Policy Wonkery

Papers, Please

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by Gary Farber

Children.

Who we hates, we do, because their parents are illegal immigrants. 

And in Alabama, this is now happening: 

FOLEY, Alabama — Many of the 223 Hispanic students at Foley Elementary came to school Thursday crying and afraid, said Principal Bill Lawrence. 

Nineteen of them withdrew, and another 39 were absent, Lawrence said, the day after a federal judge upheld much of Alabama’s strict new immigration law, which authorizes law enforcement to detain people suspected of not being U.S. citizens and requires schools to ask new enrollees for a copy of their birth certificate. 

Even more of the students – who are U.S. citizens by birth, but their parents may not be – were expected to leave the state over the weekend, Lawrence said. 

"It’s been a challenging day, an emotional day. My children have been in tears today. They’re afraid," he said. "We have been in crisis-management mode, trying to help our children get over this." 

Foley Elementary has the area’s largest percentage of Hispanic students, about 20 percent of its student body. 

Under the new immigration law, schools must check the citizenship status of any student who enrolls after Sept. 1. 

The students must present a birth certificate. Those who cannot do so have 30 days to submit documentation or an affidavit signed by a parent or guardian saying that they are here legally. 

Why?  Federal Judge Sharon Lovelace Blackwell.  

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GOP’s Radical Breakage Continues

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by Gary Farber

Who is "Wisconsin's most dangerous professor"?  He's William Cronon.  Who he?  He's this incredibly threatening man:

[…] In 1991, Cronon completed a book entitled Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, which examines Chicago 's relationship to its rural hinterland during the second half of the nineteenth century. In 1991, it was awarded the Chicago Tribune's Heartland Prize for the best literary work of non-fiction published during the preceding year; in 1992, it won the Bancroft Prize for the best work of American history published during the previous year, and was also one of three nominees for the Pulitzer Prize in History; and in 1993, it received the George Perkins Marsh Prize from the American Society for Environmental History and the Charles A. Weyerhaeuser Award from the Forest History Society for the best book of environmental and conservation history published during the preceding two years. 

[…]

In July 1992, Cronon became the Frederick Jackson Turner Professor of History, Geography, and Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin ­Madison after having served for more than a decade as a member of the Yale History Department. In 2003, he was also named Vilas [pronounced "Vy-lus"] Research Professor at UW-Madison, the university’s most distinguished chaired professorship.

Cronon has been President of the American Society for Environmental History, and serves as general editor of the Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books Series for the University of Washington Press.  […]  He has served on the Governing Council of The Wilderness Society since 1995, and on the National Board of the Trust for Public Land since 2003. He has been elected President of the American Historical Association for 2011-12.

Born September 11, 1954, in New Haven , Connecticut, Cronon received his B.A. (1976) from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He holds an M.A. (1979), M.Phil. (1980), and Ph.D. (1990) from Yale, and a D.Phil. (1981) from Oxford University. Cronon has been a Rhodes Scholar, Danforth Fellow, Guggenheim Fellow, and MacArthur Fellow; has won prizes for his teaching at both Yale and Wisconsin; in 1999 was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society' and in 2006 was elected a Fellow of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters as well as the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

He is obviously a Maoist of the worst Marxist–Leninist sort! 

How do we know?  Because the Republican Party of Wisconsin wants him investigated.

The Republican Party of Wisconsin has made an open records request for the e-mails of a University of Wisconsin professor of history, geography and environmental studies in an apparent response to a blog post the professor wrote about a group called the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

Professor William J. Cronon, who is the president-elect of the American Historical Association, said in an interview Friday that the party asked for e-mails starting Jan. 1.

The request was made by Stephan Thompson of the Republican Party of Wisconsin. In his request, Thompson asked for e-mails of Cronon's state e-mail account that "reference any of the following terms: Republican, Scott Walker, recall, collective bargaining, AFSCME, WEAC, rally, union, Alberta Darling, Randy Hopper, Dan Kapanke, Rob Cowles, Scott Fitzgerald, Sheila Harsdorf, Luther Olsen, Glenn Grothman, Mary Lazich, Jeff Fitzgerald, Marty Beil, or Mary Bell."

Most of the names are Republican legislators. Marty Beil is the head of the Wisconsin State Employees Union and Mary Bell is the head of the Wisconsin Education Association Council.

