Included in the 2017 federal tax overhaul was a substantial tax break for investments in businesses and properties located in economically distressed areas. Although state governors had a hand in selecting the nearly 9,000 “opportunity zones” eligible for the incentive, the federal law gave states little say over what types of projects investors actually put their money into.
But lawmakers in at least 17 states have considered measures this year dealing with opportunity zones, including those aimed at steering investors toward certain projects, according to Novogradac & Company, an accounting firm that is tracking such legislation. For instance, California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) has proposed a state tax break for investments in green technology and affordable housing. And Washington state Rep. Mike Chapman (D) has introduced a bill (H 1324) offering a tax credit for opportunity zone investments in rural areas.
“Through the added incentives, states can encourage the type of development they want to see in opportunity zones,” said Michael Novogradac, managing partner of Novogradac & Co.
However, Novogradac noted that cities and counties may have greater influence than states over what ultimately gets built in opportunity zones. For instance, Boulder, Colorado’s city council stopped some development in its opportunity zone last year, saying more planning was needed.
“I do think [states] can bend the curve to be sure,” Novogradac said. “But at the end of the day it really depends on local government and local policies.” (STATELINE.ORG, LEXISNEXIS STATE NET)
When it comes to email triage, company newsletters often get relegated to the end of the line, even among the most highly engaged employees. And, according to Gallup poll figures, 68.5 percent of American workers are “not engaged” or “actively disengaged,” making them even less likely to pay attention when an internal newsletter appears in their in-box. What’s this mean to you—the distributor of critical business intelligence that has the power to drive better decisions? It’s time to explore new tactics for driving employee engagement with internal newsletters.
During the SCIP Conference earlier this year, I met Dr. Michael Sutton, an associate professor at Westminster College and respected expert in knowledge management, immersive learning and more. Since he’s currently a competition judge for the Games4Health Challenge, I was curious about his thoughts on using gamification to enhance corporate internal information sharing.
He replied that it is an “interesting challenge” and one that is complicated by an audience that is “stratified across multiple generations.” How do you appeal to the Millennials in your company while still engaging the Gen-Xers and Baby Boomers? He recommends conducting some internal market research and even focus groups to improve your understanding of your audience. He also recommended a number of sources for reference. Here are three tips that I picked up:
After talking with Dr. Sutton, I know this barely scratches the surface—but everyone has to start somewhere. Have you experienced positive results using gamification to drive more awareness for the business intelligence you’re distributing?
Are you tasked with managing your organization’s research on the companies that matter to them? Potential new clients? Investments? Partnerships? It can be daunting and time consuming especially if you’re not confident in your less-than-trusted content sources that you rely on to point teams in the right direction. In 1996, Bill Gates said that “content is king,” and today, this is true now more than ever. In the 22 years since he uttered those words, the web has expanded from about 100,000 websites to more than one billion sites today. With all of that information—and misinformation—it’s critical to ensure the content you leverage is working for you by being organized, comprehensive and timely.
As you start to think about best practices related to company research, consider these three critical components to curating content:
Organize Your Content Sources for Easier Analysis
One of the biggest roadblocks researchers often face is ensuring you have the variety of content required to create a holistic picture of any company or organization you may be researching. This work can be time consuming and sometimes unfruitful, depending on the quality of the content and whether you have access to full stories, versus links or summaries only. Move beyond free online monitoring and work with a partner who organizes and manages global content sources to be sure you’re getting the complete view you need. Services like Nexis manage more than 40,000 global content sources, including trusted up-to-date and archived news, company profiles, industry information and social media content, and organizes them all into one streamlined database. You’ll have no shortage on sources and your research will become deeper and more actionable. In the words of Brady Darvin, VP of Consumer Insights, Strottman International, “... in most cases, finding similar information on the public Internet, IF it even exists, takes me or my analyst at least three times as long as it does using Nexis.”
Include Historical Data for Richer Insights
Just as important as using multiple content sources is accessing historical data. As you work to develop robust reports on a company or organization, you need to consider all key touch points. This can include current information like financial performance, management profiles, affiliations, and reputation, but taking a look back can often be just as helpful in developing a report that provides true thought leadership. Work with a partner who can access historical archives of articles and other sources that will give you more depth than you’ll ever get on the open web. It’s often this marrying of archived and up-to-the-minute data that turns your research into insights.
Increase Your Collaboration for Better Visibility
Researchers can often feel isolated or misunderstood from the rest of the organization. One extreme is today’s data scientist who are sometimes perceived as the modern “mad” scientist, off in a room doing things no one understands and yielding results no one else could develop. Do your part to demystify research by collaborating with the people and teams who use your reports. Seek out aggregated and standardized content then apply and distribute results through alerts, common searches, data visualizations and easy-to-understand work folders. This way, you can share your work and insights with those who need it more quickly and consistently to enable collaboration across teams. Not only will this improve efficiency and productivity, it will raise the value and visibility of your research work and expertise.
What’s the bottom line on getting the best industry and company intelligence that matter to your business? It’s to work with a solution set or partner that strategically curates the most robust collection of content and sources you need—this could include global news, company profiles, legal content, industry information and more. Better yet, get a comprehensive set of content that is also standardized and indexed for you to easily uncover the most relevant data across the disparate yet necessary news, company and other business data you need. Unlike the open web where you have to wade through varied and incomplete information, by working with a partner you’ll be able to find, analyze, visualize and share information critical to making smart business decisions and staying ahead of the competition.
Ready to learn even more about how to improve the content you’re using to research companies and organizations for your teams?
Learn more about how to uncover better information and better results with Nexis.
Are you a nonprofit or university? With Nexis for Development Professionals you can find high-value donors with a comprehensive and reliable fundraising research tool that encompasses news, company and public records data-- all in one place.
Recent reader rankings award from National Law Journal follows eight wins in 2017
LexisNexis®, a leading global provider of information and analytics, today announced that it was recognized throughout 2017 and into 2018 as the Best Online Public Records Research Provider by various prestigious ALM publications in their annual “Best of” awards for legal technology.
ALM “Best of” awards are chosen by the various publications’ readers and other working professionals in the legal industry. The LexisNexis® Public Records service received its first win of 2018 from The National Law Journal, and was recognized in the following eight reader ranking surveys across 2017:
“When it comes to finding details on an individual entity, having a modern, extensive public records resource is crucial, as it can be unpredictable where or when a person or business will leave a footprint,” said Jeff Pfeifer, vice president of product management at LexisNexis. “These awards acknowledge the massive data collection, sophisticated reporting capabilities and flexible searching found within LexisNexis Public Records—all of which combine to provide researchers with the most complete picture of people and businesses.”
LexisNexis has one of the largest databases of public and proprietary information available on the market today. With over 78 billion records, the service aggregates data from more than 10,000 sources, including public, private, regulated, emerging and derived data. The collection also includes over 10.6 billion unique name and address records, 5.6 billion property records and 68 million business contact records.
Integrated with the Nexis® platform, including Nexis® for Development Professionals and Nexis® for Real Estate Professionals service, the advanced Public Records technology automatically accounts for typographical errors, seamlessly searches for aliases and applies more than 200 analytic flags to warn of suspicious behavior, irregularities and to determine “most likely” contact information. Users can also access other tools such as Social Media Locator, which analyzes hundreds of social networking sites and millions of websites, including the deep web, to match and build its results.
Industry acknowledgement of LexisNexis Public Records as a ‘must-have resource’ joins many other company awards and accolades, including the recent Legal AI Leader awards from The National Law Journal for both the Lexis AnswersTM service on Lexis Advance and the Lex Machina® Legal Analytics® platform.
The LexisNexis® Difference
LexisNexis is an industry leader in public record, legal, news and business information—helping both non-profit and higher education institutions meet their development goals by providing access to powerful research tools, the most comprehensive intelligence dataset and data experts who can meet the unique and individualized needs of our clients. Whether you are looking to find and qualify new donors, analyze existing donors or enhance your database overall, LexisNexis can help you achieve your goals.
It’s been half a decade since Harvard Business Review named Data Scientists as “the sexiest job of the 21stcentury,” and they’re still in high demand. In fact, the 2017 report, "The Quant Crunch: How the Demand for Data Science Skills is Disrupting the Job Market," projects a 28 percent spike in demand for Data Scientists and Advanced Analysis within the next two years. But is ‘sexy’ really the right description? Data Scientist Monica Rogati sees it differently, having said, “In my opinion, they are half hacker, half analyst; they use data to build products and find insights. It’s Columbus meet Columbo―starry-eyed explorers and skeptical detectives.”
According to CrowdFlower’s 2017 Data Scientist Report, what they do and what they want to do are at odds. The Data Scientists surveyed for the Report indicated:
Yet, the whole processing of collecting, labeling, cleaning and organizing data falls low on Data Scientists’ preferred tasks. Rather than spending the majority of their time on ‘janitorial’ tasks, surveyed respondents definitely tapped into the ‘explorer’ and ‘detective’ attributes referred to by Ms. Rogati.
Why? Because real insight comes from data analytics, not data maintenance.
These days, we all suffer from information overload. Companies have data galore, but moving from data to information to insight is challenging. Just last year, Harvard Business Review cited an IBM study which suggested that bad data costs organizations $3.1 trillion annually. So, while they might not like it, one of the reasons that Data Scientists are highly valued is precisely because their expertise is needed for identifying problems in the data. Here are 3 additional reasons:
Experienced Data Scientists are trusted advisors and strategic partners to departments across an enterprise. Using analytics to measure, track and evaluate performance metrics, the Data Scientist can provide much needed insights—from helping marketers to deliver more targeted, effective campaigns to enabling hedge fund managers to identify opportunities while minimizing risk.
The world is changing rapidly, so in order to stay ahead of your competition, you need speed and agility. Data Scientists can measure key metrics, in the context of historic and real-time data, to quantify the value of decisions that have already been implemented and, if necessary, to identify where companies need to adapt further.
By examining and understanding the trends hidden in both internal and external data, Data Scientists can help improve a company’s performance, such as using trend analysis to refine customer targeting and increase engagement. Moreover, early identification of trends often paves the way for companies to make the most of new opportunities. Ultimately, the result can be increased profitability.
Analytics can help transform how businesses operate, and companies need Data Scientists to discover the hidden stories in data analysis—and tell those stories in compelling ways—to unlock the value. But data quality, as we noted above, can be a distraction. Make sure you give your Data Scientists the content and tools needed to deliver insights. Learn how LexisNexis empowers Data Scientists with access to comprehensive news and business data.
1. LexisNexis offers content Integration solutions so your data scientists have timely, relevant information to support more comprehensive analysis.
2. Check out more posts on hot topics and trends for research professionals
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When multiple people or organizations bring their unique strengths together the results are often greater than what either could have achieved alone. The very best business partnerships have catapulted careers and fueled business growth. Partnership between brands can help reach new audiences, and professional partnerships form a relationship that pushes both sides to achieve more.
That’s not to say forming a partnership is without risk. While we can celebrate the best partnerships among us, there are countless examples of joint ventures that just didn’t turn out so well. Knowing this, it’s important to consider partnerships carefully before making them official. This means doing your research before signing on the dotted line. You may not be able to predict the future, but you can look to the past to see if partnership is doomed from the start. When you start researching, here are certain red flags that merit deeper consideration.
