Opinion

Early Impacts of AB 5 in California

December 20, 2019 by Guest Contributor Leave a Comment

California recently passed Assembly Bill 5: a bill designed to reduce companies’ abilities to take advantage of contract workers. The bill was written in response to the growing number of independent workers making their money from the gig economy, including Lyft and Uber drivers.

Since it’s conception, AB 5 has caused controversy. Companies see it as a risk to their profit margins, some independent contractors demand basic benefits, and some independent contractors fear for their livelihoods. The bill excludes some professions, including doctors and psychiatrists due to their generally high incomes, and targets employers who are failing to provide those working for them with the basic necessities for living in California. It requires that employers who hire contractors for the amount of work an employee should be doing to hire them as employees.

By transitioning contract workers into employees, employers would have to provide more substantial wages, protections, and benefits. This would increase the cost of labor for many employers, leading to Uber and Lyft spending over $100 million to get a ballot measure on the 2020 ballot to oppose the bill. The rideshare companies are worried, and rightfully so, that the new law requiring them to recognize all of their drivers as employees will severely lower profits. The companies say that the new measures will force them to implement driver schedules, raise rates, and reduce the freedom of their drivers.

This is true. What’s also true is that contract workers are often taken advantage of, with employers going with the cheaper worker rather than hiring an employee and the benefits that go along with it.

The problem arises when companies now see out-of-state freelance workers as a cheaper alternative to California freelancers. This largely affects industries including construction, writing, and graphic design. Independent contractors are already feeling the pressure from the new restrictions and companies are unwilling to hire them. This is more a reflection of employers’ unwillingness to provide their workers with sufficient contracts than workers demanding too high of benefits or legislators trying to punish employers.

AB 5 won’t go into effect until January 1st, 2020. Until then we won’t know it’s full effect and how companies will respond to the new laws.

Washington’s New Vaccination Law

November 29, 2019 by Guest Contributor Leave a Comment

Schools in the tri-city area of Washington state are enforcing mandatory vaccinations for students in public and private school districts. A law passed in June 2019 has removed philosophical and personal reasons for MMR vaccination exemptions. Students without proof of vaccinations are being excluded from attending school until they receive the necessary vaccinations.

The law was passed after multiple measles outbreaks across the country. Due to its highly contagious nature, the illness needs an incredibly high herd immunity to avoid spreading to the most vulnerable members of the community.

How Many Students Have Been Excluded?

Since schools are required to give families a warning before excluding students, the vast majority of students have complied with the new law. At this point, almost six months after the law passed, fewer than 50 students in the Pasco School District (which serves over 17,000 students) are currently being excluded. Statewide statistics are not yet available.

Who Is Still Exempt?

Students who have religious or medical reasons for being unable to receive vaccinations are still exempt from the MMR shot and will have to fill out an official exemption form. Philosophical and personal exemptions are still acceptable for diphtheria, hep B, Hib, pneumococcal, polio, whooping cough, tetanus, and chickenpox vaccines.

Is This an Attack on Civil Liberties and Personal Freedom?

This raises the question of what you consider personal freedom. If you are free to carry illnesses, you are restricting someone else’s freedom to live by risking their health. If they want to exercise their right to live a full life but are unable to get vaccinated due to health reasons, they might have to restrict your right to not get vaccinated for personal reasons. The question is whether we want to live in a society that only protects those who are already able to protect themselves.

Why the $50 Billion Opioid Settlement is Laughably Small

October 18, 2019 by Guest Contributor Leave a Comment

The years-long legal battle with pharmaceutical companies regarding their part in the ongoing opioid epidemic might be coming to a head today, as the top six companies being held accountable negotiate a potential settlement. Should that settlement be agreed upon, it’s estimated to reach close to $50 billion. But given the damage opioids have done to the country, is $50 billion enough?

Brief Background

Starting in 1996, Purdue Pharma heavily marketed its drug OxyContin, an opioid, as a non-addictive painkiller with more power than acetaminophen and ibuprofen. Obviously, only one of those claims is true. Since then the prescription opioid market has boomed, making manufacturers ungodly amounts of money and distributing highly addictive painkillers to millions of Americans. Between 2006 and 2012, 76 billion oxycodone and hydrocodone pills were prescribed and distributed.

Due to increased first-hand experience of the dangers of over-prescription of opioids, numbers of prescriptions began dropping. Numbers peaked in 2012 with 255 million prescriptions, but have lowered to 191 million in 2017. While this looks like a significant drop, prescription rates are still much higher than they need to be.

In an interactive map released annually by the CDC, users can see numbers of prescriptions per 100 people in a county for any year from 2006 to 2017. Bell County, Kentucky, was lucky to see a drop of over 50 prescriptions per 100 people between 2012 and 2017, unfortunately, that just dropped the number from 281 to 228 prescriptions per 100 people. For context, Bronx County, New York, only had 26.4 prescriptions per 100 people in 2017, a drop from 38.1 in 2012.

The damages from the epidemic have had a wide-ranging impact on the American economy, which the Washington Post estimates have cost the US upwards of $631 billion.

What Makes up the $631 Billion

Dangerous drugs come with a variety of costs, from treatment to decreasing work efficiency to wrongful death. The Washington Post story breaks down part of their estimate to the costs of treatment and wrongful death, $205 and $253 billion, respectively. The remaining costs relate to decreased work efficiency, absenteeism from work and family, and drug-related incarceration.