Cronon said the university had not yet complied with the open records request. The e-mails would be subject to the state's open records law because they were written on an university e-mail account.

The university has an e-mail policy that states, "University employees may not use these resources to support the nomination of any person for political office or to influence a vote in any election or referendum.”

Cronon said he did not violate the policy in any way. "I really object in principle to this inquiry," Cronon said of the party's open records request.

Thompson was not available for comment. But in an statement, Mark Jefferson, the party's executive director, said, "Like anyone else who makes an open records request in Wisconsin, the Republican Party of Wisconsin does not have to give a reason for doing so. […]"

What was Cronon's offense?  He wrote an Op-Ed piece for the terrorist-loving New York Times.

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Their urge to betray – and ours

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WRITTEN BY Thomas Nephew, of Newsrack, NOT BY Gary Farber

Until recently, Peter Benjamin was the chairman of the Washington, D.C. area Metro transit system's Board of Directors. A former mayor of Garrett Park, he brought an avuncular personality and long experience with Metro affairs to the table. While in correspondence with us about the bag search issue I've written about before, he dismissed some of our assertions about the program's drawbacks — for example, he didn't believe it would cause much decline in ridership. But he seemed to take seriously the civil liberties issues involved.

Still, sometimes I think if I had a dollar for every time I've heard or read "I'm a supporter of the ACLU, but…" I could afford the richer, more refined lifestyle I truly deserve.


 

And sure enough, when push came to shove at a February 10 discussion of the bag search issue, Mr. Benjamin delivered what may be the new low standard in that genre. Beginning with the heart-sinking words "I am a long term member of the American Civil Liberties Union. Many of my friends consider me a civil liberties nut," Benjamin was giving the lie to those words within roughly twenty seconds. Even though asserting that the rights we have as citizens are "why we are the great country that we are" and personally believing that "bag checks are a violation of those rights, and …the beginning of a process that moves towards us having fewer and fewer and fewer of those rights," Mr. Benjamin continued:

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The Wisconsin Waltz

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by Gary Farber

As flames of revolution spread across the Mideast, the fight against anti-union bills is spreading across the American Midwest.

David Dayen, aka dday, points out that Ohio, Indiana See Protests Against Anti-Union Bills:

Wisconsin remains the main battleground for the broader assault on worker’s rights. But elsewhere in the Big Ten states and across the country, these battles have moved forward. In Ohio, Gov. John Kasich is pushing pretty much the exact same bill as Scott Walker in Wisconsin. Known as SB 5, the bill would strip collective bargaining rights from Ohio public employees. SB 5 is a piece of legislation, so Kasich isn’t trying to implement this under the cover of a budget bill. However, he has said that if he doesn’t get what he wants out of SB 5, he will put those items into the next budget bill. Alternatively, this could go to the ballot. So SB 5 won’t be the last showdown. The Governor, aping Scott Walker, claims this is a fiscal issue, but nobody can explain how much money SB 5 would save.

Many Ohio Republican legislators are already looking askance at SB 5. With pressure rising from state editorial boards and organized labor, the State Senate may not have the votes to get this thing out of committee.

OB-MQ832_unions_G_20110220193255

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A Kind Of Moderation

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Guest post by Thomas Nephew, longtime blogger, posted by Gary Farber.

Gary has been kind enough to invite me to post here, and I'm overcoming some real jitters to give it a try.  

Obsidian Wings!  One of the top blog sites and one of the top online communities of the past decade, hence pretty much of all time.  Writing that could make you simultaneously rend your garments and thank the gods somebody, somewhere had the guts and the gift to say it – whether as writers like Katherine, Publius, Lindsay, Hilzoy, Eric, or G'Kar/Andrew, or commenters like Nell, KCinDC, or Gary.  (Just to name a few, and not to overlook the rest.)  Still not sure I'll belong.

Aside from jitters, though, I was also not sure how I'd fit with ObWi's recognizable "voice" — probably basically hilzoy's, but somehow the whole site's as well. 

I have my own little blog, which I named "newsrack" once upon a time, and "newsrackblog.com" now.  I imagined I'd cover the ebb and flow of news from all over, but I couldn't do it: the Twitter-like pace of a Willis, a Reynolds, a Sullivan, a Marshall awes me and completely eludes me.  