Entering into a partnership is a lot like marriage. In no small part, you’re forging your destinies and tying your reputation to theirs. Their successes become the new team’s successes, but their troubles might quickly become your nightmare.
Discovering that a partner has a complicated legal history—especially if this wasn’t previously disclosed—is a sign to tap the brakes before progressing a partnership forward. A long series of lawsuits, significant past judgements, liens, bankruptcies and criminal histories could all potentially point to a history of unethical behavior, poor judgement or blatant disregard for the law. At the very least, this sort of finding merits a conversation with a potential partner before you link your business to their past.
It’s not uncommon for successful business leaders to have multiple interests. Even corporate entities can be invested in a diverse mix of ventures outside of their primary industry. Executives often serve on many outside boards of directors. A partner with many interests isn’t a bad thing, so long as it doesn’t pose a conflict with your joint goals.
Conflicts of interest create situations where bias can cloud business judgement. Even if competing interests somehow didn’t affect a potential partner’s judgment, the appearance of a conflict can be just as bad. Those on the outside can see this as reason to lose faith or question their motives. This creates a cloud that can dampen any potential success a partnership might yield
Carefully research where a potential partner’s interests may compete with the goals you’ve laid out, and, when conflicts exist, move forward with complete transparency.
When it comes to partnerships, when they look bad, you look bad. Intentional or not, going into business with another person or group constitutes a tacit endorsement that can bolster or hinder your reputation.
Reputation impacts all parts of your business. A bad reputation can cause customers, employees, vendors and future partners to turn away. That’s why it’s so important that you don’t let your hard-earned reputation be tarnished by an ill-vetted partner.
The list of reputational risk factors is as diverse as it is ever-changing. A history of negative media coverage, poor corporate citizenship and a past negative or offensive social media comments can all resurface at any moment, creating the chance for a public relations crisis. Don’t wait to be caught off guard: research potential reputational risks well before making a partnership official.
Any good partnership will rely on open and honest communication, and research is the first step toward establishing the trust that makes it happen. In the early stages this type of research can, at best, validate optimism for a new joint-venture. At worst, it can save you from a potential disaster in the future. Either way, entering into a partnership without research is a risk not worth taking.
Thirty-two states have expanded Medicaid in accordance with the 2012 U.S. Supreme Court decision upholding the Affordable Care Act but letting states decide whether or not to implement the Medicaid expansion provided for by the federal law. A budget proposal that includes Medicaid expansion has also been passed by Virginia’s House, and expansion ballot measures have been approved or are in the signature-gathering phase in three states.
The rebranding of a company is an exciting time. Not only does it allow an organization to introduce a new visual identity (updated logos, a new color scheme and fonts, etc.), it also represents a fresh start. A rebranding creates a unique opportunity for a brand to communicate a renewed focus or a new strategy to employees, investors and customers.
Creating this sort of inflection point has clear business appeal, but a rebrand’s ability to drive media attention should not be taken as a given. While a rebranding can be a strategic pillar to launch a new integrated marketing communications strategy, in many cases, the announcement may not be alluring to members of the press.
We’ve talked before about the importance of expectation-setting in media relations, and this is especially true when heading into a rebrand. Those expectations—and how you approach your strategy—will vary based on the scale of the rebrand and which audiences are most important to you.
When it comes to making the official announcements and introductions, there are some good ideas … and some that aren’t as strategically sound. Here are a few.
Good Idea: Inform Investors
When the announcement of a new brand corresponds with a change in business strategy, media relations offers an effective way to quickly and clearly inform current and potential investors of the changes. Brands carry value and equity, and modifying that formula can have a positive or negative impact on how investors feel about the future of an organization.
Mostly relevant to publicly traded companies or start-ups seeking venture capital investment, a media relations campaign targeting investors will have a much narrower focus than a national one. Rather than highlighting the aesthetic nature of the new brand, focus on the substantive changes that correspond with the visual update. Investors—and, in turn, financial reporters—will care more about expanded product or service offerings, recent mergers and acquisitions, or new geographic targets than a new logo or website design.
Before launching, do your research. Use media monitoring tools to investigate past coverage of similar announcements to identify the right reporters and outlets to pitch. Rather than casting a wide net to general interest outlets, focus on business publications and industry sources that will find the information most relevant (more on that later).
Bad Idea: Bragging about Beauty
Have you ever had a coworker enter the office with a new outfit or hairstyle? It’s likely you didn’t spend more than a few seconds thinking about the change—and you almost certainly didn’t pore over in-depth written or video analysis of his or her trip to the stylist or mall. This is somewhat analogous to the aesthetic side of rebranding.
A new look might garner a second glance, but likely won’t inspire reporters to invest valuable resources into a pronounced feature. While the select few iconic brands like Apple, Amazon, Starbucks or Ikea may earn major coverage for a makeover, the average organization won’t. Plan your messaging accordingly.
Good Idea: Know your Niche
Most industries have multiple publications that analyze the broad trends and daily minutiae of changes within the sector. Each of these outlets is likely to be interested in a rebranding announcement—especially if your organization is a relatively prominent figure within the industry.
When sharing branding news with these outlets, it’s still important to focus on what’s likely of most interest to them. Be prepared to highlight how the announcement may fit into larger industry trends and/or the ways the new brand may correspond with changing business behaviors or consumer habits. Understand that the audience for this type of media coverage will be colleagues, competitors and business partners, and tailor the information you share with those people in mind.
Bad Idea: Chasing Bad-Fit Big Fish
Media—whether print, digital or television—that cater to a mass, general audience aren’t the place for most brand announcements. These outlets are concerned with major news of the day, and their reporters and producers receive hundreds of pitches on a daily basis.
Again, only the largest and most prominent of companies are likely to secure coverage of a rebrand in these outlets. Even then, it might not be the kind of coverage they like. New brand designs, after all, aren’t always so popular and can create as much consumer backlash as brand benefits.
Good Idea: Focus on Your Family
Employees are built-in brand ambassadors, and getting your internal audience excited about a rebrand is a great way to organically influence the external audiences around them. According to brandwatch, the average Facebook user has 155 friends, while Twitter users are connected with an average of 707 followers. Enticing employees to share your company’s news on their social media channels will expand the reach of that story in a real way.
There are a number of ways to hype the news internally and encourage employees to share with their networks. Host internal gatherings to share key messaging around rebrand. Give your employees/ambassadors new branded products to take out into the real world. You might even consider creating a digital resource library with social media optimized images and templated posts that employees can easily personalize and share. Just be sure to avoid making them feel like it’s a requirement.
No matter the size or timing of a rebrand, the keys to making the most of the announcement are sharing your excitement and vision with the right people and avoiding tactical executions that aren’t likely to net positive results. By following these tips, you should be able to count your rebrand announcement as the first major success of a newly redesigned organization.
Visitors to the Washington statehouse in Olympia on Jan. 25 were greeted by something not usually seen on the idyllic, manicured Capitol grounds: over 1,100 red, yellow or white tombstones, one for each of the Evergreen State residents to die by their own hand in 2014. The red markers, representing suicide by firearm, made up over 500 of the total.
As horrific as that seems, 2014 was not even a particularly active year for such tragic occurrences. According to data compiled by the state Department of Health, between 2012 and 2014 Washington averaged 665 firearms-related deaths per year. Approximately 80 percent of those – or about 530 per year – were suicides. By comparison, the state averaged 497 deaths annually in traffic accidents over that same time frame.
Those numbers are not lost on Gov. Jay Inslee (D), who on Jan. 8 issued Executive Order 16-02, which launched a statewide public health initiative to reduce and prevent gun-related fatalities and injuries. A significant element of that effort is the implementation of the Washington State Suicide Prevention Plan, something lawmakers first endorsed in 2014 but never put into effect. The plan includes screening adolescents for depression and developing a culturally appropriate crisis-prevention plan targeted at high-risk populations like Native Americans and Alaskan Natives.
Inslee’s order is not the only effort of its kind currently underway in the Evergreen State. Lawmakers will also soon have the chance to weigh in on legislation (HB 2793/SB 6603) that would mandate suicide awareness training for pharmacists and firearms dealers and require them to offer prevention information to their customers.
Washington is just one of many states in recent years taking action to deal with suicide and its leading driver, depression. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, almost two dozen states since 2012 have introduced or adopted legislation to help citizens better manage depression and other depressive disorders. Programs vary widely. Wisconsin, for instance, now has a grant program that trains law enforcement in crisis intervention techniques for people suffering from a depressive disorder, while Wisconsin and Utah each offer grants and student loan repayment opportunities for mental health care professionals who agree to work in underserved areas. Ohio offers state-regulated “telepsychology” services aimed at reaching citizens who can’t or won’t come into a clinic or hospital for assessment and treatment.
Over the last three years at least 14 states – including Nebraska, Colorado, Illinois and Texas – have also adopted a version of the Mental Health First Aid Act, model legislation developed in 2008 by the National Council for Behavioral Health, the Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene and the Missouri Department of Mental Health that offers in-person training for people to learn about depression, mental illness and addictions. The legislation generally provides state funding for the Mental Health First Aid Toolkit program, “a 5-step action plan” that trains participants “how to spot risk factors and warning signs of depression and other mental illness,” hopefully giving them a chance to intervene before a mentally ill person ends their own life.
Bryan Gibb, National Council’s Director of Public Education, says the program has so far trained 500,000 people, with plans this year to double that figure. He says the vast majority of training – whether it has been funded by state coffers or directly through grants from organizations like his - has gone to local counties and community health centers. After going through the program, he says, participants are then able to train educators, first responders, health care providers or others in their community at little or no cost. Which is significant in that many of the entities that have taken the most advantage of the program are in underserved rural areas where the need has historically been greatest.
“The initial surge tended be in places like the desert Southwest, or among Native American populations in rural New Mexico and rural Alaska, or the migrant community in the Central Valley of California,” he says. “Cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles, Philadelphia and New York already have a fairly decent service network. These rural locales that are trying to triage people who need help right now, they simply didn’t have that.”
Gov. Inslee noted that need for quick intervention in caring for people who might be close to the edge. In announcing his directive, Inslee told reporters that suicide too often happens with “people who had a moment of depression. Who, if we can get them through it, can have a useful life.”
While loss of life is certainly the worst outcome of a depressive disorder, there is a significant financial impact on all of society as well. A 2015 study published in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry notes that the annual cost related to depressive disorders in the United States rose from $173 billion in 2005 to over $210 billion in 2010, with at least half of that coming from lost productivity at work and payouts from disability insurance claims related to depression. The report says depression has in fact become “the leading cause of disability for people aged 15-44, resulting in almost 400 million disability days per year, substantially more than other physical and mental conditions.”
That spike in costs has gone hand in hand with a rise in the number of people diagnosed with the condition. Between 2005 and 2010, the number of people suffering from depression in America grew from 13.8 million to 15.4 million. Impact was spread unevenly across age groups, with those over 50 experiencing the fastest rate of increase, while those younger than 25 declined slightly.