Due to these high numbers, the $50 billion settlement doesn’t even cover half of the losses estimated to have hit federal, state, and local governments ($186 billion).

How Prescriptions Lead to Damages

Opioids are highly addictive, which is known to the CDC, doctors, pharmacies, pharmaceutical companies, PBMs, pop-culture icons, and just about anyone who has been alive in the past 10 years. Unfortunately, this doesn’t stop doctors from prescribing doses that are higher and more ongoing than recommended for safe usage.

Worker’s compensation and workplace injuries are places where addiction and damages start for a lot of people. Injuries that occur due to physical work can require weeks, months, or even years of physical therapy to fully recover, and pain can often slow down or stop the employee from returning to work. Opioids give the opportunity to return to work quickly without the pain. Unfortunately, the prescriptions provided by workers’ compensation are often much higher than recommended, with workers refilling prescriptions for over 90 days after an incident. According to the CDC, 45% of opioid claims were due to injuries that had been sustained over 2 years prior.

The chemical dependence of the brain on opioids and natural tolerance build-up over time makes long-term prescriptions dangerous and less effective than advertised. According to the National Safety Council, patients who have been using prescription opioids for over 3 months are highly likely to already be dependent and have a built-up tolerance. The CDC notes that this is detrimental to the economy, as workers with a pain medication disorder miss an average of 29 days per year, almost 3X the 10.5 day average for regular employees.

While workplace injuries are the root of many opioid addictions, any injury or surgery can lead to addiction. Those who have sustained moderate to severe auto accident injuries and need to get back to work are likely to be prescribed opioids, as are those who have undergone minor surgery. I got all four wisdom teeth out just over a year ago and got a nice bottle of 15 Vicodin for my struggles; I ended up disposing of at least 4 of them once I had recovered and no longer felt like I needed serious painkillers. Point being, patients in pain cannot be trusted to deny opioids of their own free will. This is why doctors and pharmaceutical companies need to be held accountable for medical malpractice when refillable prescriptions are given for non-chronic pain (and even chronic pain, given the human ability to build up tolerance).

What’s the Proper Response

As shown in cases like lawsuits against JUUL for advertising addictive nicotine products to children, holding companies accountable beyond settlements is incredibly difficult in America. $50 billion is an astronomical amount and would greatly help state and local governments treat and fight opioid addiction, but is only a fraction of the amount that opioids have already cost the country. Ideally, protections would be put in place and enforced to ensure only those who desperately need addictive and destructive substances and provided with them. Ideally, the people responsible for pushing opioids as non-addictive and constructive for chronic pain despite all evidence to the contrary would be put in jail and would have all assets stripped away. But then again, ideally, we wouldn’t be in this situation in the first place.

Distracted driving laws are too weak

October 9, 2011 by Archives Leave a Comment

There’s no argument that the dangers of distracted driving currently outweigh the seriousness of the penalties for doing so. Whether shaving or texting, any action that diverts attention or mental and physical resources from the task of driving is incredibly dangerous.
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After all, drivers are wielding 1,500 pound metal objects at high speed. Focus is mandatory.

So why do most states fail to impose laws that reflect the seriousness of the danger?

In California, drunk drivers face, on the first offense, a $1000 fine, a suspended license and mandatory jail time of up to six months. By comparison, a new law combating distracted driving imposes a $300 dollar fine on first offenders. Some states, like Alabama, don’t impose any cell phone related restrictions on drivers over the age of 17.

Now consider a study conducted by researchers from Texas A&M’s Transportation Institute, which sought to quantify how much cell phones actually distract drivers. The results are disturbing, considering minor the legal ramifications.

TTI measured the reaction times of focused drivers and then for those using cell phones by monitoring how quickly drivers responded to a flashing light, meant to represent information like an actual yellow light or a pedestrian crossing the street.

Normal reaction times for focused drivers were “a second or two,” but doubled when a cell phone was put in the driver’s hand. TTI reported that texting drivers were eleven times more likely to completely miss the flashing warning lights.

It makes sense. There are three primary ways to be distracted: when your eyes, hands, or mind are not employed for the task of driving. Texting, and even choosing whether to answer a phone seriously engages all three.

But it’s not so easy for lawmakers to legislate. Unlike drunk driving, for which simple and effective testing measures can determine guilt at the scene, distracted drivers are harder to monitor. In many distracted driving cases that go to court, police have to request phone use records from wireless providers to determine whether the person was actively receiving or sending texts at the time. This cumbersome process complicates enforcement and prosecution of the law.

Philosophically, one wonders if a law that levied incredibly harsh penalties but was almost unenforceable would be a sufficient deterrent to criminal behavior.

There are technologies available that claim to make it safer (and some that make it impossible) to use the phone while driving, and I suspect that weak legislation will be trumped by the integration of phone and car technology. If you can text and talk without removing your hands form the wheel, new, more stringent laws may not be necessary.

The real issue may be that while the vast majority of people recognize how dangerous distracted driving is, a large portion of Americans surveyed by the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety are still texting while driving.

When people recognize a need for change yet do not feel compelled to make the changes themselves, new, harsher laws can be the incentive they need. In areas like copyright law, we’re rushing to fill in laws to account for the ways new technologies change our lives. Texting while driving doesn’t just change lives, it can end them. It’s an issue that deserves our full attention.