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Archives: Op-Eds

Medium Post: Our Plan for a $50 Billion Child Care Bailout

The coronavirus pandemic is causing a crisis for the nation’s child care providers and working families. Following the advice of public health experts and government officials, businesses have shuttered and families across the country are staying home to stay safe and to mitigate the spread of the virus. But this has pushed child care providers […]

The New York Times: Congress Needs a Plan to Confront the Coronavirus. I Have One.

Congress has passed three coronavirus packages aimed at providing immediate relief to families, workers, hospitals and small businesses, but with more than 12,000 dead and 10 million out of work, the scale of this tragedy demands we do much more — much faster. Communities across the country are entering a critical stage. Illnesses are mounting […]

Medium Post: Protecting Our Elections During the Coronavirus Pandemic

The coronavirus outbreak is not only a public health emergency and an economic crisis – it also threatens our elections. Elections are foundational to our democracy. But as federal, state, tribal, and local governments issue stay-at-home orders and encourage residents to practice social distancing to combat the virus, large-scale, in-person voting on Election Day could […]

Medium Post: Congress Must Move to Rapidly Increase Our Coronavirus Testing Capacity

Congress is close to finishing its third legislative package to assist in the coronavirus response. It’s imperative that as soon as this package is complete, we immediately turn to dramatically increasing our coronavirus testing capacity, which will help us address both the health and economic impacts of this crisis.

I’ve outlined some ideas to consider as we move toward this long overdue goal.

Widespread diagnostic testing is necessary to control coronavirus – as we’ve seen, countries that instituted widespread testing early on have thus far stemmed the spread of COVID-19 and aided their economies by getting healthy people back to work. South Korea, for example, developed an expansive testing system. As a result, it has been able to track, isolate, and quarantine infected people without shuttering its cities or forcing its citizens to stay inside.

It’s no secret that the U.S. missed its chance to control COVID-19 through early testing. The Trump Administration profoundly mishandled its coronavirus response, leaving public health officials without diagnostic tests in the early days of the pandemic. Public and private labs are racing to catch up: in recent days, the FDA approved its first point-of-care diagnostic test, while commercial behemoths like Roche, LabCorps, and Quest have launched their own diagnostics. Academic labs in Massachusetts are joining the fight, too. But states still don’t have diagnostics they need – forcing many to ration their tests and forego aggressive efforts to contain the virus. Meanwhile, without tests, medical workers and first responders that have been exposed to the virus, but that have not actually contracted it, cannot be tested – causing shortages of medical workers when exposed individuals are forced to quarantine.

President Trump says he wants to prematurely send people back to work, but the government cannot demand that workers report for duty without first guaranteeing their safety. Public health experts have made clear we need to maintain protections like social distancing until the testing and supply shortage is addressed. We need more tests to know who is safe to go back to work and not spread the virus to people around them. Exposing more people to the virus and causing them to be hospitalized or die from COVID-19 is a moral failure as well as an economic one.

Congress must take additional steps to get our public labs and companies the resources they need to ramp up production, and fast. To test at scale, we need more medical supplies. We need more lab capacity – and laboratory materials. And, we need more people.

Congress must force the President to utilize the Defense Production Act (DPA) to spur the development and allocation of tests, the raw materials necessary to produce those tests, and the protective equipment necessary for health care professionals to administer them. The Trump Administration recently said it would use the DPA to make 60,000 test kits, and the legislative package just passed by the Senate allocates $1 billion for COVID-19 DPA purchases. But the President has been unconscionably slow to utilize his DPA authorities. That is why Congress must ensure that he utilizes these new funds, follows through in his commitment, and builds on it. A country of nearly 330 million people needs more than 60,000 tests. And in order to produce and conduct tests, scientists also need things like cotton swabs, chemical reagents, and RNA extraction kits – all materials that are in shortage as labs produce more tests. To administer COVID-19 diagnostics, frontline workers must have access to protective equipment – like masks and gloves – to keep them safe from infection. Those materials are also in shortage, putting health care workers at huge risk and forcing medical facilities to forego mass testing in order to conserve supplies. The Administration must use the DPA to produce these materials, too, and to ensure that they get to states that need them.