I nevertheless think I've sometimes written some fairly good stuff there, usually when I stick to a topic for a while, learn more about it, research it, and finally start to get across to *myself* what the heck interests me about it.  

I call those "jags", and I've been on a few:   Iraq.  Iraq. (More on that in a moment.) Torture.  Bankruptcy bill.  Texasgate. Impeachment.  Executive power.  Civil War/Reconstruction.  Wal-Mart.  Fair Share Health Care.  Feingold 2010.  FISA Amendment Act.  License plate scanners.  A general sense of disgust with the media. Disappointed In Obama.  D'oh!

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One Way To Connect

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by Gary Farber

ONE WAY TO CONNECT can be this:

This is America:

This is something we can do:

To Beat Back Poverty, Pay the Poor:

The city of Rio de Janeiro is infamous for the fact that one can look out from a precarious shack on a hill in a miserable favela and see practically into the window of a luxury high-rise condominium. Parts of Brazil look like southern California. Parts of it look like Haiti. Many countries display great wealth side by side with great poverty. But until recently, Brazil was the most unequal country in the world

Everything connects:

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No Escape

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By guest poster Gary Farber.

Prison rape jokes abound every time a heinous trial or crime is in the news. 

I don't need to repeat any: you've heard them.  Heh, heh, I'm not going to feel sorry for that mass murderer/rapist/con artist/thief, and what's coming to him.

Of course, few of us think we'll ever wind up in jail, let alone prison, and most of us won't. 

Prison rape is what happens to The Other. 

Which is where the laughing and the righteous vengeance arise: it's not so funny if you imagine yourself, or one of your loved ones, trapped in an injustice system, unjustly thrust into captivity, and subject to brutal sexual and violent abuse.

Last week, the Department of Justice's Bureau of Justice Statistics released a report: Sexual Victimization in Prisons and Jails Reported by Inmates, 2008-09.

As you imagine, it's not enjoyable reading. 

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The Most Powerful Lobby in Washington

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by von I have a policy:  avoid debating Israeli policy via blog.  I have some experience with deeply-contested histories (obliquely referenced in my St. Patrick's Day post, below).  Contested histories are nuancy.  But the blog format isn't long enough, or interactive enough, to allow for any nuance.  Reduced to spurts of 200 or 500 words, everyone becomes a caricature.  And I'm … Read more

Pelosi Goes “All In” On Public Option

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By Lindsay Beyerstein Nancy Pelosi is going all in to support a public option that would hold down costs by setting reimbursement rates at Medicare plus 5%. The CBO's latest cost estimates for various House health care reform options have galvanized Pelosi in favor of a Med+5 public option, Brian Beutler reports.  Pelosi has always … Read more

And this is the point …..

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…. Of calling the Democrats' stimulus package A Stimulus for Tomorrow (Part 11) by von Andrew Sullivan mentions a piece by Daniel Gross, which purportedly reminds "conservatives"* that it's too early to label the stimulus a failure because most of the money hasn't been spent yet. Here is my hand.  Here is my forehead.  Here is my … Read more

Round Two

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(Also known as: A Stimulus for Tomorrow, Part 10) by von Everyone should have seen this coming …. well, everyone who reads these here Wings of Obsidian.  From Salon (citing Bloomberg and The New York Times): Call it the the stimulus that dare not be named. Bloomberg reports that the Obama administration is considering "a mix of spending … Read more

Unleash Senator Wyden

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by von Senator Wyden (D-Ore.) has a health care bill.  As I've written in the past, it's a pretty damn good bill.   I'm not alone in liking it:  lots of other folks on the left and right do as well.  Moreover, unlike all the other major health care bills out there, Wyden's bill is genuinely bipartisan:  it … Read more

Sunshine

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by hilzoy Here's an interesting catch by Merrill Goozner: "The House bill would create an internet accessible database that includes all health-related payments to physicians by corporations including gifts, food, or entertainment; travel or trips; honoraria; research funding or grants; education or conference funding; consulting fees; ownership or investment interests; and royalties or license fees. … Read more

The Wrong Way To Use Antibiotics

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by hilzoy Good news from the NYT: "The Obama administration announced Monday that it would seek to ban many routine uses of antibiotics in farm animals in hopes of reducing the spread of dangerous bacteria in humans. In written testimony to the House Rules Committee, Dr. Joshua Sharfstein, principal deputy commissioner of food and drugs, … Read more