The rise among the middle-aged jibes with findings of a study published last year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. That survey, conducted by Princeton researchers Anne Case and Angus Deaton, found that death rates among older Caucasians with lesser levels of education were significantly higher than among any other demographic in the world. Perhaps more illuminating was the perceived causes: alcoholism, chronic pain, addiction to both legal and illegal drugs, and suicide.
That finding is not surprising to Dr. Steven Grinstead, whose clinic in Sacramento, California focuses on pain management and addiction treatment.
“We are seeing a lot more of the Baby Boomer generation come through now than we ever have before,” he says. “Especially men, who’ve been told from youth they have to be tough. Which makes depression a really hard thing to spot. People can put on a really good façade when they want to hide it.”
The recent efforts at the state level have been accompanied by a similar uptick in federal endeavors. The FY 2015 U.S. budget provided $15 million for a grant program to provide Mental Health First Aid training as a part of President Obama’s “Now is the Time” initiative, funding which Congress renewed for 2016. Pending legislation in the U.S. Senate (SB 711) and the House of Representatives (HR 1877) would authorize another $20 million in grants to support more training programs around the country. Federal law also now requires health coverage to give mental health treatment parity with that for physical conditions.
But it hasn’t all been state and federal action. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced last November an $850 million initiative he said will offer Mental Health First Aid training to all New Yorkers.
Back in California, Dr. Grinstead says he applauds the surge in interest in addressing depression and other mental illnesses and hopes more state and local governments take advantage of these kinds of programs.
“Depressive disorders don’t just impact the person suffering them. They have a direct, lasting impact on everyone in that person’s sphere, he says. “My thought is that if these efforts save just one life, they are well worth it.”
For policy makers at all levels of government, battling the national opioid epidemic can feel like a deadly game of Whack-a-Mole: No matter how many times they attack a particular element of the problem, another one just pops up somewhere else. But since giving up is not an option, lawmakers continue to take a wide ranging approach in their efforts to defeat a scourge that has claimed over 300,000 lives since 2000.
Prescription opioids were developed primarily to alleviate extreme chronic pain and include a wealth of commonly used pharmaceutical drugs like oxycodone and morphine. In that regard they have been a very effective pain management tool for doctors and patients alike. But opioids can also be highly addictive, and misuse and frequent over-prescribing has helped create millions of such users. Opioids are also the main agent in illegal narcotics like heroin. Purely synthetic opioids like fentanyl can also be easily manufactured by drug traffickers, who now regularly cut supplies of heroin and cocaine intended for street sale with analogue strains of fentanyl like carfentanil, which is 100 times stronger than the standard prescription form of the drug. Not surprisingly, law enforcement officials say that influx has become a leading factor in the sharp increase in opioid-related deaths plaguing much of the nation.
Although every kind of drug is subject to abuse, opioids have become an almost overwhelming problem throughout many states. According to data released by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last December, 63 percent of the nation’s 52,000 fatal drug overdoses in 2015 were due to opioids. Since 2010, 30 states have experienced steady increases in opioid-related deaths, with only a handful seeing a decline (see Bird’s Eye View in this issue). And a study released last week by the Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health showed that the number of Americans using heroin has increased five-fold over the last decade, and dependence on the drug has tripled in that time span.
Problems associated with such abuse go well beyond overdose deaths. Foster care caseloads, to name only one example, have risen dramatically in recent years, with children under age 1 the highest percentage of that increase. There is no definitive data to indicate the cause, but officials in many states believe substance abuse is a major factor.
Lawmakers have come at the problem from various angles for years. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, 47 states and the District of Columbia – all but Montana, Wyoming and Kansas – have adopted laws since 2001 that allow greater access by first responders, family members or even friends of known opioid users to naloxone, an “opioid antagonist” drug that can counteract the effects of an overdose. Thirty seven states and D.C. now also have so-called “Good Samaritan” laws that allow someone to seek help for an overdose victim without facing criminal charges themselves, and dozens of states have acted to steer non-violent drug offenders into treatment or diversion programs rather than jail. Many have also eased mandatory minimum sentencing laws and expanded access to Medication Assisted Treatment (MAT), which combines medication and behavioral therapy to help offenders with drug habits.
All but Missouri have also adopted prescription drug monitoring programs (PDMPs), state-run electronic databases designed to monitor the dispensing of such medications. Numerous states have also started prescription drug takeback programs, which allow consumers to return unused medications in order to prevent those drugs from being taken by someone other than the person they were intended for.
Both the states and federal government are now also paying greater attention to how opioid pain relievers are being prescribed. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, an estimated 20 percent of all patients seeking help from their doctor for pain have been prescribed some form of opioid. In 2012, this culminated in 259 million opioid prescriptions, enough to provide a bottle of pills to every adult in United States.
That astounding figure prompted the CDC in 2016 to issue new prescription guidelines that call on doctors to more carefully assess patients before starting them on an opioid medication. The guidelines allow greater use of nonpharmacological treatments like physical therapy or acupuncture as well as more use of non-opioid pain medications. And if a doctor does wish to start their patient on an opioid, the guidelines encourage them to first discuss in detail with that person the risks and benefits of using such a powerful and potentially addictive medication.
In March of last year, Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker (R) signed legislation making the Bay State the first to adopt its own restrictions on initial opioid prescriptions. That measure limits an initial opioid prescription for adults to no more than a seven-day supply, with a similar limit on all opioid prescription for minors. By the end of the year governors in seven other states - Connecticut, Maine, New Hampshire, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Vermont – had followed suit, while Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey (R) added the Grand Canyon State to the list via executive order in October. Ducey followed that up with another EO last January that requires prisoners with a history of opioid abuse who exit jail to participate in post-release MAT and counseling.
The trend continued this year. In February, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) signed legislation that enacts a five-day supply limit and requires insurers to provide at least six months of addiction treatment coverage. Weeks later, in March, Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf (D) announced the Keystone State was adopting an initial prescription limit for minors as part of a full suite of new rules intended to mitigate opioid abuse. And last Thursday, Ohio Gov. John Kasich (R) announced new prescribing rules that include the seven-day limit for adults and five days for minors.
There is good reason to believe such restrictions can help. A new CDC study shows that limiting initial prescriptions may well be a huge factor in slowing the growth of opioid abuse, particularly in young people or those who might be prone to addiction. According to that research, some patients face a significantly increased risk of opioid dependency after taking the drugs for as little as four days. The risk grows even greater after the 31st day of use or with a second prescription. Other research also indicates a strong connection between the abuse of anti-anxiety medications like Xanax and Valium, and the abuse of opioids. According to that study, concurrent use of the two drugs more than doubles the chances of an opioid user going into overdose.
But the limit laws also have detractors. A seven-day limit proposal by Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) this year met strong resistance from the Old Line State medical community, which complained it didn’t give doctors enough flexibility in treating patients. Hogan and state health officials eventually worked out a compromise that requires doctors to follow best practices, including the new CDC guidelines. Maryland State Medical Society Executive Director Gene Ransom said that requirement will essentially instill the seven-day limit anyway. More than that, it puts doctors on notice that their prescribing behavior is not going unobserved.
“There is a clear message now from the General Assembly that physicians have to pay attention to what is going on with prescribing,” he told the Washington Post.
States are also continuing a wide array of other mitigation efforts. Kate Blackman, who tracks the issue for NCSL, says over 400 opioid abuse prevention bills have been introduced in the states so far this year, including 56 measures across 21 states that deal with prescribing regulations. More than 100 other bills deal with access to naloxone, though with so many states already allowing its use many of those new laws only tweak ones already in place. But even in states hit particularly hard by the epidemic, consensus can be hard to find. Last week the Oklahoma Senate Judiciary Committee killed SB 226, a bill that would have made the Sooner State the 38th to enact a Good Samaritan law. That rejection came the same week officials acknowledged that the state endured a record number of overdose deaths in 2016. Although the bulk of those were related to methamphetamine use rather than opioids, the state’s 49 opioid overdose deaths mark a 60 percent increase from 2015.
States also continue to consider other efforts, including drug buyback programs, greater opioid awareness training for health providers and the creation of state commissions and task forces. At least one state, Ohio, has adopted a requirement to provide opioid abuse training in public K-12 schools, a program that lawmakers in at least four states – Michigan, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and South Carolina – are considering this year as well. Massachusetts and Pennsylvania have also adopted laws allowing patients to formally notify their doctors that they do not want to ever be prescribed an opioid. At least two more states – Alaska and Connecticut – are weighing similar bills.
The federal government also remains in the mix. Last week, President Donald Trump named Gov. Christie to head a commission to seek out more ways to combat opioid abuse nationwide. There may be new legislation as well: last Tuesday, Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Missouri), the top Democrat on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, announced that she is requesting marketing, sales, and addiction study materials from the companies that produce the nation’s top five opioid medications. Her intention is to showcase the role those manufacturers have played in the growth of the opioid epidemic.
Outside of statehouses and Congress, there is growing interest in the effort by dozens of drug makers to battle abuse by producing pills with abuse-deterrent properties that make them very difficult to crush and then snort or inject. But regulators warn that abuse-deterrent is a far cry from abuse-proof, notably because the drugs can still simply be swallowed as is. Therefore, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration says such claims should be taken with the proverbial grain of salt.
Meanwhile, some scientists believe the real answer lies in producing opioids that simply don’t give users the high that promotes abuse in the first place. Traditional opioids not only relieve pain, they send the brain a signal of euphoria. A recently released study from San Francisco-based Nektar Therapeutics showed promise for one such opioid drug. It is designed to enter the brain too slowly to produce the kind of high that entices users to overtake the medication. Nektar is only one of many pharmaceutical companies with a non-addictive opioid in development.
The question is whether these drugs will also do what current opioids do best: alleviate chronic severe pain. It is far too early to know for sure – to date testing has only been done on mice – and the answer is not likely to come soon. But with an epidemic like they’re facing now, states will take any good news they can get.
The Trump administration is plunging ahead with waivers that will encourage states to impose controversial work requirements on Medicaid recipients despite a federal judge’s ruling striking down such requirements in Arkansas and Kentucky.
Last month Ohio became the ninth state to receive federal permission to mandate work for certain Medicaid beneficiaries. Other states in various phases of the approval process for work requirements include Arizona, Indiana, Michigan, New Hampshire, Utah and Virginia. (For more on this see Bird’s Eye View.)
Medicaid, covering about one in five Americans, is the federal-state program that provides health care to the disabled and persons with low income. The Affordable Care Act, often called Obamacare, allowed states to expand Medicaid coverage to individuals and families with income up to 138 percent above the poverty line. Thirty-one states and the District of Columbia have done so, and expansion is pending in three other states.
In striking down the Arkansas plan and, for a second time, the Kentucky plan, U.S. Judge James Boasberg of the Washington D.C. federal district, an appointee of Barack Obama, said Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar had been “arbitrary and capricious” when he approved work requirements in these states.
Azar defends such requirements as helpful to the health and economic situations of poor people, a claim critics say is disputed by the facts. The Arkansas experiment with work requirements dropped 18,000 people from the Medicaid rolls, including some who were working but lacked the required computer access.
The Trump administration has repeatedly invited states to seek waivers for work requirements and other purposes and has approved most applications.