If the President won’t fully-utilize the DPA on his own to produce these critical supplies, I’ve signed onto a bill from Senator Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisc.) that Congress could pass tomorrow to require the Trump Administration to act. And Congress can ensure that the President, beyond the $1 billion allocated yesterday, has the funds he needs to do so.

Congress can also put aside more designated funding for specific priorities that would break the testing logjam.

First, Congress should immediately develop a dedicated coronavirus test fund to issue guaranteed contracts to public and private diagnostic manufacturers, keeping them solvent as they boost capacity. We must also provide grants to public health labs and doctors’ offices – which are often strapped for cash – so that they can purchase testing equipment. Congress has provided entities like the National Institutes of Health and the Biomedical Advance Research and Development Authority with supplemental funding to support public and private sector development of COVID-19 vaccines, therapeutics, diagnostics, and preparedness needs, but testing must compete with other priorities funded by these dollars and Congress has yet to establish a fund solely dedicated to diagnostics for COVID-19. As Congress funds diagnostics, it should prioritize both RNA tests, which can help immediately identify infected people, and antibody tests, which can tell us who is immune to the virus and can head back into their communities.

Next, Congress should take immediate steps to boost the number of medical workers able to perform diagnostic tests. It should provide the Public Health Service Commissioned Corps with the funds to hire and train temporary workers to administer tests. In addition to hiring doctors, nurses, and public health professionals, it should hire workers who can receive on-the-job training to complete tasks that don’t require medical degrees. The government should prioritize the hiring of people temporarily out of work due to COVID-19.

Finally, Congress must increase diagnostic testing transparency. The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) should be required to report the demographic information of individuals tested for COVID-19 to make sure resources are being distributed equitably. And Congress should force private and public manufacturers to provide daily updates to HHS on their testing capacity, raw materials, and other resources – ensuring that our federal response is based on an accurate, up-to-date understanding of our testing resources. Our federal response has been dogged by consistent confusion over our national testing capacity – including the number of people tested and their locations. Without this information, it’s impossible to know whether resources are going to the people who need them most, or whether we are leaving rural, underserved, or minority communities behind in our response.

As Congress takes these steps to boost capacity, it must continue to make sure that COVID-19 tests and treatment are free and accessible to everyone in America – no matter their income-level, race, or zip code.

These problems are real – but they are not insurmountable. Congress can take action right now to alleviate them. To turn the tide of this pandemic, we need information. We need diagnostics. And we need Congress to immediately step up and help provide them.

Read the post on Medium.com here. 