A Question For Megan McArdle

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by hilzoy Megan McArdle responds to my last post: "Surely the point of worry is that many millions of people will be forced into the public system, because its existence will encourage their employers to dump their health care plans.  Since private systems have so far found it virtually impossible to deny many treatments for … Read more

About That “Unfairness”

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by publius One of the most common critiques against the public option is that government subsidies will give it an unfair market advantage.  Frankly, "fairness" isn't high on my list of priorities.  But regardless, the cry for a "level playing field" is admittedly a politically powerful counterargument that needs to be addressed. So here's the … Read more

How Much Will Cap And Trade Cost?

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by hilzoy Remember how cap and trade was supposed to "cost every family as much as $3,100 a year in additional energy costs"? Surprise, surprise:  "CBO estimates that the net annual economywide cost of the cap-and-trade program in 2020 would be $22 billion—or about $175 per household. That figure includes the cost of restructuring the … Read more

Eat Your Spinach!

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by hilzoy This is one of those dull bills that really matters: "The nation's complex food supply chain would become more transparent, inspections of food facilities would become more frequent and manufacturers would be required to take steps aimed at preventing food-borne illnesses under legislation proposed yesterday by key House leaders who have pledged to … Read more

Emissions Standards

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by hilzoy This is wonderful: "The Obama administration today plans to propose tough standards for tailpipe emissions from new automobiles, establishing the first nationwide regulation for greenhouse gases. It will also raise fuel efficiency targets to 35.5 miles per gallon for new passenger vehicles and light trucks by 2016, four years earlier than required under … Read more

Keeping Us Safe

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by hilzoy I wanted to highlight one other bit of the GQ story on Rumsfeld. The author writes: "What Rumsfeld was most effective in doing," says a former senior White House official, "was not so much undermining a decision that had yet to be made as finding every way possible to delay the implementation of … Read more

“My Colleagues Just Stared At That Line”

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by hilzoy Michael Crowley catches an important development: "Obama's new budget plan includes a little-noted sea change in U.S. nuclear policy, and a step towards his vision of a denuclearized world. It provides no funding for the Reliable Replacement Warhead program, created to design a new generation of long-lasting nuclear weapons that don't need to … Read more

Comparative Effectiveness Research

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by hilzoy Reading this post by Merrill Goozner (it's very good) reminded me that I meant to write about the articles on comparative effectiveness research in the recent New England Journal of Medicine. One, by Jerry Avorn, concerns the backlash against CER: "The contested provisions were designed to support studies comparing the efficacy and safety … Read more

Well, I Think Demographics Is Interesting …

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by hilzoy Here's a fascinating article on global demographics (h/t): "Something dramatic has happened to the world’s birthrates. Defying predictions of demographic decline, northern Europeans have started having more babies. Britain and France are now projecting steady population growth through the middle of the century. In North America, the trends are similar. In 2050, according … Read more

Don’t Give Away Carbon Permits

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by hilzoy Via Kevin Drum, bad news from Sen. Jeff Bingaman:  "Sen. Jeff Bingaman, a New Mexico Democrat who chairs the energy panel, said earlier that any climate bill that passes the Senate is unlikely to adhere to the administration's plan that the government auction all the permits to emit greenhouse gases because such a … Read more

Renewable Energy Standards

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by hilzoy A renewable energy standard is a requirement that utilities get a certain percentage of their power from renewable energy. It's a market-based system: utilities that exceeded the requirement would get credits that they could sell to other utilities who weren't doing as well, enabling us to meet the standard in the most cost-effective … Read more

A Change Of Pace

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by hilzoy Yesterday, the House passed the Captive Primate Safety Act, which would make it illegal to "import, export, transport, sell, receive, acquire, or purchase in interstate or foreign commerce" any nonhuman primate. (Humans are covered by the 13th Amendment.) This is one of those small-bore but really, really good bills that I've been rooting for … Read more

Auto Industry Bleg

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by hilzoy I’ve been trying to understand the problems of the auto industry, and on a couple of points I can’t quite seem to figure out what’s going on. So I thought: why not ask? (1) A quote from Business Week: “Everyone knows that GM is over-branded. (…) At the core of GM’s problems is … Read more