Putting a human face on his decision invalidating the Arkansas law, Judge Boasberg related the travails of Adrian McGonigal, a 40-year-old food service worker from Pea Ridge, Arkansas, with serious medical conditions. He was employed by a poultry company that provided no health insurance. Beginning in 2014, McGonigal received medical care and prescription drugs through the state’s expanded Medicaid program. In 2018 he was told of new work requirements.
“Despite his lack of access to and difficulty working with computers, he was able to report his employment in June 2018 but did not know he needed to continue to do so each month,” Boasberg wrote. “As a result, when he went to pick up his prescriptions in October, the pharmacist told him he was no longer covered, and his medicines would cost him $800.”
Without the prescriptions, McGonigal’s health deteriorated, he had several work absences and was fired. “He thus lost his Medicaid coverage and his job,” the judge observed.
This is not an isolated case, according to Sara Rosenbaum, professor of health law and policy at George Washington University. Rosenbaum said in an interview that it was ironic to use work requirements to remove people who are already working from the Medicaid rolls.
Among Medicaid adults nearly eight in ten live in working families, and a majority are working themselves, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. Many have care-giving responsibilities for children or senior adults.
Rosenbaum pointed out that Medicaid expansion was incorporated into the ACA because low-income workers are unlikely to have health insurance. Medicaid has helped people return to work because it provides the health care they need to make work possible, she said.
The battle over Medicaid work requirements is part of a larger partisan struggle in which President Donald Trump and 18 Republican state attorneys general continue their efforts to dismantle Obamacare.
Republicans tried to abolish the ACA in 2018, when they controlled both houses of Congress, but fell short. Democrats won the House in the 2018 elections and have rallied in support of the law.
But Republicans got a boost last December when a Texas federal judge, ruling on the lawsuit filed by the GOP attorneys general, found that a provision of the ACA requiring Americans to buy health insurance or pay a penalty was unconstitutional. U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor said this invalidated every other section of the 2,000-page law.
The case is now before the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and is expected eventually to reach the Supreme Court, where the five-justice majority that found Obamacare constitutional in 2012 remains intact.
Pending the outcome of the appeal, the ACA continues to be the law of the land.
Trump caused a stir in March when, reportedly over Azar’s objections, he told the Justice Department to file a brief with the appellate court opposing the entire Affordable Care Act. He said it would be replaced by a “really great” Republican health plan that would be better and less expensive than Obamacare but offered no details.
Having no such plan at hand, Republican senators balked. According to the New York Times, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) privately warned Trump that the Senate would not revisit health care in a comprehensive way until after the 2020 elections.
This forced Trump to back down and guaranteed that health care will be a major issue in the 2020 election campaign, the Times said.
Democrats are jubilant at the prospect. Many of them believe the health care issue was the key to winning the House in the 2018 midterms.
But neither poor people in need of health care nor the states have the luxury of waiting for the next election.
In the states the Trump administration has promoted plans that would allow small businesses to combine forces and offer cheaper health insurance plans that do not meet Obamacare standards.
The ACA requires mandatory coverage for 10 essential health benefits such as maternity care, prescription drugs and mental health treatment. It also guarantees, as a number of cut-rate plans do not, health insurance to those with prior medical conditions.
Health providers and insurers have warned that the cut-rate plans will be gobbled up by healthy consumers, leaving behind a sicker patient pool and driving up the costs of ACA plans.
In Washington, D.C. on March 28, U.S. District Judge John D. Bates of the District of Columbia, an appointee of George W. Bush, ruled that the administration’s efforts to avoid the requirements of Obamacare by allowing small businesses and self-employed persons to form associations and offer cut-rate plans were “clearly an end run around the ACA.”
It was a victory for l1 Democratic-led states and the District of Columbia, which had sued to prevent the plans from taking effect.
The ruling was celebrated by New York State Attorney General Letitia James (D), whose state led the lawsuit. “We are pleased that the District Court saw past the Trump administration’s transparent effort to sabotage our health care system and gut these critical consumer protections in the service of its partisan agenda,” she said in a statement.
Judge Bates’ ruling came the day after Judge Boasberg’s ruling against Medicaid work requirements. Taken together, the two decisions constituted back-to-back body blows against the efforts to rewrite the nation’s health care rules.
But the administration is not giving up. It has appealed Boasberg’s decision and could appeal the Bates decision. Even if the Boasberg decision stands, the Department of Health and Human Services will have another opportunity to rewrite work requirements in Arkansas and Kentucky.
In the Bluegrass State, Gov. Matt Bevin (R) has threatened to scrap the entire Medicaid expansion if work requirements are eliminated, stripping coverage from nearly 500,000 people.
Boasberg commented on Bevin’s statement in his opinion, comparing it to the threat “of a gun to the head.”
“Kentucky, it now seems, has picked up that gun by threatening to de-expand Medicaid,” Boasberg wrote.
The saddest aspect about this protracted battle over health care rules is that it’s almost entirely partisan with neither side willing to make even small concessions.
But small breaks recently occurred in the partisan dike in Ohio and Montana.
Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost (R) withdrew from the lawsuit filed by his fellow GOP attorneys general that seeks to declare Obamacare unconstitutional. Yost opposes the provision requiring people to have health insurance or pay a penalty but disagrees that it makes the entire law invalid.
Yost filed a friend-of-the-court brief with the 5th Circuit Court urging that the law be upheld. Joining him, somewhat unexpectedly, was conservative Montana Attorney General Tim Fox (R), who has described Obamacare as “a train wreck and a nightmare.”
Fox, who is running for re-election in 2020, nonetheless said it was important to protect more than 150,000 Montanans who have pre-existing medical conditions.
That’s what Obamacare will be doing until after the next election or until blocked by the courts.
Forty-seven years ago, a farmer opened his fields for a festival celebrating three days of peace and music—the Woodstock Music and Art Fair. More than 30 musical acts performed, including Richie Havens, the Grateful Dead, the Who, Janis Joplin, Santana, Sly & the Family Stone, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Jefferson Airplane and Jimi Hendrix. Looking back through the news archives, we realized that there are insights to be gleaned from the iconic event. Here’s what we learned.
Woodstock didn’t actually take place in Woodstock. Organizers originally planned to hold the festival there, but when both the location and local support for the event fell through, they had to act fast. A second site likewise fell through. Fortunately, Max Yasgur, a dairy farmer in Bethel, NY stepped in to save the day. Regardless of the industry, information professionals need to embrace this same resilient approach because disruption constantly happens. Using news alerts can help you anticipate opportunities and threats so you can support smarter, agile decision making.
Woodstock’s organizers planned to sell tickets at $6.00 a day for the three-day festival. They had facilities and food planned for a crowd of 50,000. But as the crowd swelled to an estimated 500,000, the fences came down and the festival organizers had to scramble to manage the volume. Certainly, information professionals can relate to the flood of information they must manage these days. News cycles that run 24-hours a day, 7 days a week across an ever-expanding array of channels—the sheer enormity of your task is enough to make you want to hide. Research tools with built-in analytics can make it easier to filter out the noise, so you can quickly move from inundation to insights.
Several times in the past decades, different organizers have tried to revive the Woodstock Festival and failed. Unlike the peace and love vibe that dominated the original Woodstock, music fans at a festival held to commemorate the 30th anniversary of Woodstock devolved into an angry mob that an MTV VJ said left “… waves of hatred bouncing around the place.” But rather than becoming the day that music festivals died, other organizers—like those who successfully launched Coachella only three months later—took lessons from the past and looked to the future to come up with a strategy that would serve them well. So well, in fact, that Coachella continues to attract crowds, artists, musicians and brand sponsors today. Information professionals need that same attitude—learn from the past, focus on the present, and keep an eye on the future. And to do that, you need access to relevant, reliable content—archival and current news—from a wide variety of global sources.
Are you ready to rock and roll?
The Rio 2016 Olympic Games came to a close with a spectacular ceremony last weekend, and the Paralympics will begin next month. The historic achievements of Usain Bolt and Michael Phelps have grabbed most of the headlines over the last month. But alongside the sport, the Games will be remembered for numerous allegations of bribery and corruption. And it’s not just governing bodies for athletics that need to screen for evidence of bribery and corruption. Companies across all industries face similar scrutiny by regulators and consumers to ensure ethical conduct.
Events in Rio have led to further scrutiny over the role of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), the Swiss-based organization that organizes the competition. Pat Hickey, a senior member of the IOC, was arrested in Brazil over allegations of illegal ticket sales. He is accused by the Brazilian authorities of being involved in a scheme to resell Olympic tickets at an inflated price. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) said it would co-operate with any police investigation and stressed that Mr Hickey should be presumed innocent until proved otherwise.
But his arrest could add to the calls for changes in the way the Olympics are organized. The IOC handles vast sums of money from broadcasting rights to the Games, sponsorships, licensing, and ticket sales. It now faces accusations in the media of a lack of transparency and accountability.
In a blog post following Mr Hickey’s arrest, Rio Olympics Neighbourhood Watch, a project run by a non-governmental organization in Rio, asked: “How much is known about the inner workings of the IOC and its finances? Who is this elite clique of decision makers who each receive US$900 per diem spending allowances during the Games and whose choices permanently affect urban fabrics around the world?”
FIFA, the governing body for world football, has faced similar criticisms in recent years, culminating in the arrest of fourteen officials in May 2015. Mr Hickey’s arrest will add further pressure on these organizations to reform. Companies that choose to associate with the Olympics or the World Cup, either by sponsorship or bidding for contracts, should monitor the media coverage of the IOC and FIFA. They might also consider using their influence to lobby these organizations to reform their governance structures.
The Rio Olympics have also been marred by allegations of doping and bribery. Before the Games even began, 118 Russian athletes were banned from competing after allegations of a state-sponsored doping regime. A weightlifter from Kyrgyzstan was stripped of a bronze medal and a number of other athletes were sent home because of doping allegations.
Previous Olympic Games have seen accusations of bribery in the awarding of tenders to build Olympic stadia and infrastructure; in deciding which country should host the Olympics; and in using access to events to bribe prospective clients or politically-exposed persons. But in Rio, boxers from Ireland and the USA have even accused the judges of taking bribes to influence their decisions, leading to some of the judges being sent home from the Games.
Rather than seeing these cases as damaging to the Olympic brand, it could be argued the decision to send home judges and athletes shows that anti-corruption measures in sport are working. Andy Spalding, Associate Professor at the University of Richmond School of Law, wrote in a post for the FCPA blog: “The Rio 2016 Summer Games may go down in history—nay, should go down in history— as the anti-corruption games. We may never have talked so much about cheating, or punishing cheating, or how to design an effective anti-cheating regime, as we are now.”
Before the Olympics began, corruption was already a major talking point in Brazil. President Dilma Rousseff has been suspended from office over allegations she manipulated government accounts, which she denies. This week she faces a vote which could result in her impeachment. There are also allegations that oil firm Petrobras colluded with government officials to pay them for their help in securing building contracts.
With the Olympics bringing the world’s attention to these cases in Brazil, some observers might have gained the impression the country has a poor record on corruption. But a report by the University of Richmond Law School Anti-Corruption team said, “These scandals are actually evidence of newly enacted corruption laws taking effect.” A new law, the Clean Company Act of 2014, aims to crack down on bribery in the awarding of contracts. Bid rigging and fraud are now prohibited in public procurement, as well as bribery of Brazilian public officials.
