Next Round Pacific Research Institute

Lord Jamie Borwick of the United Kingdom’s House of Lords was a recent guest at a PRI luncheon in San Francisco. Britain’s House of Lords has certain similarities with the U.S. Senate, except the members are mostly appointed, or as in Lord Borwick’s case, elected for life.  He provides his perspective on the future of Britain after the E.U., the possibilities of a free-trade agreement with the U.S., Britain’s national health care system, and the new prime minister Boris Johnson.

Noted education reformer Larry Sand of the California Teachers Empowerment Network talks with PRI's Lance Izumi about opportunities to expand school choice in California despite recent legislative setbacks last year targeting charter schools. They discuss a looming Supreme Court decision that could help more students utilize education freedom scholarships to attend private, religious schools, and a new school choice ballot measure aiming for the 2022 ballot.

Dr. Henry Miller, senior fellow with PRI’s Center for Medical Economics and Innovation, joins us to discuss the Wuhan Coronavirus. We explore a wide variety of topics related to this public health crisis, including how people get the illness and how it is being treated, how the Chinese and U.S. governments are working to combat it, the prospects for the rapid development of a vaccine, how social media disinformation is fueling the crisis, and how concerned Americans should be about becoming the victims of a deadly pandemic on U.S. soil.

Adam Andrzejewski is the founder of Open the Books, an organization dedicated to transparency in government.  Open the Books has been at the forefront of holding state government accountable for how it spends taxpayer money. In California, Governor Newsom’s most recent state budget plan proposed $222 billion in General Fund spending alone.  So when State Controller Betty Yee declined an Open the Books request for line-by-line state spending, they sued her in court to force her to reveal these public spending records.  Adam discusses the case against California and Open the Books’ victories in other states in holding public officials accountable.

Joseph Tartakovsky, a PRI adjunct fellow and with the law firm Gibson Dunn, discusses the homeless case Martin v. the City of Boise.  It involves five homeless people who sued Boise, Idaho for fining them for violating a city ordinance prohibiting people from living in the streets. The homeless group believed that Boise violated the 8th Amendment’s cruel and unusual clause. The LA City Council sided with Boise filing an amicus brief in support of Boise’s position.  The ruling has tremendous implications for the homeless crisis in California and other western cities.

Dr. Wayne Winegarden, director of PRI’s Center for Medical Economics and Innovation, breaks down recently-proposed plans in Washington and Sacramento that emphasize price caps and more government control to address prescription drug prices. He discusses the conclusions of his new study on America’s drug pricing challenge, which makes the case that system-wide reforms to improve the complex drug supply chain and increase transparency are what’s needed to lower health care costs.