is still awaiting results from a larger trial underway. Prior to its FDA approval, the Amylyx CEO pledged to remove the drug from the market if the larger trial fails. Less than 24 hours after the drug’s approval, he backed off of the promise during an investor call.
 
What’s Happening: The drug’s approval is just one example of how the FDA increasingly finds itself stuck balancing the need for a new drug that can potentially alleviate suffering and save lives against the wait for more research to prove the new drug’s effectiveness. Under current law, the FDA has the power to withdraw accelerated approval drugs that fail to demonstrate adequate safety or effectiveness through confirmatory trials, but the FDA is not mandated to do so.

Why it Matters: “The bigger picture is that the FDA has been under growing pressure for years to fast-track treatments and, as a result, evidence standards have grown weaker,” said Mark E. Miller, executive vice president of health care for Arnold Ventures.
 
What’s Next: AV released a new slate of policy briefs to educate lawmakers on the issues and suggest a path forward for reforms:

• AV’s Accelerated Approval Policy Brief.
• AV’s Antimicrobial Resistance Policy Brief.
• AV’s Real World Evidence Policy Briefs.

Read the story >

Howard Henderson, founding director of the Center for Justice Research at Texas Southern University, who is leading a first-of-its-kind study to analyze the benefits and costs of prosecutor diversion programs, which allow people charged with low-level crimes — such as minor drug possession or retail theft — to avoid prosecution
and involvement with the
criminal justice system.
 

"The attention has been, for the most part, on the police and our correctional system," says Henderson. "It’s like everyone forgot about this cog in the wheel that probably has more power than any other entity in the system."

The study will research programs in seven offices located in Colorado, Mississippi, California and Texas, covering a mix of rural, suburban, and urban jurisdictions. It is supported by one of 14 grants recently announced by Arnold Ventures that aim to better understand prosecutorial discretion.

We spoke with Henderson about his ongoing research, what a “model” prosecutor’s office looks like, and the power of prosecutors to reduce racial disparities, improve outcomes, and promote community safety.

Read the Q&A >
 

Related: What research can tell us about ​“the most powerful actors in the criminal justice system.”

41%
The proportion of small businesses that have increased the prices of goods or services due to rising health insurance costs, according to a report released by Small Business for America’s Future.
 

The report also found that 28% of small businesses have held off on hiring new employees, and 27% of small businesses said “the rising cost of health insurance caused me to shift more health insurance costs onto my employees.”

Policymakers at both the state and federal levels are increasingly considering and adopting solutions to lower prices in the commercial market, including making prices transparent, limiting further consolidation and improving market competition, and directly limiting excessive prices. 

Criminal Justice

• The Houston Chronicle looks at the rise in kids killed by guns — whether homicides, suicides, or accidents.
   
• A federal judge in Texas held that, under the new Bruen standards, a federal law prohibiting people under a domestic violence protective order from possessing a gun infringes on their Second Amendment rights, The Texas Tribune reports.
   
• In this Elle piece, Lenore Anderson of the Alliance for Safety and Justice, an AV grantee, debunks the myths and rhetoric around the “tough on crime” hype of many midterm candidates.
   
• Professor Andrea Armstrong, founder of the AV-funded database Incarceration Transparency, co-published two new reports on the Louisiana criminal justice system — one offering an overview of the state’s justice system and the other recommendations for philanthropic organizations to improve support of state-level reforms.
   
• A new policy brief from Michael Rempel and Krystal Rodriguez of the Data Collaborative for Justice at John Jay College, an AV grantee, details how the next chief judge of the state of New York can advance justice, equity, and community safety.
   
• An essay in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram shines a light on how a new Texas law mandating cash bail resulted in a developmentally disabled woman being stuck behind bars and ending up in a coma.
   

Health Care

• A KHN investigation exposed the case of a 2-year-old child who died four days after receiving questionable, unneeded baby root canals and crowns at a private equity-owned dental clinic. The reporting dives deep into the growing incursion of private equity into health care.
   
• The perfect storm of conditions makes health care facilities a prime subject for private equity to exploit for financial gain, reports Competition Policy International. PE threatens competition “by consolidating healthcare providers, offloading assets, cutting services, and loading acquired companies with debt.”
   
• State Health Care Cost Commissions are an effective tool to slow health care spending increases, reports the Center for American Progress. They have also been used to increase the quality and equity of health care.
   
