The Strong and Slow Boring

Thomas Hanna, communications manager, and Matt Keyser, National Partnership for Pretrial Justice

On Jan. 1 of this year, Illinois was supposed to fully eliminate cash bail. However, at the last minute, the State Supreme Court stayed implementation pending its adjudication of a legal challenge to the reforms. While justices determine the future of the law, ongoing studies by researchers at Loyola University Chicago have started to shed light on the reform’s potential impacts.

 

Why it Matters: This new research suggests that bail reform will have a significant and positive impact on many individuals, families, and communities.

In particular, the researchers estimate that people in the state, including those charged with crimes and their family and friends, would avoid having to post around $120 million per year under bail reform. That money would instead recirculate within communities, potentially helping to improve and strengthen local economies. It would also free up financial resources that people could use to pay for their defense, reducing the likelihood of unjust convictions and unnecessary guilty pleas.

 

What's Next: The Loyola researchers’ work is ongoing for the next three years, and they’ll continue analyzing how the bail reforms are implemented — if and when the state Supreme Court clears the path — and their impacts on the system.
 

Read the story >

By Juliana Keeping, communications manager

12.2 million
The number of people simultaneously enrolled in Medicare and Medicaid — the “dual-eligible” population
 

41%
Proportion of the dual-eligible population who experience a mental health condition
 

$440 billion
Amount spent, in aggregate, each year on providing care and coverage to the dual-eligible population

 

Of the more than 12 million people who qualify for both Medicare and Medicaid, 41% experience a mental health condition. Generally, navigating Medicare and Medicaid, which operate separately and cover different services and benefits, can be extremely difficult for patients, leading to poor health outcomes and high costs to the system.

 

A bipartisan group of senators recently asked for input from experts and stakeholders to better understand how to help improve the coverage and care experience for this population. This week, AV’s Complex Care team answered the call, suggesting evidence-based policy solutions to integrating Medicare and Medicaid. The forward movement signals congressional interest in producing a federal integration solution.

In the meantime, states like North Carolina and Indiana are creating standout initiatives that build on existing capacity and can help lead to healthier outcomes and health care savings for the dual-eligible population. Signs like these point to positive momentum in the bipartisan health care reform space and a busy year ahead for AV’s Complex Care team.

 

Read more: Arnold Ventures Responds to Bipartisan Senators Seeking Advice on Improving Care for 12 Million+ Americans
 

Related: Dual-Eligibility Facts & Figures

By Thomas Hanna, communications manager

Between Congress passing gun safety legislation and the Supreme Court’s Bruen decision, 2022 was a year of significant change for gun policy in the United States. Amid this rapidly shifting legislative and legal landscape, AV is reaffirming its commitment to building the gun policy evidence base.
 
Why it Matters: In the wake of the Bruen decision, more so than ever policymakers will need to know the likely effects of different gun policies. But for empirical evidence to continue to play a role in these gun policy decisions, a focus will need to be on identifying historical analogues for modern laws and connecting them to the research data.
 
What's Next: With AV’s continued support, RAND Corporation’s Gun Policy in America (GPIA) initiative will produce two future updates to the cutting-edge Science of Gun Policy, which systematically reviews decades of scientific evidence on the effects of firearm laws. Additionally, AV will be supporting the Duke Center for Firearms Law, which was launched in 2019 by professors Joseph Blocher and Darrell Miller to advance nonpartisan scholarship about the Second Amendment. The Center will unpack the implications of the Bruen decision, suggest doctrinal rules and frameworks, and clarify which government interventions are consistent with the Second Amendment after Bruen.

Read the story >
 

Criminal Justice

• AV-grantee Collateral Consequences Resource Center released its 2022 annual report showing that last year 33 states, the District of Columbia, and the federal government enacted 71 separate pieces of legislation aimed at improving opportunities or restoring rights for people with an arrest or criminal record.
   