Professor Spalding said these high-profile cases of corruption at the top levels of business and government in Brazil show that the country has now set up effective tools to fight bribery and corruption. Breaches of corruption laws can be evidence that these laws are working and create confidence in a country’s commitment to taking enforcement action against bribery and corruption. So although Rio 2016 will be known for the sporting heroics of Bolt and Phelps in years to come, perhaps it should also be remembered as the “anti-corruption games”.
Micro-donations are now one of the main pillars of modern fundraising, and were considered to be a major disruption to the nonprofit landscape when they started to become prominent. US presidential elections have seen micro-donations account for increasing proportions of funds on a termly basis, while microgiving schemes from the Ice Bucket Challenge to No Makeup Selfie have been responsible for raising millions in donations comprising of just a couple of dollars each.
The culture of micro-donation within the wider fundraising scene has opened up so many possibilities for raising money, enabling funds to be collected quicker, on a wider basis, and from people who may not be in a position to donate larger sums at once. Crucially, microgiving makes donating to charities accessible for everyone.
Encourage Small Donations
In spite of selflessness and compassion being at the heart of the fundraising concept, there is a prevalence of fear of competition when it comes to the amounts being donated. Those on lower incomes are prone to feeling embarrassed about not being able to donate higher amounts to charity, to a point at which they avoid making micro donations at all.
This is why fundraising campaigns have to be presented in an accessible way that encourages and values donations of all sizes. By insisting that “every penny counts” and other such motivations, you empower people to make their donations and feel as legitimate in doing so as every other person contributing, and more likely to do so on a regular basis.
Be Thankful
Life is more expensive than ever, and in an economy that is still struggling, people do not want to part with any of their hard-earned money thanklessly, even if it is going to a good cause. Charities must go to lengths to make their donors feel valued, and give them good reasons to be benevolent with their money. What might seem like a small amount to donate to one person could be a huge amount to the person actually donating it, and an indication of great generosity.
Every donation, regardless of its size, must be instantly acknowledged and genuine gratitude expressed. If people are donating via websites or apps, make sure that a heartfelt message of thanks automatically shows upon completion of the donation. If spare change is being donated to people with collection tins, make sure those representing the charity are friendly and approachable, and vocalise their thanks; stickers or badgers are another small but significant way of giving back to your donors, and showing that you appreciate their input.
Explore All Options
Widespread technology and device use makes prospective donors easier to reach in a range of ways than ever, so charities should give time to exploring the many options available. There are now mobile apps that specialize in micro donations, while many stores and other businesses give their customers the option of rounding the total payable amount up to the next dollar, with the difference going to charity. The crux of it is giving people quick, simple and safe options to give money, and asking for small amounts. This eliminates almost all of the reasons a person could give for not donating: not having the time, not having any cash on them, not being able to afford it, not trusting the security of the transaction. The ‘impulse buy’ mentality behind making it possible for people to donate in this way is a simple but highly effective way of not only finding donors, but keeping them in the long term.
The bottom line is that the public do not owe you anything, and that if they are going to be convinced to lend their financial assistance to a nonprofit organization, they have to feel that they are actually making a difference, and that their contributions are valued. If you struggle as an organization to validate your prospective donors in such a way, you are not going to be making the most of the goldmine that is microgiving.
Visit us online to see how Nexis® for Development Professionals can help you find the right donor prospects and maximize your contributions.
Despite dire predictions of its demise, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) is alive and flourishing as it nears its eighth birthday in 2018. Medicaid is flourishing, too, but with new controversy over pending work requirements.
Nicknamed Obamacare after the president who proposed it and signed it into law, the ACA has survived a troubled childhood. The Supreme Court saved Obamacare from being strangled in its cradle over constitutional issues. Last year the law was on life support as Republican congressional leaders and President Donald Trump tried repeatedly to repeal it. By narrow margins the Senate rejected every attempt.
Still, the ACA’s prognosis for 2018 seemed bleak when the Trump administration slashed advertising and outreach for Obamacare and halved the sign-up period for obtaining coverage through the federal website. “Obamacare is finished. It's dead. It's gone,” Trump declared on the eve of the open enrollment period.
But it isn’t gone. More than 8.8 million enrolled for ACA coverage, nearly as many as in the longer enrollment period in 2016. Enrollment has also been strong in the 11 states and the District of Columbia that maintain their own health care exchanges. Since the enrollment period was extended in many of these states, full figures are not yet available.
Obamacare’s greatest impact has been on Medicaid, the federal-state program that provides health care for the poor and disabled. More than 74 million people are enrolled in Medicaid, about a third more than when Obamacare began. The ACA allows states to provide Medicaid to persons making up to 138 percent above the poverty line. Enticed by an incentive that originally provided a full federal subsidy for new enrollees, 31 states and D.C. have expanded Medicaid since the ACA took effect.
Partly because of this expansion, Medicaid has become the second largest item in most state budgets after education, rising as a percentage of state spending from 20.5 percent in fiscal 2008 to 29.0 percent in fiscal 2017, according to the National Association of State Budget Officers. Costs increased in 2017 when states were required to assume 5 per cent of the costs of new Medicaid enrollees. This will jump to 10 percent in 2020.
The increased cost of Medicaid has caused budget anxiety in many states and prompted 10 of them, all with Republican governors, to seek federal waivers allowing them to experiment with cost-cutting measures. The most controversial of these experiments is a work requirement for Medicaid enrollees, known by the euphemism of “community engagement.” This month the Trump administration allowed Kentucky to impose the first work requirement in Medicaid’s history and signaled it would look favorably on similar requests from nine other states. They are Arizona, Arkansas, Indiana, Kansas, Maine, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Utah and Wisconsin.
Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin (R) celebrated the approval of a work requirement as “the most transformational entitlement reform that has been seen in a quarter of a century” while advocates for the poor threatened lawsuits.
“The [Bevin] administration has their chicken-and-egg story completely wrong — they say people need to work to get healthy,” Sheila Schuster, a Kentucky health care advocate told the New York Times. “We all know that health is the foundation from which people go to school, go to work and keep their employment...The administration is not only going backward, but doing it for completely the wrong reasons.”
Bevin countered with Executive Order 2018-040, which orders state officials to terminate the state’s Medicaid expansion in its entirety if the work requirement is thrown out by the courts.
Under the Kentucky plan, starting in July, most Medicaid recipients aged 19 to 64 who are not disabled will be expected to work at least 20 hours a week or do an equivalent amount of volunteer work. Pregnant women, full-time students, primary caretakers of dependents, homeless people and those deemed medically frail will be exempted.
Kentucky, one of only three Southern states to expand Medicaid under the ACA, has been a poster child for Obamacare. According to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid, Kentucky’s enrollment in Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) increased by 108 percent from 2013, when Obamacare became operative, to October 2017. This is by far the largest percentage increase of any state, and more than three times as much as the national average increase of 29 percent. Kentucky’s uninsured rate fell 9.2 percentage points from 2013 to 2016, reaching a low of 5.1 percent, according to U.S. Census data.
Total Medicaid enrollment in Kentucky, including children and the elderly, stood at 1.3 million as of October 2017, nearly 30 percent of the Bluegrass State’s entire population. These included 650,867 adults, three-quarters of which were added by the ACA expansion. The Bevin administration estimates that the work requirement would apply to 350,000 of these adults, although it’s unclear how many of them are already employed. Nationally, 60 percent of Medicaid recipients are working, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.
Medicaid has become the nation’s largest health program, enrolling one in five Americans. Total Medicaid costs in 2016, the last year for which complete figures are available, were $553 billion with 63 percent paid by the federal government and 37 percent by states.
After increasing the federal budget deficit with a tax bill passed by Congress in December, Republicans hope to lower it at the expense of Medicaid and other health care programs. A budget resolution passed by Congress along party lines last October lacks the force of law but provides a window on GOP priorities. All non-Medicare health programs, principally the ACA and Medicaid, would see a cut of $1.3 trillion or nearly 30 percent by 2027, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
While Medicaid is a pressing issue, states are more concerned in the short run with the congressional deadlock over CHIP, which provides health care for nine million children of working parents with income too high to qualify for Medicaid. Funding for CHIP, created in 1997 with bipartisan support, expired last September and the popular program has become a pawn in the congressional struggle to reach agreement on a budget resolution. Several states have warned Congress they cannot fund CHIP on their own after January 31.
Going forward, expect Trump and congressional Republicans to keep the pressure on Obamacare. The tax bill abolished a provision of the ACA that required most Americans to obtain health insurance or pay a penalty, beginning in 2019. Despite Trump’s claim that removal of this requirement “essentially” repealed Obamacare, the ACA remains healthy and in force. A.M. Best, a global credit rating organization, found that insurers have adapted to the uncertainty surrounding the Trump administration’s handling of the law and predicted that ACA insurance markets “will be relatively stable through 2018,” The Hill reported.
Insurance markets would become even more stable if Congress passes a pending bipartisan bill restoring payments to insurers for discounts they gave low-income ACA customers for health policy deductibles and other expenses. Trump cut off these payments, estimated at $8 billion in 2018. During the debate on the tax bill, however, the president promised Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) that he would sign a bill restoring the payments if it reaches his desk.
Trump is also expected to sign an executive order allowing Americans to purchase cheaper health insurance policies that do not meet the comprehensive standards of the Affordable Care Act. Most Democrats oppose this action, which they say gives Americans an illusion of coverage rather than effective health insurance.
Overall, Trump and congressional Republicans have managed to damage the Affordable Care Act without destroying it. A renewed attempt to repeal the ACA in a midterm election year would be an uphill battle, especially with a reduced majority in the U.S. Senate, which the GOP now controls 51-49.
The Democratic commitment to preserving the Affordable Care Act and the GOP’s continued hostility to the law guarantees that health care will be a prime political issue in this year’s midterm elections. When Republicans swept to power in the U.S. House in 2010, repeal of Obamacare was their principal battle cry.
But polls show that Obamacare is more popular now than it was then. It would be ironic if the issue that brought Republicans victory in 2010 proved their undoing in 2018.
While much of the West suffers through an epic drought that has contributed to a deadly fire season, state and local officials are bracing for a severe El Nino winter that could bring substantial rain along the Pacific Coast and significant snowfall in the mountains.
California, expected to bear the brunt of the storms, may suffer the worst of both worlds. Forecasters say that massive storms could uproot trees, cause mudslides and trigger flooding without making much of a dent in a four-year drought.
That drought, which afflicts portions of eight other western states, has taken its heaviest toll in California, the nation’s most populous state and an agricultural bread basket. Brown is the new green in many communities as lawns have been allowed to die or have been replaced with desert vegetation. Some 560,000 acres, about one-seventh of the Golden State’s croplands, lie fallow. Many of the state’s reservoirs are down to a third or less of capacity and the snowpack in the Sierra is 5 percent of normal. Tree ring studies say this is the lowest snowpack in 500 years.
A healthy snowpack is a prerequisite for drought relief. Snowpack functions as a frozen reservoir, accumulating over the winter and melting during spring and summer to provide water for rivers and streams. Last April, in an iconic scene, California Gov. Jerry Brown (D) issued a clarion call for water conservation in a barren Sierra meadow that normally would have been covered by several feet of snow.
