As the COVID-19 pandemic has swept across our country and claimed more than 100,000 lives in a few short months, the opioid epidemic, which dates back to at least the early 2000s, has received less attention. But the toll of the opioid crisis in the United States remains enormous by any measure.
Nursing homes have borne the brunt of the COVID-19 pandemic, but recently released data show that the severity of outbreaks in these facilities has varied substantially across the United States. Some have argued that policy decisions have driven the variation in outcomes observed in nursing homes, while a competing theory is that nursing home outbreaks largely mirror the surrounding area.
A large share of total COVID-19 deaths in the United States have occurred in nursing homes, prompting the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) to begin reporting facility-level data on COVID-19 rates at nursing homes.
The first widely reported COVID-19 deaths in the United States were nursing home patients in Washington State on February 28. Numerous accounts of similar outbreaks soon followed, including 47 deaths at a nursing home in Minnesota (as of April 30), 54 deaths at a nursing home in Massachusetts (as of May 4), and 81 deaths at a facility in New Jersey (as of May 27).
Recent news about e-cigarette misuse has fueled both public misperception and policy responses that are likely to have unintended consequences. As the US vaping market continues to evolve, policymakers face the tricky challenge of safeguarding the potential for positive public health outcomes from e-cigarettes, which offer a lower-risk alternative to traditional cigarettes, while ensuring reasonable protections against youth use.
Is the tax code sufficiently progressive? The answer depends not only on the values of the person answering the question, but it also is a surprisingly tricky empirical exercise. What counts as income and who pays the corporate tax? How should one measure households?
