Lindsey Mattila (CMC ’17) On April 18th, 2017, President Trump signed an executive order to reform the H-1B visa program. This program has traditionally been used for companies to hire highly-skilled foreign workers in tech, medical, industrial, and science fields. The United States currently admits approximately 85,000 H-1B visas annually. This executive order comes as Trump is facing a...
Lindsey Mattila (CMC ’17) Non-compete agreements, or the lack thereof, have played an instrumental role in the quick growth and innovation of Silicon Valley. Non-compete agreements, which are generally built into employment contracts, require employees to wait a year, or some other designated amount of time, before joining a competitor. In theory, these agreements should indirectly decrease...
Lindsey Mattila (CMC ’17) Many Americans think that the federal government is too out of touch with the general public. These Americans often think this is because the government is centralized in one of the most, if not the most, affluent area in the country. Electing outsider politicians, such as President Trump, may be a short-fix solution to the problem of Washington, D.C. being full of...
Lindsey Mattila (CMC ’17) The United States is currently the only developed country that does not have universal health coverage. While the Affordable Care Act provided access to healthcare for millions of people that would have otherwise been unaffordable, nearly 13 percent of the American population, ages 18 to 65, are still uninsured. Beyond extending coverage to all American citizens, a...
Lindsey Mattila (CMC ’17) In my last blog post, Reducing Healthcare Costs Through Pharmaceutical Policy, I analyzed the pharmaceutical industry and explained why it is the most promising healthcare sector to improve in order to decrease rising health care costs. To put a stop to rising costs, which are predicted to rise even more dramatically with the aging Baby Boomers, more will need to...
Lindsey Mattila (CMC ’17) In 1984, the Supreme Court established one of the most influential principles in administrative law in the Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc. A few years prior, Congress passed the Clean Air Act, requiring states that had not yet met the lower pollution rate to use a permit system for more intensive regulation. The Environmental...
Lindsey Mattila (CMC ’17) As healthcare costs continue to rise, it is becoming more important to find different areas of the healthcare industry where costs can be reduced. Although hospital care and physician and clinical services make up an overwhelming majority of the industry (at 32 and 20 percent respectively), the pharmaceutical industry may be the least complex healthcare sector to...
Lindsey Mattila (CMC ’17) On January 6, 2017, The U.S. Intelligence Community– 16 separate governmental agencies that work on intelligence activities– released a report stating that there is enough evidence to conclude that Russia was behind the cyber attacks on the Democratic National Committee email servers. This hacking produced intel that the Intelligence Community argues...
By Lindsey Mattila (CMC ’17) On January 25th, reports emerged from employees at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Human and Health Services, and Department of Agriculture that the Trump administration had enforced rules that would limit their communication and research. The days that followed were filled with uproar as environmental, health, and agriculture advocates worried...
By Lindsey Mattila (CMC ’17) Trump’s stances on immigration were a key part of what made him such a popular candidate. His inflammatory comments calling undocumented Mexican immigrants rapists and drug dealers, along with his promise that Mexico would pay for a new southern border wall, captured headlines for months after he made them. Eventually, Trump developed those comments into a ten-point...