California residents responded to Brown’s call by reducing urban water use by 31 percent, more than the governor had sought. Previously sacrosanct agriculture has also been required to contribute. Early in the summer the State Water Rights Board ordered more than l00 growers and irrigation districts with some of the oldest water rights in California to stop drawing supplies from hard-pressed streams and rivers in the Central Valley.
Despite these efforts, the drought has tightened its grip. State climatologist Michael Anderson said that’s because the drought has been accompanied by record high temperatures that dry out vegetation and stress the environment, including reducing stream flow for native fish.
The combination of drought and high temperatures has spurred wildland fires, which this year are burning hotter and covering more ground because of the dry vegetation. California wildfires have burned more than 800,000 acres, destroyed hundreds of homes and caused six deaths. In Washington State wildfires have burned more than 500,000 acres. Three firefighters died in August battling the Okanogan Complex fire, a massive combination of five wildfires in the north-central section of the state.
Nationally, the amount of land burned by wildfires has surpassed nine million acres, most of it in the West, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. With at least six weeks left in the fire season in many parts of the region, wildfires may consume a record acreage before winter storms ease the danger.
These storms could be exceptional. Weather forecasters are counting on El Nino, a climate condition that occurs when ocean temperatures increase in the equatorial Pacific Ocean, sometimes bringing cooler and wetter weather to the southern United States, southern California in particular. Not all El Nino winters are wet, but this one has the potential, according to Bill Patzert, a climatologist with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, of being a “Godzilla El Niño.” State and local emergency officials, aware of recent flooding after record rain in the Carolinas, are heeding the warning. Many California communities are stockpiling sandbags, trimming trees and clearing debris from river and stream beds that are bone dry now but could quickly pose a flood danger in a storm.
The March rains of 1991 caused extensive damage and California is more susceptible to weather-related calamities now because of population increases – 38 million people compared to 30 million in 1991 – and increased building on vulnerable hillsides and flood plains. State climatologist Anderson said that because of drought and high temperatures the tops of hillsides are drier than the bottom portions of the hills. This creates an instability that makes slides more likely in a heavy downpour.
For California, the benefits of a wet El Nino winter depend in large measure on where the rain and snow falls. Three-quarters of the population and urban water demand is in Southern California; nearly three-quarters of the state’s water storage facilities are in the north. Much of the rain that falls in the southern part of the state runs off into the Pacific Ocean, while precipitation in the north is captured in Lake Shasta and various reservoirs or, if cold enough, in the Sierra snowpack. Until recently, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) had limited its predictions of substantial winter precipitation to Southern California with prospects for the north more problematic. But the latest forecasts have boosted the likelihood of El Nino rains all the way to the Oregon border.
The timing of the predicted storms is also an issue. The NOAA forecasts suggest that storms won’t arrive in California with force until after Jan. 1, narrowing the window for any precipitation. In California, most of the rain comes in the winter months. Even late March storms are relatively infrequent. In 1991, before the March miracle storms, many forecasters had given up on the rainy season and were reconciled to another year of drought.
All of the present forecasts come with caveats. Four of the last six El Nino winters produced no more than average rainfall on California’s central coast. Forecasters last year predicted a wet winter that never came. It’s also worth noting that a wet El Nino, if it comes, won’t help everywhere. El Nino winters are typically dry in the Northwest, for instance. Washington usually has ample rain, but Gov. Jay Inslee earlier this year issued drought proclamations for 24 watersheds, mostly because hot weather had, as in California, deprived the mountains of snowpack.
In addition to a deeper snowpack, water experts in California are hoping that the anticipated storms will benefit communities that depend on groundwater. For example, cities in Orange County, home to Disneyland, get about half their water from an underground aquifer that is dependent on rain and recycled water. The aquifer now is nearly depleted.
But even a very wet winter would not end the drought, climate scientists say. Writing in the New York Times, Stanford scientists Noah S. Diffenbaugh and Christopher B. Field said that California was too hot and dry for a winter’s rain to make a lasting difference. Global warming, they said had doubled the odds of the drought continuing. Theirs is not an isolated view. Writing in the journal Science Advances earlier this year, scientists from NASA, Columbia and Cornell relied on tree-ring studies to suggest that California may be in the beginning phase of a 35-year mega-drought of the sort that contributed to the extinction of the ancient Pueblo peoples, or Anasazi, of the Colorado Plateau.
However that may be, Californians with long memories do not have to rely on tree rings to know what a stormy El Nino season can bring. In the winter of 1982-83, after another four-year drought, El Nino-related storms triggered floods and coastal mudslides, killing 36 people and causing $1.2 billion in damage. So, in the popular saying, be careful what you wish for. California needs the rain, only not too much of it too fast.
Prodded by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and led by California and Hawaii, states are tackling climate change and promoting renewable energy. But the fossil fuel industry and skeptical Republicans are pushing back.
Hawaii last month became the first state to establish a goal of relying 100 percent on renewable energy, setting 2045 as the year to reach this ambitious target. Meanwhile, legislation moved forward in California that would significantly expand its pioneering efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and combat climate change. The Golden State has an economy larger than all but six nations in the world, and almost anything it does has the potential of having global impact.
“The eyes of the world are on California,” asserts State Senate President Pro Tem Kevin de Leon (D). He is the author of a bill [SB 350] that would require the state to generate 50 percent of electricity from renewable sources such as solar and wind power, halve the amount of petroleum used by vehicles and double energy efficiency of buildings by 2030. The bill is part of an environmental package making its way through California’s Democratic-controlled legislature over Republican opposition. Gov. Jerry Brown (D), outspoken on climate change, is likely to sign these measures if they reach his desk.
Six other states – Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey and Washington – have mandated reductions in fossil fuels to meet climate-change goals. Twenty-nine states have laws designed to increase renewable energy usage. Vermont’s is notable: it requires that 55 percent of a utility’s electricity come from renewables, including large-scale hydro power, by 2017. The target increases to 75 percent by 2032.
Presently, fossil fuels supply 85 percent of the nation’s energy. In several states momentum toward greater use of renewables has been stopped or slowed by the opposition of power companies and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) a corporate-funded policy group that provides like-minded legislators with “model bills” favoring fossil fuels.
Last February the Republican-controlled legislature in West Virginia repealed a mandate requiring that 25 percent of its energy be obtained from renewable or alternative sources such as natural gas by 2025. Last month Kansas made its previous mandate for 20 percent use of renewables by 2020 a voluntary goal. In 2014 Ohio froze its renewable energy targets while Florida cut its energy-efficiency goals by more than 90 percent.
But all states may become involved in the climate change battle when a pending EPA regulation is issued, said Glen Andersen, director of energy programs for the National Conference of State Legislatures. The regulation, known as the Clear Power Plan, is President Obama’s proposal to assign each state a level to which it must reduce carbon emissions from electric power plants, a culprit in global warming. The plan could become a burden for states that rely on coal-fired power plants. Twenty-six states obtain most of their energy from coal, with the highest users being Texas, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Kentucky and West Virginia.
The Clean Power Plan is the major element of Obama’s effort to make a difference on climate change through executive action. Republican congressional leaders charge he is exceeding his constitutional authority and infringing on legislative powers. In February, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) sent letters to all state governors urging them to refuse to carry out the EPA rule when it is implemented in August. While most states have ignored McConnell, five Republican governors have said they may honor his request. They are presidential aspirants Scott Walker of Wisconsin and Bobby Jindal of Louisiana plus three governors from heavy coal-using states: Greg Abbott of Texas, Mike Pence of Indiana and Mary Fallin of Oklahoma. Meanwhile, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives has passed a bill that would allow each state to decide if it wants to abide by the regulation. It faces an Obama veto if it clears the Senate.
Obama maintains that he has broad authority to act under the Clean Air Act, a comprehensive federal law regulating air emissions and authorizing the EPA to establish national standards to protect public health. Put forward in 1963 by President Lyndon Johnson, it passed by bipartisan vote. In 1970, Congress approved President Richard Nixon’s proposal creating the EPA. The Clean Air Act was strengthened and the EPA given most of the powers it possesses today. Congress approved the changes with only a single dissenting vote.
That was then. In today’s politicized environment, global warming is a partisan issue. Dealing with climate change is a priority for Obama and many Democratic governors and legislators, especially on the coasts. Republican attitudes range from ambivalence to hostility; many question the scientific consensus that global warming is a growing peril.
Gallup’s annual Environment Survey highlights the partisan division. It shows that 52 percent of voters who lean Democratic consider global warming and climate change a major problem; only 13 percent of Republican-leaning voters agree. A Pew Research survey found that nearly two-thirds of voters believe the planet is getting warmer, but neither the Pew nor the Gallup respondents assigned much urgency to corrective action. These findings suggest that Congress has little to fear in the way of voter retaliation for its resistance to climate-change legislation.
The impasse between a chief executive who favors action on climate change and a resistant Congress could continue beyond the Obama presidency. Helped by favorable 20ll redistrictings, Republicans appear to be in position to control the House of Representatives into the next decade. In this context, state actions matter. When the federal government – including President Obama – was opposed to same-sex marriage, state actions made such unions legal and paved the way for the historic ruling last month by the Supreme Court declaring marriage equality a constitutional right.
Even small states can set an example, and Hawaii’s establishment of a 100 percent renewable energy goal could have “aspirational” value for other states, said Vicki Arroyo, executive director of the Georgetown Climate Center. For Hawaii itself, developing renewable energy is practical economics. The oil-dependent Aloha State has solar, wind, wave and geothermal resources but lacks fossil fuels. In signing the bill, Gov. David Ige (D) said Hawaii spends about $5 billion annually on foreign oil. “Making the transition to renewable, indigenous resources for power generation will allow us to keep more of that money at home, thereby improving our economy, environment and energy security,” he said.
But it is the pending California legislation that could have the greatest impact on other states – and perhaps other countries as well. California has long been a trend-setter on environmental issues. In 1974, legislation authored by a conservative Republican assemblyman and supported by Gov. Ronald Reagan gave the California Air Resources Board power to prohibit sale or registration of vehicles that failed to meet the state’s strict standards on emissions control. The U.S. auto industry, which had opposed the bill, capitulated and made all its cars meet the California standards.
Later, California became a national pacesetter on greenhouse gas emissions, a role it’s now expanding. In April, Gov. Brown issued an executive order calling for reduction of pollutants in California to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2040 and to 80 percent below these levels by 2050, matching the standards of the European Community.
How important are such actions? Fred Krupp, president of the Environmental Defense Fund, said at the Aspen Ideas Festival, that state measures and Obama’s Clean Power Plan initiative had broken a stalemate with China, which suffers ominously from air pollution. Last November Obama reached an agreement with Chinese President Xi Jinping in which the United States promised to cut carbon emissions by one-fourth through 2025 and China pledged to reach peak emissions by 2035.
These are at best starting points, but they could be useful. Air pollution does not respect state boundaries, and climate change is a global phenomenon. As important as California’s actions are, says Sen. de Leon, they will not make a significant dent in global warming unless other states, the federal government, and the international community also take action.
