The James Bond of Philanthropy, or How to Go Broke in Your Lifetime

By Rhiannon Meyers Collette, Communications Manager

In his latest swipe at drug prices, President Trump signed and published an executive order directing HHS to develop rules that would tie Medicare drug prices to the lower prices paid by other developed nations. In an interesting twist, the proposal shares a provision included in House Democrats' signature drug pricing bill they passed last year, but that has not been considered by the Senate (and is not expected to be).

Why it matters: High drug prices are hurting Americans, and while President Trump has recently issued a number of executive orders to address this problem, don't expect this executive action to bring down drug costs any time soon, writes Kristi Martin, AV's VP of Drug Pricing. "We will have to wait for proposed rules to see if these announcements come to fruition or remain just another announcement from the Administration promising to lower drug prices," she writes. "The process is likely to take months, and court challenges should be expected."

What's next: President Trump's executive actions have centered on Medicare, but none of his actions have addressed the prices paid by commercial insurers and people without insurance. Comprehensive reform is needed to make drugs more affordable for patients, employers, and taxpayers.

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Related: After receiving $1 billion in taxpayer money to develop a COVID-19 vaccine, AstraZeneca is now aggressively hiking prices on some of its biggest selling drugs, reports the Los Angeles Times — and it’s done so in “in a way that stood out even among other big drug companies.”

Related: Pharma is waging a stealth war on drug price watchdog ICER, reports Reuters.

By Adrienne Faraci, Communications Manager

For more than a decade, state and local governments have become addicted to heavy and increased use of fines and fees from the criminal justice system to help replenish their general revenue funds. Ramsey County, Minn., is among the latest to give up those funds, eliminating more than a dozen criminal justice fees, such as those tied to probation supervision, home electronic monitoring, and diabetes supplies while incarcerated.

The problem: Relying on revenue sources that aren’t paid by a majority of residents is putting an unfair burden on those that may be least able to afford it. "From a public finance perspective, it is a 'bad tax.' Fines and fees treat people unfairly," says Patrick Murphy, AV’s VP of Public Finance. And they create incentives to keep people involved in the criminal justice system. “It’s offensive that cities are nabbing money from people where they can, because they can, using the police power of the state,” says grantee Tracey Gordon from the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center.  Fines and fees are also an inefficient, unreliable funding source: One New Mexico county pays $1.17 to collect every dollar it brings in, and many jurisdictions spend 40 cents of every dollar they bring in on collection costs, which often goes to private vendors. 

What’s next: Advocates and policy experts from both the criminal justice and public finance worlds are starting to work together on strategies to help jurisdictions limit or eliminate their reliance on harmful fines and fees. “If there’s a window, it’s going to be because policymakers care about the two big threads of economic crisis and overdue racial reckoning,” says Juliene James, AV’s Director of Criminal Justice.
 

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Related: A federal appeals court has blocked hundreds of thousands of felons in Florida who still owe fines and fees from registering to vote, reports The Washington Post. “Nobody should ever be denied their constitutional rights because they can’t afford to pay fines and fees,” says Paul Smith of the Campaign Legal Center.

By Adrienne Faraci, Communications Manager

There are myriad ways this fall's move to online education is changing the sector. With many colleges and universities moving to remote learning, the drop-out rate for low-income and students of color is rising, largely due to a lack of adequate WiFi that makes it nearly impossible for students to keep up with their studies.

The problem: This is happening amid the backdrop of a rush by colleges and universities to grow and diversify their online enrollment numbers. Education experts at New America have been meeting with colleges, accreditors, and other experts to learn how COVID-19 has impacted higher education. Not surprisingly, issues with distance learning were a top priority. Clare McCann of New America raises a red flag in her tweet thread on the trend by many universities and colleges to partner with Online Program Management (OPM) companies in an effort to diversify their enrollment and revenue pools. But many of these partnerships leave the university with little to no direct authority over the curriculum or caliber of these online programs, and they can result in higher tuition costs and predatory marketing and recruiting practices.

What's at stake for students? Accountability, and most importantly, the quality of their education. 

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Related: Students deceived by the now-defunct ITT Tech, a for-profit chain that led students into predatory loans, will now be eligible for private student loan forgiveness. 

Related: The Department of Education is appealing an order to cancel student loan debt of students like Josue Perez, who was scammed by a for-profit college. 

“Policymakers, having left America unprepared for what’s next, now face brutal choices about which communities to save — often at exorbitant costs — and which to sacrifice. Their decisions will almost inevitably make the nation more divided, with those worst off relegated to a nightmare future in which they are left to fend for themselves. Nor will these disruptions wait for the worst environmental changes to occur. The wave begins when individual perception of risk starts to shift, when the environmental threat reaches past the least fortunate and rattles the physical and financial security of broader, wealthier parts of the population. It begins when even places like California’s suburbs are no longer safe. It has already begun.” — Read “Climate Change Will Force a New American Migration” by  Abrahm Lustgarten in ProPublica.

“Policing the Police 2020,” a Frontline documentary hosted by the New Yorker’s Jelani Cobb, who returns to Newark, N.J. — a city he visited four years ago — to see how policing reforms instituted in the wake of a Department of Justice Settlement have played out. Newark’s reforms include tougher policies on body cameras, search and seizure, and use of force, as well as training on community engagement, bias, and alternative tools to help police better diffuse a tense situation. The film makes the case for looking at “defunding the police” in terms of a public health crisis: diverting those dollars to services that can prevent people from becoming victims of and perpetrators of violence. Newark has done this in part through street outreach teams whose mission is to reduce need for a police presence in the first place. It’s “an experiment that’s trying to move beyond policing and, at least in some measure, address problems that have plagued Black America for far too long.” The type of DOJ oversight that led to Newark’s reforms has weakened over presidential administrations, and the debate has now largely been framed as “a few bad apples” versus a deeper, more systemic problem. But a report on Newark done 50 years ago, in the wake of the 1967 riots sparked by police brutality, pointed to racial inequities caused by discriminatory policies in housing, education, and employment, and it posed a simple question: Do we have the will to act? As Cobb says, “Fifty years later, the question remains the same.”

(Viewer warning: This film opens with audio of George Floyd’s murder.)



Worth mentioning: I can’t open Facebook or talk to a friend or family member without hearing about Netflix’s new documentary-style PSA “The Social Dilemma.” It's a mind-bending look at how social media is, well, bending our minds. The conversations with top former executives of the companies this film targets (many of whom don’t let their kids go near a screen) are fascinating, but the interspersed dramatizations feel a little hokey. (It’s Pete Campbell from “Mad Men”! An apt casting choice, truth be told — he would have loved social media.) Yes, it will make you want to delete your apps and put your phone down, thanks to the alarm bells it rings so effectively. But does it oversimplify our scary slide into the age of disinformation? Some think so.