Two Bipartisan Bills to Watch in Higher Ed

By Evan Mintz, director of communications

Improving America’s health care system and reining in high prices were on the table last week at a Washington Post Live event, which featured Mark E. Miller, executive vice president of health care for Arnold Ventures.

What's Happening: Policymakers — such as Sen. Cassidy (R-LA), who spoke at the event — are digging into the key, underlying causes of unaffordable health care. “Consolidation and lack of transparency,” Miller said at the event. “Those are the drivers.”

Why It Matters: Around 90 percent of health care markets are highly consolidated, allowing hospitals to become the price-setters in their communities. As a result, prices are set arbitrarily and irrationally high, and can vary widely for the same service.

What’s Next: Proposed bipartisan legislation in Congress will help get at these issues by improving price transparency requirements and addressing a loophole that allows big hospital systems to buy up local doctors’ offices and charge hospital prices for routine services. Requiring site-neutral billing would end that practice, not only saving money for taxpayers, employers, and patients, but also ending one of the financial incentives for consolidation.

Read our five takeaways on health care costs from the event>

Criminal Justice

• New legislation introduced in Congress is seeking to reincarcerate people released to home confinement by the CARES Act. A new article published by Reason explains why such a move would be unnecessary and counterproductive.
   
• In an editorial, the Star-Ledger rebuts partisan claims that crime in New Jersey is out of control and that bail reform is to blame. To the contrary, the editorial provides data showing that court appearance rates are higher than they were before bail reform and that New Jersey is safer than most other states.
   
• Fox News covers the story of Houston Texans rookie quarterback C.J. Stroud who, after a record-breaking game last week, spoke about his incarcerated father and the need to reform the justice system.
   
• The New York Times reports on how a spot-inspection at a women’s prison in Florida found squalid conditions and crumbling facilities. The shocking findings shine a harsh spotlight on conditions and understaffing in the federal prison system. (free link)

• The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society released a comprehensive analysis of what individual patients could save if Congress passed site-neutral reforms for Medicare. Here’s just one stat: A breast cancer patient who needs 25 days of radiation treatment would save more than $19,000.
   
• A relaunched coalition of business and health care industry leaders is calling for Congress to fight hospital consolidation and price markups, and to enforce price transparency and honest billing practices.
   
• Axios reports that federal regulators are trying to crack down on payments that reward Medicare Advantage insurance brokers for directing seniors to plans that may not be their best options.  
   
• An unlikely coalition of groups representing health plans, consumers, employers, and labor — including AV grantees Purchaser Business Group on Health and Health Access California — coauthored an essay in Health Affairs calling for California to address excessive and unsustainable health care costs.

• The U.S. Department of Education has announced a $37.7 million fine against Grand Canyon University for deceiving thousands of students about the cost of its doctoral programs, Higher Ed Dive reports.
   
• Third Way has released a memo calling for college accreditors to have universal standards and a common understanding of how student achievement should be evaluated.
   
• Arnold Ventures' Higher Education Fellow Clare McCann was quoted in an Inside Higher Ed story about a judge stalling Education Department plans to forgive loans held by students misled by the University of Phoenix and Ashford University.

• Narrower car lanes can help save lives, according to a new report by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
   
• In a move intended to lower development costs and reduce reliance on cars, Austin, Texas has become one of the largest U.S. cities to eliminate parking requirements, KUT News reports.
   
• Michigan lawmakers are passing their own state-level clean energy plan, which will cut the regulatory red tape that had blocked wind farms and solar fields, according to M Live.

• The city of Boulder, Colo., held its first mayoral election using ranked choice voting just as other Colorado cities consider implementing the nonpartisan democracy reform, Axios Denver reports.
   
• Bridge Michigan covers the interesting situation of voters in three Michigan cities approving ranked choice voting even as state law prohibits its use. FairVote covers the sweep for ranked choice voting.

• "Dog is my hero" — is that how the bumper sticker goes? The actual Hero Dog Award winners will be announced today, and when we say heroes, we mean canines who protect others, lift spirits, and make the world a better place. Meet the nominees here.
   
• They may not be heroes, but cats have thoughts about them, which they are prepared to share with you through apparently 300 different facial expressions (including, likely, a full spectrum of disdain). This range of expressions brings to mind one particular cat's look of abject horror during a legal proceeding, unrolling like a 21st century version of Kafka's The Metamorphosis.