• A new article for Health Affairs Forefront explores the reasons a large number of people eligible for both Medicare and Medicaid do not have access to integrated care options in some states.
   

Higher Education

• The Biden Administration has asked the Supreme Court to uphold its student debt forgiveness plan, CNN reports.
  
  Related: The Associated Press explains the latest on the student loan forgiveness legal case. Judge Mark Pittman, a Trump appointee, ruled that Biden’s debt relief program is “an unconstitutional exercise of Congress’s legislative power and must be vacated.” Shortly after the ruling, the Department of Education removed the student debt relief application from its website and has filed an appeal.
   
• CBS News questions whether college rankings should be based on mobility and other measures of return on investment. "Too often, our best-resourced schools are chasing rankings that mean little on measures that truly count: college completion, economic mobility, narrowing gaps in access to opportunity for all Americans," Department of Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said at an August conference.  
   
• Inside Higher Ed speaks with AV Fellow Clare McCann about what happens to students when their colleges close; many do not return to any college. “What’s important is that the policies are put in place for all schools that are at a serious risk of closure so that we’re making sure institutions … are getting all their ducks in a row before anything happens.”
   
• The Washington Post reports the final ruling in the $6 billion Sweet v. Cardona student loan settlement, where approximately 200,000 defrauded student loan borrowers will soon have their debts automatically canceled after U.S. District Judge William Alsup granted final approval. “People are just overjoyed,” said Eileen Connor, director of the Project on Predatory Student Lending, a group representing the borrowers. “I’m hopeful this is a path forward for people and for the Department of Education to move forward and have some kind of process that works.” (free link)
   

Contraceptive Choice and Access

• The Gates Foundation explains the need for greater contraception options for women and its work to develop new and improved contraceptive technologies.
   

Democracy

• FairVote reports on the most recent ballot measure approvals across the country; statewide in Nevada, ranked-choice voting and top-five primaries won, and the measure will be up for vote again in 2024 to take effect. Ranked-choice voting also won in Seattle by an overwhelming margin for those who wished to change the voting system.
   
• Unite America discusses the importance of Nevada’s ranked-choice voting win as a solution that puts voters first.
   

Climate and Clean Energy

• ClearPath reports that Rep. Scott Peters (D-CA) and John Curtis (R-UT) introduced the Carbon Removal and Emissions Storage Technologies (CREST) Act of 2022, bipartisan legislation introduced today which will authorize research, development, and deployment (RD&D) of innovative carbon dioxide removal and sequestration technologies crucial to meeting America’s emissions reduction goals. In June, the Senate companion bill was introduced by Sens. Susan Collins (R-ME) and Maria Cantwell (D-WA). “Carbon dioxide removal (CDR) is one of the most promising clean technologies for removing carbon already in our atmosphere and affordably reducing emissions across the global economy,” said Rich Powell, CEO of ClearPath Action.

 

Journalism

• Thanks to a grant from the Lipman Center, supported by AV, the Associated Press published the first in a series of stories examining police reform in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd in May 2020.
   
• The Center for Public Integrity, an AV journalism grantee, revealed that thousands of schools across the United States are failing to count homeless students, effectively withholding essential support that should be promised to them under federal education law.
   
• A new nonprofit newsroom has launched in Cleveland. Supported in part by the American Journalism Project, Signal Cleveland envisions itself as a "new type of community-first" news organization with journalism that is free and meets readers' needs.
  
  Related: Signal Cleveland is the latest example of a reimagining of journalism in the form of a burgeoning nonprofit news industry, a "hopeful antidote to the struggling local media industry," AJP's CEO Sarabeth Berman argues in an op-ed.

• “On the Road” host Steve Hartman is a major celebrity to the students of Alhambra Traditional School in Phoenix. That’s because their teacher uses the show every week for lessons on character. "Math, English, reading, writing — nothing matters if the kids aren't grounded and good," teacher Derek Brown says. Watch this heartwarming story on Kindness 101.
   
• I feel for my Swifties out there trying to snag concert tickets. Hopefully the memes will cheer you up.
   
• In other music news, Beyoncé is tied — with her husband Jay-Z — as the most nominated act in Grammy history.
   
• You can cuddle a turkey at this animal sanctuary. (And feed them pies. Think of it as an alt-Thanksgiving.)

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. Learn more about the RFP here.

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,