Vicki Arroyo believes a tipping point could be near. She points out that polls show younger people are more concerned about global warming than their elders – and more convinced that something can be done. Public opinion changed rapidly in defiance of conventional wisdom on issues ranging from same-sex marriage to removal of the Confederate flag, Arroyo observes. Many national leaders and Pope Francis have warned of looming climate catastrophes unless something is done about global warming. Is climate change an issue whose time has come?
- By Lou Cannon
Before social media—and even in its early days—word of mouth advertising (WOMA) relied heavily on family and friend networks, but the rise of social media influencers has changed the WOMA game. Now, popular YouTubers, Instagrammers and bloggers boast thousands of followers, millions of views, and lucrative brand collaborations. And influencers aren’t restricted to fashionistas and foodies. Forbes recently published its list of Top Tech and Business Influencers, highlighting “… social media stars building empires and fortunes online.” PR and marketing professionals recognize the value of that, achieving more than 6X returns for every dollar spent on influencer marketing.
But you won’t realize those types of returns if you lack visibility into who your audience is following or fail to build strong, collaborative relationships with the influencers you engage. How do you determine which influencers have the reach you need?
Our new eBook, 5 Keys to Measuring Social Media Influencers, takes a deeper look at the value social media influencers bring to brands, and how media monitoring and analytics can help you pinpoint which influencers align with your audience and your brand voice.
Get your copy now to read about these critical measurement criteria:
Download your copy today!
See how LexisNexis can help.
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The Affordable Care Act mandated that insurance companies cover mental health services at parity with medical care. But loopholes in the ACA and other federal laws have let some plans limit or exclude mental health coverage.
So state and local governments have begun taking on the issue themselves. California; Larimer County, Colorado; and Seattle are among those that have enacted tax increases to provide funding for mental health services. And a 2018 RAND Corporation report found that California’s tax had expanded such services to 130,000 individuals in Los Angeles County alone.
In November Denver appears to have become the first major city to approve a tax increase for mental health services via the ballot box, with the approval of a measure imposing a 0.25 percent sales tax hike. The increase is expected to generate $45 million in its first year.
“That is an absolute game-changer,” said Carl Clark, president and CEO of the Mental Health Center of Denver. “Forty-five million dollars is a significant amount of money to create more programs and build more capacity for our existing programs that are working well.” (GOVERNING)
As of Oct. 30 at least 43 states had introduced over 240 bills and resolutions related to cybersecurity this year, according to analysis of LexisNexis State Net data by the National Conference of State Legislatures. Twenty-seven of those states have enacted bills, and four have adopted resolutions. Among other things, the measures provide additional funding for cybersecurity, mandate the implementation of specific cybersecurity practices by government agencies or businesses, increase penalties for cybercrimes and address cyberthreats to critical infrastructure.
Source: National Conference of State Legislatures, LexisNexis State Net
As a result of the November elections, in 2019 Republicans will control both the legislature and the governor’s office in 23 states, three less than the number of states under unified GOP control this year. Democrats will control the legislative and executive branch in 14 states, twice as many as currently under unified Democratic control. In the other 13 states -- four fewer than this year -- control of the governor’s office and the legislature will be split between the two parties.
Natural and man-made disasters occur all too frequently. Last year alone, the world was rocked by a total of 336 catastrophic events, including 189 natural and 147 man-made disasters. In the past week, we’ve seen headlines following landslides and unprecedented flooding in Japan sharing the spotlight with wildfires ravaging more than 15,000 acres in California. Fittingly, September is designated as National Preparedness Month by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Just as individuals and families need a plan in case of disaster, businesses do too. And we’re not just referring to readiness to handle an unexpected power outage or a blizzard forecast for next week.
As an information professional, you need to have advanced tools for conducting thorough news and business research and analyzing trends. Thus prepared, you can empower your colleagues and the C-suite with actionable insights, allowing for proactive strategies to manage threats that arise from competitors, economic factors or even the weather. We decided to take a look at disaster preparedness in the news over the last five years. (Check out the interactive chart!)
After searching World Publications for articles featuring disaster preparedness and index terms covering both natural and man-made events, we pulled the results into Nexis® Analyzer and charted results based on Country Index Terms. Not surprisingly, given the earthquake and tsunami in Japan and a spate of powerful tornados across the United States, media coverage related to preparedness was higher in both places. What does come as a surprise is how quickly the focus on preparedness declined in Japan, despite the fact that the nation continues to wrestle with issues related to the catastrophic damage done to a nuclear power plant in the wave’s path. The benefit of this type of quick analysis is that you can identify trends immediately, providing additional focus areas for subsequent searches. Imagine applying the same process to a business challenge. What questions would you ask to help you keep your company ready to respond to whatever the future holds?
The daily fantasy sports industry had a few wins this spring in its first full year of pushing to make its games explicitly legal across the country. And while the question of whether the games are legal remains unclear in much of the nation, and their future up in the air in some of the biggest states, proponents of the games say the industry is in a period of positive momentum that’s likely to continue.
Seven states have enacted laws this year to specifically allow players to compete daily for prize money by picking fantasy sports teams. That includes New York, which became the latest to okay the games when Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) signed AB 10736 last Wednesday. The Empire State joins Colorado, Indiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Tennessee, and Virginia as states that this year made daily fantasy sports, or DFS, explicitly legal. And just last week lawmakers in Massachusetts unexpectedly legalized the games as part of a larger economic development bill sent to Gov. Charlie Baker (R). Kansas enacted a broad gambling bill last year that clarified that DFS is legal there.
That looks like a good start for an industry – led by the two major DFS companies, DraftKings and FanDuel - that only embarked within the last year on a nationwide effort to make sure the new games - which are murky as to whether they are technically gambling - are allowed to continue. About 57 million people in North America already play daily fantasy sports, and the stakes are high. According to research by consulting firm Eilers Research cited in a California Senate analysis, DFS could generate more than $370 million in revenue this year, and could easily top $1.5 billion in the next few years.
Still, the majority of states are yet to act. And the industry hasn’t locked in its future viability in some of the states with the largest potential customer bases, including Florida, Illinois and California.
Florida lawmakers this year failed to act on a proposal to make it clear the games are legal there. In Illinois the question of their legality is mired in litigation. And in California lawmakers continue to consider the idea, but it has gotten tangled up with a separate push to allow other kinds of online gambling.
Americans have long played fantasy sports - “drafting” teams of real players and matching the statistics of their drafted players against real stats piled up by players on other fantasy teams. But internet-based “daily” fantasy sports burst on the scene last year, letting players cash in on how their picks did in a game, as opposed to a full season. That, in some eyes, looks like betting on sports.
Policy makers got interested in the games over the last year or so with an explosion in the number of players fueled by a publicity spree last fall by DraftKings and FanDuel. There’s a hodgepodge of opinions about their legality, leading the two companies to go on offense, seeking to have the games explicitly declared legal state by state. The push came against a backdrop of opinions trickling out from various state attorneys general on whether DFS should be considered legal under current laws.
Lawmakers have weighed in as well, with more than 25 states having considered legislation in the past two legislative years dealing with fantasy sports, with most seeking to legalize and regulate them.
Currently, in addition to waiting for New York’s governor to act, the industry is most closely watching California, where a bill (AB 1437) to legalize and regulate DFS passed the Golden State’s Assembly 98-1 back on Jan. 27, but remains in committee in the Senate.
California, which may account for as much as 15 percent of the overall national market for the games, is important to the industry, but the proposal to legalize DFS there faces a short time frame, with leadership in no hurry to move the bill in its first year. California lawmakers recess Aug. 31.
The DFS measure has also gotten wrapped up in an initially separate legislative debate over internet poker. Both bills are being pushed by Assembly member Adam Gray (D). His spokesman, Trent Hager, said Gray wants to pass both bills this year.
“They’re complimentary bills - legislation to protect consumers and increase oversight and accountability,” said Hager. “It’s completely the wild west here with no consumer protections.”
So while the DFS bill is ready for Senate committees to act, Gray is waiting for the internet poker legislation to pass the Assembly. “We remain hopeful they’ll both move forward this year,” Hager said.
But Senate President pro Tem Kevin de Leon (D), while not taking a position on the DFS bill, told reporters last week he “is in no rush” to address the issue either. The California measure also may be hampered by not having a gaming stakeholder, such as a racetrack or Indian casino operator, as a partner in the effort said Vincent Oliver, a gaming law attorney in California who has followed the issue.
The backers of the idea appear to have “a lot of work in a short period of time,” he said.
But the DFS industry remains hopeful.
“We are optimistic that this important legislation that establishes consumer protections to a growing and popular industry will move forward in the remaining days of this year’s legislative session,” said Steven Maviglio, a spokesman for the fantasy sports companies working on the bill in California.
DFS also got wrapped up in a tangential gambling issue in Florida that may well come up in other states - whether allowing DFS would amount to an expansion of gambling that would have ramifications for state compacts with Indian tribes that own casinos.
That’s also come into play in California, where leaders of two tribes, the Morongo Band of Mission Indians and the San Manuel Band of Mission Indians, wrote to Gray back in the spring questioning whether the games might violate the state Constitution’s granting of exclusive rights for certain types of gambling to tribes.
The legality question for DFS is also in flux in Illinois, where a bill to legalize the games failed to get to the House floor after passing the state Senate. Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan (D) had previously said that she considers the games illegal in Illinois, and DraftKings and FanDuel have also gone to court seeking to have the games declared legal.
Illinois and Florida represented the biggest setbacks to DFS companies and players this year. Still, while some in the DFS industry were worried as recently as late last year that the industry might be in trouble, backers of the games now clearly are optimistic that the push for broader legalization will be successful. The effort is almost certain to resume in Illinois and Florida, and lawmakers in Pennsylvania this summer are also considering a package of gambling issues that could include DFS legalization and regulation. In addition to the seven states where DFS has been explicitly legalized, a few states consider the games legal under existing laws.
Chris Krafcik, the research director at consulting firm GamblingCompliance, which monitors the legal landscape surrounding the gaming industry, said the momentum has started and is likely to keep going.
“Absent events — such as litigation or enforcement action — that would disrupt or derail the daily fantasy industry, we expect that multiple states will enact legislation to regulate daily fantasy contests in the coming years,” Krafcik said. “In our view, it’s reasonable to expect that in 2017, at least as many states will enact daily fantasy regulatory bills as did this year.”
-- By SNCJ Correspondent David Royse
The number of deadly crashes on U.S. roadways increased more in the last two years than in any other two-year period over the last half century, due at least in part to distracted driving. The surge in accidents is driving up auto insurance rates across the country. But it remains to be seen if that disturbing trend will also spur widespread adoption of tougher state distracted driving laws.
