The Knowlership Blog

Three months after declaring the opioid crisis a national emergency , President Trump declared during his first State of the Union that the United States would beat the epidemic by getting “much tougher on drug dealers and pushers.” Such combative rhetoric draws attention away from the real narrative behind America’s biggest drug epidemic: bad government policy catering to special interests. The Rise and Fall of OxyContin Prior to the 1990s, doctors generally viewed opioids as a last resort due to their addictive properties . Two medical perspectives shifted . First, a 1992 federal report concluded that fear of opioid addiction prevented too many patients from receiving the pain relief they needed. Around the same time, medical professionals began to accept chronic pain as a legitimate reason for treatment, with or without the presence of other symptoms. The resulting medical paradigm shift led to a spike in the demand for painkillers, and pharmaceutical companies raced to ...

As part of the deal ending January’s government shutdown, Congress has until February 8th to strike a deal on immigration. Hanging in the balance are the fates of nearly 700,000 young people now at risk of deportation after the Trump administration announced the phasing out of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program (DACA) last fall. In his State of the Union Address on January 30, Donald Trump reiterated his plan to grant assistance if his long-promised border wall receives funding. Democrats insist on unconditional relief. Known as “Dreamers,” these immigrants are too important for Congress to relegate them to political pawns. Instead, they should regain legal status with a path to citizenship. The Obama administration created DACA in 2012 to buy time for some undocumented immigrants while Congress developed comprehensive immigration reform. Under certain conditions, DACA allowed people who illegally entered the country as children to receive official documentation...

Both houses of the Republican-controlled Congress passed sweeping tax reform legislation on December 20. Despite the GOP’s longstanding push to repeal of the alternative minimum tax (AMT), it remains in the tax code, albeit in a tamer form . By backing off its repeal efforts yet again, Congress missed an opportunity to restore some transparency to the tax code. Given the aura of elitism surrounding the original GOP tax reform measures, many observers assume that repealing or reducing the power of the AMT only benefits the privileged . Critics of the measure are right to consider it a tax on the rich, but its story is more complicated than that. Since its enactment, it has engulfed more and more taxpayers while most of the richest Americans remain unscathed. In 1969, Congress passed the alternative minimum tax in an attempt to target 155 wealthy individuals who were able to take advantage of so many deductions, credits, and other loopholes in the tax code that they did not pay...

Senator Bernie Sanders (I - Vermont) scheduled a visit to the University of Toronto in late October. On his agenda are visits to healthcare facilities and a convocation “to see what we can learn from the Canadian system,” Sanders says. Canada’s publicly funded and administered healthcare system has received much acclaim in the United States, with some associating the country with model health policy. If healthcare is a right, like Sanders suggests, then Canada’s free universal system seems ideal. Neglected in this enthusiasm are the hidden yet very concrete costs of wait times in Canadian healthcare. Sometimes we deceive ourselves into thinking something is free when we have actually paid for it. At many universities, for example, full-time students may enroll in a meal plan. When students pay for a meal plan, the school allots them a certain number of meals or credits that may be spent at certain campus locations, like the cafeteria, coffee shop, or spirit wear store. A...