Mortgages And Bankruptcy

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by hilzoy A bankruptcy judge in the Washington Post: “Homeowners are the only ones who cannot modify the terms of their secured debts in bankruptcy. Corporate America flocks to bankruptcy courts to do precisely this — to restructure and reamortize loans whose conditions they find onerous or can no longer meet. Airlines are still flying … Read more

Mark To Market

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by hilzoy One of the stranger aspects of the debate over the bailout was the way both progressives and conservatives latched onto the idea of suspending mark to market accounting. (The final bailout bill (pdf) reiterated that the head of the SEC had the power to do this (sec. 132), and called for a study … Read more

Gaining Ground By Standing Still

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by hilzoy Yesterday, the Congressional Budget Office released new long-term Social Security projections (pdf): “CBO projects that outlays will first exceed revenues in 2019 and that the Social Security trust funds will be exhausted in 2049. If the law remains unchanged, the Social Security Administration (SSA) will then no longer have the legal authority to … Read more

Obama And Affordable Housing

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by hilzoy

While I was away, the Boston Globe had a story on Obama and some Chicago affordable housing projects that sound pretty bad. If you read the article carefully, the actual story seems to come down to this:

First:

“As a state senator, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee coauthored an Illinois law creating a new pool of tax credits for developers. As a US senator, he pressed for increased federal subsidies. And as a presidential candidate, he has campaigned on a promise to create an Affordable Housing Trust Fund that could give developers an estimated $500 million a year.

But a Globe review found that thousands of apartments across Chicago that had been built with local, state, and federal subsidies – including several hundred in Obama’s former district – deteriorated so completely that they were no longer habitable.”

Second, some of these failed projects were developed by Obama associates, supporters, and contributors. Third, some of them are in Obama’s old State Senate district, and he doesn’t seem to have done much about them.

I have no interest in defending Obama on the second and third points. I don’t know much about them. Some blog coverage of this story is wrong: contrary to some summaries of this article, Obama did not “run” these projects, and Grove Parc, the development the Globe story focusses on, was redeveloped by a public-private partnership in 1990, while Obama was still in law school. After citing a description of this project, Rick Moran writes: ” Obama pushed hard to finance these projects back in the 1990’s.” Projects with this legal structure, yes. This project, no.

The story here, to my mind, is not: Obama got support for the projects the article describes. It’s: Valerie Jarrett, one of his close advisors, let this continue after her group took over management of the project in 2001. It’s worth noting, though, that Jarrett and the company she now heads, Habitat, did not need Obama’s help to get into this business: when the Chicago Housing Authority was put into receivership in 1987 (before Obama went to law school), they were appointed its receivers. When Jarrett met Obama, and for quite a while afterwards, he would have been the one needing her help, not the other way around. That in no way excuses her allowing this property to deteriorate, or Obama’s not doing anything about it. I mention it only because when I read the blog coverage, a lot of people seemed to think that this story was about Obama getting contracts for his buddies. And I really don’t think that’s accurate. When a lot of the contracts mentioned in the story were given out, Obama was not in a position to do any such thing, nor were some of the buddies in question in need of his help.

But I do know a little about housing stuff, enough to find the idea that there’s something suspect about supporting public/private partnerships for low-income housing development a little odd. To get a hint of what bugged me about the Globe story’s presentation of this point, consider this quote:

“Under Mayor Richard M. Daley, who was elected in 1989, the city launched a massive plan to let private companies tear down the projects and build mixed-income communities on the same land.

The city also hired private companies to manage the remaining public housing. And it subsidized private companies to create and manage new affordable housing, some of which was used to accommodate tenants displaced from public housing.

Chicago’s plans drew critics from the start. They asked why the government should pay developers to perform a basic public service – one successfully performed by governments in other cities. And they noted that privately managed projects had a history of deteriorating because guaranteed government rent subsidies left companies with little incentive to spend money on maintenance.”