Before 2015 the U.S. traffic fatality rate had generally been trending downward since the mid-1960s, with the total number of fatal crashes going from about 50,000 per 100 million vehicle miles traveled to about 30,000, according to a report from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. But a 7.2-percent increase in 2015 - the largest since an 8.1-percent spike in 1966 - reversed the trend. That increase and a 6-percent increase estimated for 2016, bringing the two-year total to over 14 percent, have been attributed largely to more cars being on the road as a result of the improving economy and cheaper gas. But the number of distracted driving-related traffic fatalities also rose by 8.8 percent in 2015, according to the NHTSA report. And another NHTSA report stated that 10 percent, or 3,196, of the 32,166 total fatal crashes, 15 percent, or 265,000, of the 1.72 million total injury crashes, and 14 percent, or 617,000, of the 4.55 million total police-reported motor vehicle traffic crashes in 2015 were “distraction-affected,” a designation that encompasses not just cell phone use but also activities like eating, talking with passengers and adjusting the radio or climate controls. Fourteen percent (342) of the distraction-related fatal crashes, 8 percent (21,000) of the distraction-related injury crashes, and 8 percent (48,000) of the distraction-related police-reported crashes involved cellphone use specifically.
It isn’t just talking and texting on cell phones that’s distracting drivers; increasingly its mobile apps like Facebook, Google Maps and Pandora that are taking their eyes off the road. According to a 2015 survey by State Farm Insurance, the proportion of drivers who text message while behind the wheel has remained relatively constant at between 31 percent and 36 percent. The proportion who use GPS navigation systems, however, has swelled from 30 percent to 51 percent and the proportion who access social media websites has more than doubled, from 9 percent to 21 percent.
“It’s interesting to observe how the number and types of distractions available on cell phones have grown over the years we have conducted this annual survey,” Chris Mullen, director of technology research for State Farm, said in a press release.
Those distractions are helping drive up insurance costs. According to a white paper published by the Insurance Information Institute, a trade group, auto insurers’ “loss costs” - “the dollar amount of claims per vehicle per year” - rose 13 percent between March 2014 and 2016, over 10 times the rate of inflation. The paper said that rise was due both to the increasing frequency of accident claims and the increasing expense of those claims, which it, in turn, attributed largely to the rising costs of medical treatment and car repairs.
Rising healthcare costs have long been a cause of concern but the rapid growth of auto repair costs appears to be a more recent development, which insurers say is due in large part to the increasing amount of technology being packed into cars in recent years, including features designed to help drivers avoid accidents. As the Charlotte Observer reported, Adam Polack, a spokesman for Allstate, said it “used to be just fixing a bumper.”
“Now it has as backup camera in it.”
Liberty Mutual says it cost $1,705 more to fix a damaged bumper in 2016 than it did in 2014, according to a recent Boston Globe story.
Unsurprisingly, auto insurers have been raising their rates. Among the largest increases was Allstate’s average 25 percent hike last year in Georgia, where traffic fatalities jumped 21 percent in 2015 and drivers logged far more miles than the national average.
“We adjust rates very carefully to charge properly for the risk we assume and ensure our ability to help protect customers from life’s uncertainties,” the company said in a written statement to CNBC, adding that the increase applied to only one of its three underwriters in the state and affected less than half of its auto insurance customers there.
Most recent rate increases have been more modest. And the federal Consumer Price Index for April 2016 showed that motor vehicle insurance prices rose 6 percent from April of the previous year, although that was still the largest 12-month increase since October 2003.
State lawmakers have been far from idle on the issue. As of 2015 most states had laws restricting the use of cell phones while driving, including “primary enforcement” bans on handheld cellphone use - allowing law enforcement officers to pull over drivers without their having to commit some other traffic offense such as speeding first - in 14 states, bans on all cellphone use by novice drivers in 37 states and bans on texting while driving by all drivers in 46 states.
Those laws have their shortcomings, however. They generally don’t deal with the growing use of cellphone apps, for instance. The penalties they impose for violations can be relatively mild. Many don’t address distractions other than cellphone use, such as eating or talking to passengers. And none ban all cellphone use - handheld and hands-free - by all drivers.
California addressed the cellphone app loophole last year with the enactment of AB 1785, prohibiting anyone from holding a cell phone at any time while driving. But the base fine for a first-time violation of the law is still just $20 and $50 for a second offense, although additional assessments can increase those amounts significantly.
Penalties are stiffer in some other states. First-time violators of Maine’s ban on texting while driving, for instance, are subject to a fine of “not less than $250” and repeat offenders can be fined $500 or more. Talking or texting on a cellphone while driving in New York is punishable by both a fine and the addition of 5 points on an offending driver’s DMV record, with drivers receiving 11 points in 18 months subject to having their license suspended. Drivers caught texting while driving in Alaska, meanwhile, face up to a $10,000 fine and a year in prison.
Some states have also sought to address distracted driving more broadly. Maine passed a law in 2009 making it illegal to operate a motor vehicle while distracted, which it defined as “engaged in an activity (1) That is not necessary to the operation of the vehicle; and (2) That actually impairs, or would reasonably be expected to impair, the ability of the person to safely operate the vehicle.” New Jersey Assemblymembers John Wisniewski (D) and Nicholas Chiaravalloti (D) are trying to get a similar measure (AB 1908) passed in their state but with tougher penalties, including a fine of $200 to $400 for a first offense, a fine of $400 to $600 for a second offense and a fine of $600 to $800 and license suspension of up to 90 days for a third or subsequent offense. A number of states have also passed “careless driving” or “inattentive driving” laws, such as the one passed by Utah in 2014 making the operation of a motor vehicle “while being distracted by one or more activities taking place within the vehicle that are not related to the operation of a motor vehicle, including: (1) searching for an item in the vehicle; or (2) attending to personal hygiene or grooming” - a class C misdemeanor.
But not even any of the 37 states that ban all cellphone use by young drivers have extended that ban to all drivers, with adult drivers still allowed to use the devices hands-free in every state. That’s a problem, according to Maureen Vogel of the private, non-profit, Illinois-based National Safety Council.
“Science tells us that it is as dangerous to use a hand-held device or a hands-free device because the distraction is not with the hands, but with the brain,” she told the Minneapolis Star Tribune.
According to her group, cellphone use decreases the performance of the part of the brain that processes moving images by 37 percent, and drivers distracted in that way miss stoplights, stop signs and traffic hazards up to 50 percent of the time.
“If hands were the problem, we would have outlawed manual transmission cars long ago,” she said.
Lawmakers have been disinclined to consider banning cell phones by motorists altogether, however.
“Wireless communication devices are an integral part of society,” said Minnesota state Rep. Mark Uglem (R), according to the Tribune.
At least 28 states and the District of Columbia have introduced over 100 bills relating specifically to distracted driving this session, according to LexisNexis State Net’s legislative tracking system. None of the measures would ban hands-free cellphone use while driving, but many would increase the penalties for violating existing distracted driving laws.
The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, a nonprofit organization funded by auto insurers, questions whether such laws will actually make a difference, noting that cellphone laws haven’t had the same impact on driver behavior as seat belt laws did.
“With education and vigorous enforcement of safety belt laws, we saw immediate effects with fewer deaths,” said Russ Rader, a spokesman for the organization, as NJ.com reported. “We're not seeing the same kind of immediate safety benefits with education and enforcement of cellphone laws.”
He added: “Addressing distracted driving through new laws is not likely to be an effective approach to make roads safer.”
What may be effective, ironically, or perhaps unsurprisingly, given that it’s been such a major contributor to the problem of distracted driving, is technology. For example, functionality could be incorporated into cell phones that deactivates texting and other features when in a moving vehicle. Cellphone users, and consequently cellphone makers, are unlikely to be very receptive to that idea, though, unless the functionality could be deactivated, potentially limiting its usefulness. A bill introduced in California - AB 970, which would allow wireless service providers to disable phone capabilities in a moving vehicle at the request of customers and which has a high probability of passage given its author’s party affiliation and success rate, according to LexisNexis State Net’s legislative prognosis tool - would presumably have that same drawback.
Potentially more promising are the collision avoidance features trickling down from automakers’ luxury lines and the autonomous vehicles being developed by Google and others. Joe Salerno, vice president of claims at Arbella Insurance Group headquartered in Quincy, Massachusetts, suggested to the Boston Globe that driverless technologies would reduce the frequency of accidents once they’re in wide enough use. And a 2015 white paper from the accounting firm KPMG stated that replacement and retrofitting of U.S. vehicle stock with autonomous technology could reduce accident frequency 80 percent and shrink the personal auto insurance sector to “less than 40 percent of its current size” by 2040.
Contrary to the contention of the IIHS, however, there is evidence that laws also help curb distracted driving. A study from April 2010 to April 2011 by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration found that high-visibility enforcement (HVE) involving “strong laws, vigorous targeted law enforcement” and “extensive” media coverage - decreased handheld cellphone use while driving by 32 percent in Syracuse, New York and by 57 in Hartford, Connecticut. A similar NHTSA study from November 2012 to June 2013 found that HVE programs decreased driver handheld cellphone use in the Sacramento area of California by 34 percent and throughout the state of Delaware by 33 percent.
“We know education, enforcement work,” said the National Safety Council’s Vogel.
Forty-two percent of the respondents to State Farm’s distracted driving survey also said “Financial and/or legal consequences (e.g., fine, losing license, jail time, insurance cost increase, etc.)” and 36 percent said “Getting caught by police” would deter them from reading or responding to text messages while driving.
“These responses about deterrents highlight the need for a multi-pronged approach to curbing distracted driving,” said State Farm’s Mullen. “Potential solutions lie in a combination of education and awareness, technology, regulation and enforcement.”
According to the Congressional Research Service, the Department of Defense spent $285 billion on federal contracts in 2014—more than all other U.S. government agencies combined. With so much money at stake, bribery and corruption risks soar, and the on-going investigation and prosecutions related to Glenn Defense Marine Asia (GDMA), a contractor providing port services to the U.S. naval fleet in the Asia-Pacific region, serve to underscore compliance risk. What’s more, the story of the “Fat Leonard” case—so-named because Glenn Defense CEO Leonard Glenn Francis is at the heart of the bribery scandal—highlights the fact that enforcement agencies are increasingly focused on holding individuals, not just companies, accountable when bad actions come to light.
A decade ago, reports the San Diego Union-Tribune, a supervisory contract specialist for the Navy in Singapore began receiving bribes in exchange for steering ship serving contracts to GDMA. Over time, the illicit activities swelled to include many more individuals. Thus far, ten people have been charged in the on-going case, including seven former or current naval officers and an NCIS special agent who passed on information about investigations into GDMA. Most recently, a former executive of a defense contracting firm in Singapore was sentenced to more than five years in a federal prison for his role in the scheme.
Not all of the fall-out has resulted in prosecutions. Reputations are put at risk without proper due diligence and on-going monitoring against bribery and corruption. Last year, three rear admirals including the commander of naval forces in Japan retired following letters of censure for “poor judgment and a failure of leadership.” In addition, Vice Admiral Ted Branch, the deputy chief of naval operations for information warfare and director of naval intelligence and Rear Admiral Bruce Loveless, the Navy Director of Intelligence Operations, lost their security clearance two years ago after being mentioned in the investigators documents—a move that has effectively put their careers in limbo.
The investigations into GDMA began approximately six years ago, but it appears that the Justice Department still has a way to go before it puts this case to bed. In the meantime, the number of defendants may continue to mount, serving as an on-going reminder that individuals need to be just as invested in eliminating bribery and corruption as the organizations they serve. Due diligence and on-going monitoring help you stay alert to compliance risks, and those who do not have robust strategies to mitigate risk could very well find themselves going down with the ship.