Boston Globe: The coronavirus puts child care sector in need of a bailout

Parents across the Commonwealth face a painful economic bind: their children are at home, but the child care check is still due. COVID-19 has (rightfully) forced the closure of child care centers across Massachusetts. In doing so, it has forced a profound reckoning about the state of the American child care system.
The child care sector — long overlooked and long deprived of adequate public investment — is foundational to today’s economy. Nearly 80 percent of parents with young children are in the workforce. To borrow a well-loved Massachusetts tagline, our economy runs on child care.
This state of emergency has crystallized that with dramatic effect, as parents in the medical sector are called to the front lines of the coronavirus pandemic; as low-wage parents weigh the devastating choice between their paycheck and their family’s exposure to a dangerous virus, as small business parents burn the midnight oil to stay afloat, and as every working parent fights to balance their family’s physical and economic livelihoods.
One thing is clear: We can no longer afford to approach child care as an economic accessory. We must approach it as the oxygen on which every facet of our recovery will depend.
Well before COVID-19, the American child care sector was in a fragile state. Collective failure to recognize the critical importance of child care to national economic health and household economic stability has starved the sector of the public funds it needs; the result is a child care market in which all stakeholders, both providers and families, find themselves in precarious positions, operating on margins that just barely keep them afloat.
In Greater Boston, families pay an average of $35,000 in child care costs each year. Access is also a challenge for some families, who face year-long wait lists, regional child care deserts, and operating hours that require them to supplement with additional care (and additional money).
Providers have it just as bad. Even with tuition fees that exceed the in-state tuition of public universities, child care providers struggle to cover their own operational costs, particularly the cost of educators. For good reason, adult-to-child ratios are high for infant and toddler care. Even when charging families upwards of $20,000 for infant care, providers operate on thin margins and can afford to pay their educators little more than minimum wage.
Now, COVID-19 is pushing this already tenuous market to the brink of collapse.
An infusion of emergency funds into the nation’s child care sector is urgently needed. At a time of uncertain employment and jeopardized household income, families cannot afford to pay for care they are not receiving. Providers, however, cannot afford to waive tuition fees if they want to continue to pay their staff and keep their businesses solvent. Child care centers across the country report that, if they are not made whole from uncollected parent fees, they will be forced to lay off staff or cease to operate completely. And financial insolvency is not months away; centers may be unable to survive more than two to three weeks.
As Congress considers a nearly $2 trillion coronavirus stimulus bill that bails out giant corporations and industries, we must bail out the child care sector. We must act immediately to provide billions in federal funding for local providers, so they and their workers are saved from economic devastation — and so our families and our economy can weather this storm.
Current safety nets intended to support small businesses are insufficient: in-home family child care providers, who play a central role in child care delivery systems, are considered by the Internal Revenue Service to be self-employed, rendering them ineligible for unemployment insurance. For family child care providers, loss of income can mean loss of housing and, therefore, inability to reopen at all. Child care centers told us that, should they be forced to lay-off or furlough staff members, they expect to lose those educators entirely. Given the low wages paid to early educators, unemployment insurance will be insufficient incentive to stay in the field. Loss of staff will cause those centers that do stay in business to delay reopening; a reality that will have implications for families’ ability to go back to work and hamstring the pace at which state and national economies recover.
Federal emergency funds will ensure providers can waive fees for families but still remain whole. These resources will allow them to continue to employ staff and support business operations during the state of emergency and periods of closure. Funds also will be used to ensure that providers who participate in emergency child care programs designed to meet the child care needs of health care providers, first responders, and essential workers are able to afford and access the material goods needed to operate such a program. Finally, the educators caring for the children enrolled in emergency child care programs deserve hazard pay commensurate with the risk they are taking with respect to their and their families’ health and safety.

Congress must act immediately. This is a call we make as policy makers, advocates, caregivers and parents. We know the uncertainty that lies ahead for every family is daunting. We see you, and we will fight for your family as hard as we fight for our own. Together, we will pull each other through.

CNBC: Coronavirus stimulus bill must include expanded Social Security payments

Congress is allocating billions of dollars to respond to coronavirus and a growing economic crisis – and those dollars need to be directed right into Americans’ pockets. Right now, Americans are facing a public health crisis and an economic crisis. Coronavirus carries special risks for older Americans and people with underlying health conditions, who are […]

USA Today: Any Coronavirus bailout must put workers first

As Congress responds to the coronavirus emergency, the financial security of workers and their families should be our first priority. That means making sure that any federal bailout of giant corporations directly helps their employees, fuels a grassroots recovery and ensures that those big companies make serious, long-term reforms that reduce the odds they’re back […]

CNN: We need a grassroots stimulus package

The coronavirus relief package awaiting a Senate vote should not be delayed, and we must pass it immediately. But we need to do more. The US is heading toward a recession, and Speaker Pelosi has already announced plans for an additional emergency response package. This is the right approach. We must act quickly to enact a major […]

Boston Globe: The coronavirus puts child care sector in need of a bailout

Parents across the Commonwealth face a painful economic bind: their children are at home, but the child care check is still due. COVID-19 has (rightfully) forced the closure of child care centers across Massachusetts. In doing so, it has forced a profound reckoning about the state of the American child care system. The child care […]