Chicago’s public housing had been, for decades, a symbol of nightmarish dysfunction:

“Planned for 11,000 inhabitants, the Robert Taylor Homes housed up to a peak of 27,000 people. Six of the poorest US census areas with populations above three people were found there. Including children who are not of working age, at one point 95 percent of the housing development’s 27,000 residents were unemployed and listed public assistance as their only income source, and 40 percent of the households were single-parent, female-headed households earning less than $5,000 per year. About 99.9 percent were African-American. The 28 drab, 16-story concrete high-rises, many blackened with the scars of arson fire, sat in a narrow two-block by 2.5-mile (300 m by 3 km) stretch of slum. The city’s neglect was evident in littered streets, poorly enforced building codes, and scant commercial or civic amenities.

Police intelligence sources say that elevated number of homicides was the result of gang “turf wars,” as gang members and drug dealers fought over control of given Chicago neighborhoods. Its landlord, the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA), has estimated that $45,000 in drug deals took place daily. Former residents of the Robert Taylor Homes have said that the drug dealers fought for control of the buildings. In one weekend, more than 300 separate shooting incidents were reported in the vicinity of the Robert Taylor Homes. Twenty-eight people were killed during the same weekend, with 26 of the 28 incidents believed to be gang-related.”

I do not know much about the Chicago Housing Authority. For all I know, every single person who ever worked for it was as wise as Solon and a saint to boot, and all its problems were the result of disastrous coincidences that were utterly beyond its control. But given the actual history of government-run housing in Chicago, when I read the Globe article citing “critics” who “asked why the government should pay developers to perform a basic public service – one successfully performed by governments in other cities”, I thought: who are these critics? And why isn’t the answer to their question obvious? Namely: whatever works or doesn’t work in other cities, letting the CHA manage public housing in Chicago seems like a really, really bad idea. Maybe it would be less bad now — for all I know, the CHA might have improved a lot. But back in 1990 or so, the question “why not let the government run public housing in Chicago?” would have been like asking “why not let Michael Brown run FEMA?” right after Hurricane Katrina. Maybe Brownie was a great guy, but the appearances were certainly against him.

So if straight public housing was out, what were the alternatives to public-private partnerships?

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Speaking Of Health Insurance…

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by hilzoy

Check out these figures from a new Kaiser poll (Kaiser is a foundation that does incredibly good work on health policy):

“The poll also found that in the past year, 23% of U.S. residents said they or a member of their household had either decided to stay with a current employer, instead of accepting a new job, or had switched jobs because of health insurance coverage. In addition, 7% of respondents said that they, or someone in their household, had decided to get married to obtain health insurance through their spouse. (…)

According to the poll, 37% of U.S. residents reported at least one of six financial troubles over the past five years as a result of medical bills:

20% had difficulties paying other bills;

20% were contacted by a collection agency;

17% had used all or most of their savings;

12% were unable to pay for basic necessities, such as food, heat or housing;

10% had to borrow money; and

3% declared bankruptcy (Kaiser Family Foundation release, 4/29).”

The 17% who used all or most of their savings, the 12% who were unable to pay for basic necessities, and the 3% who declared bankruptcy, are stunning. But I was also appalled by the 7% who said that they or someone in their household got married during the past year to get health insurance. (To be clear: I’m not appalled by those people: under the right circumstances, I might well do the same. I’m appalled that it’s necessary. I take marriage seriously, and the idea that people have to marry for health insurance seems awful, in something like the way that having to marry someone to get your family out of debt would.)

I’ve argued for a while that universal health insurance would free people to change jobs, take risks, and be entrepreneurs in a way they might find it much harder to do if they had to risk not just their money but their health — or, worse, the health of their kids. But I’ve always based this on a combination of common sense and anecdotes — I know people who have stayed with jobs they hated instead of taking great new offers either because those new offers didn’t come with health insurance or because they were worried that they wouldn’t be insurable because of a preexisting condition. But I wouldn’t have imagined that 23% of respondents would say that they or someone in their household had either stuck with an existing job or switched jobs because of health insurance. That’s a pretty serious distortion of the labor market.

The most important reason to provide health insurance to everyone is basic decency and fairness. But not providing health insurance has serious costs to our economy and our society. If significant numbers of people are not taking the best jobs they can find, let alone deciding whether or not to marry, because of health insurance, things are badly broken.

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In My Other Life…

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by hilzoy I do stuff like this: “Drug and medical device companies should be banned from offering free food, gifts, travel and ghost-writing services to doctors, staff members and students in all 129 of the nation’s medical colleges, an influential college association has concluded. The proposed ban is the result of a two-year effort by … Read more