• The Mapping Police Violence database documented at least 1,176 people killed by U.S. law enforcement in 2022, The Guardian reports, making it the deadliest year on record since experts started tracking such statistics.
   
• Police unions in Illinois may try to use collective bargaining to undermine police accountability measures included in the state's new SAFE-T Act, Fox News reports.
   
• The D.C. City Council overrode Mayor Bowser's veto of the city's landmark criminal code revision, keeping the 16-year process on track for completion, The Washington Post reports.

 

Health Care

• 160 million Americans have employer-sponsored insurance. Researchers at the Center on Health Insurance Reforms at Georgetown University lay out evidence to show how excessive hospital prices make these plans more expensive. One solution? Smart policy to constrain prices doctors and hospitals charge. 
   
• The No Surprises Act (NSA) has prevented more than 9 million surprise bills since January 2022, according to a recent survey. However, the NSA, which was enacted to protect consumers from high medical bills for out-of-network health care services, does not include protections from surprise bills for ground ambulance services. New research from AV grantees at USC-Brookings sheds light on these surprise bills. Among the notable findings? Nearly one-third (28%) of ambulance rides resulted in a potential surprise bill for those who have private insurance. Read more in Health Affairs.

 

Higher Education

• A group of colleges have appealed the $6 billion settlement in the Sweet vs. Cardona case for 200,000 student borrowers who say they were defrauded by their schools, The Washington Post reports. “This appeal demonstrates just how desperate these schools are to deny justice for borrowers, and we will not stop fighting until students get the relief they deserve,” said Eileen Connor, director of the Project on Predatory Student Lending, a group representing the borrowers. (free link)
  
  Related: Fighting Fraudulent Student Debt, One Bad Actor at a Time
   
• The Education Department will hold a hearing next week on DeVry University’s appeal that it must reimburse the cost of forgiving student loans owed by former students, due to the school’s fraudulent claims about job placement, Politico reports.
   
• The Government Accountability Office released a report on the need for the Education Department to increase oversight into college fraud. The report found that agency reorganization, leadership turnover, and an ongoing failure to finalize investigative procedures have impeded the department’s efforts to investigate colleges that mislead students.
   
• The Education Department has made a request for information to build a shame list on low-performing schools. It's part of an effort to drive accountability.
   
• Third Way published a one-page infographic that outlines key facts on and the impact of college completion.
   
• In Education Next, Sarah Turner, professor of economics and education at University of Virginia, writes about the impact of the nine-extensions-long student loan pause on students and the Education Department. The analysis shows that the across-the-board pause on federal student loan payments disproportionately benefits the most affluent borrowers, costing at least $5 billion per month and delivering the bulk of the benefits to upper-income families. 

 

Evidence-Based Policy

• The Washington Post points out that as students, families, and schools look to make academic gains after Covid losses, many turn to tutoring — but not all tutoring is created equal, nor is it equally accessible. (free link)
  
  Related: Arnold Ventures has funded two randomized controlled trials evaluating the tutoring nonprofit SAGA, one focused on literacy tutoring for first-graders, and one focused on math tutoring for ninth-graders, and is also supporting the National Student Support Accelerator and others’ research efforts through our work with Accelerate.

 

Journalism

• As the business model for local news undergoes a metamorphosis to find long-term sustainability, nonprofit news present a viable path forward, according to a new report by the Government Accountability Office.
   

Also

• Texas Monthly named AV Co-Founders and Co-Chairs Laura and John Arnold among the 16 most influential Texas business icons of the past 50 years for their philanthropic work.

• "The passengers can be loud but they are pretty well-behaved." A "puppy bus" in Alaska is going viral.
   
• After an Alabama farmer died, the town learned he secretly paid strangers’ pharmacy bills. (It's an inspiring story of kindness, but more than one commenter lamented the high price of prescription drugs, saying he shouldn't have had to do this.)  
   
• From TED, six tips to help you be a better human.
   
• "I just call myself The Map Guy." Meet 12-year-old Dylan Gay, who can recreate any map from memory. 

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.