Media Coverage of FREOPP
Many of the most important media institutions in the English language have covered FREOPP’s scholars and research, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The Economist, Time, Newsweek, PBS, CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, and the BBC. The above graphic features a representative, though not exhaustive, list.
For interview requests or other press inquiries, please contact Michael Franc, Chief Research Officer, at inquiries@freopp.org or (202) 800–4780.
On FREOPP as an institution
The Washington Post, September 30, 2016: “There are plenty of think tanks devoted to free markets, and some…devoted squarely to issues of opportunity and inequality in the U.S. economy. The FREOPP crew, though, surveyed the policy landscape and saw no groups that blended the two: a grounding in market principles, but a focus on harnessing them — and bending them, when needed — to aid Americans struggling in the country’s transition to an information economy.”
The Atlantic, November 2016: “In September, [Avik Roy and others] launched a new think tank, the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, which aims to promote policies that will help people with below-median incomes or net worth.”
On FREOPP’s COVID-19 research & commentary
The Wall Street Journal, September 14, 2020: “Google parent Alphabet’s YouTube division seems to have blocked a White House medical adviser’s analysis because it conflicts with the flawed pronouncements of a U.N. bureaucracy. Avik Roy, President of the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, reported Sunday on Twitter that YouTube ‘just took down a June 23 interview that Scott Atlas’ did with Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.”
The Washington Post, August 31, 2020: “‘Epidemiology is not the only discipline that matters for public policy here. That is a fundamentally wrong way to think about this whole situation,’ said Avik Roy, president of the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, a think tank that researches market-based solutions to help low-income Americans. ‘You have to think about what are the costs of lockdowns, what are the trade-offs, and those are fundamentally subjective judgments policymakers have to make.’”
The Wall Street Journal, August 24, 2020: “Nursing homes account for 0.6% of the population but 45% of Covid fatalities, says the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, a free market think tank. Better isolating those residents would have saved many lives at little economic cost, it says.”
The Wall Street Journal, July 31, 2020: “Avik Roy notes that ‘those under the age of 25 are at significantly lower risk of death from COVID-19 than of the flu.’ For teachers approaching middle age, there are much bigger risks.”
Vox, July 14, 2020: Estimates vary, but analysts Gregg Girvan and Avik Roy found that as of June 29, 50,779 of the 113,135 US deaths from Covid-19 (or 45 percent) were deaths of residents of nursing or long-term care facilities. Their numbers suggest that about 2.5 percent of all nursing home residents have been killed by the disease; in New Jersey, which is particularly hard hit, the share is over 11 percent.
Los Angeles Times, July 10, 2020: “At nursing homes and assisted living facilities, which an analysis by the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity found account for 45% of coronavirus deaths in the U.S., testing employees is mandatory for many. But the cost quickly adds up.”
BBC News, July 10, 2020: “Elder care homes across the US have been hard-hit by the virus — though the true extent of the severity remains unclear, months in…An analysis by the non-partisan Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity found 45% of US Covid-19 deaths came from nursing homes — a group that makes up just 0.6% of the US population.”
Axios, July 2, 2020: “Nursing homes have been the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak, prompting more urgent discussions about alternative housing situations for elderly Americans. Why it matters: Deaths in nursing homes and residential care facilities account for 45% of COVID-19 related deaths, per the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity.”
Bloomberg Law, June 10, 2020: “Witness Avik Roy, president of [the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, said that] COVID-19 from a health standpoint was primarily a danger to the elderly and people who already had health problems. The most sustainable way to reopen the economy, a benefit to all workers, is to protect people at risk from Covid-19 and let low-risk individuals return to school and work, Roy said.”
Politico, June 4, 2020: “It makes it clear that all along there were trade-offs between details of lockdowns and social distancing and other factors that the experts previously discounted and have now decided to reconsider and rebalance,” said Jeffrey Flier.
Time, May 28, 2020: “Roughly 42% of U.S. coronavirus deaths have occurred in nursing homes and assisted living facilities, according to a May 22 analysis from the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity.”
USA Today, May 10, 2020: Avik Roy, president of The Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, said he hopes “the next round of [COVID-19 relief] funds is more closely targeted to the hospitals that are suffering because they’re doing the right things,” not “giant regional hospital monopolies with high prices and strong balance sheets.”
The Washington Post, May 5, 2020: “The search for a vaccine is a moonshot, and it may work. After all, America did put a man on the moon. But we can’t keep the economy in lockdown while we wait. The purpose of the lockdown was not to prevent every American from getting COVID-19, Avik Roy says, but to prevent our health-care system from being overwhelmed. ‘We’ve done that,” he says. “It’s time to stop annihilating the economy.’”
The Wall Street Journal, April 28, 2020: “Let me commend a plan by Avik Roy and his colleagues at the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, which they expressly call a pessimism plan: A vaccine won’t be developed. An effective treatment won’t soon materialize. Universal testing will not quickly scale up. Infection won’t be found to confer lasting immunity. We can hope for success in these areas but betting our national survival on hitting a hole-in-one is not a strategy.”
The New York Times, April 27, 2020: “The Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity…this month released a plan to quickly restart much of the economy. It includes reopening schools while carrying out an aggressive system of tracing the contacts of Americans who are infected with the virus and quarantining vulnerable groups and people potentially exposed to the virus. Mr. Roy said in an interview that the plan was motivated in part by research suggesting that prolonged school closures disproportionately hurt nonwhite and low-income children, who are less likely to have access to educational materials at home that allow them to keep up with more affluent peers. ‘The last thing we need at a time of rising inequality is to widen that inequality for our children,’ Mr. Roy said. ‘Upper-income parents are the ones most able to improve educational opportunities for their children. Lower-income parents are not.’
Politico, April 30, 2020: “‘Sweden has single-payer health care, but so does Italy, and Italy’s system crashed,’ said Avik Roy, a health care policy adviser to Mitt Romney and Rick Perry’s presidential campaigns, and the president of Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, a think tank based out of Texas. ‘The countries that have done well or poorly [with COVID-19], if you look at it across what kind of health care system they have, there’s zero correlation.’”
Other notable mentions
Vox, August 27, 2020: “‘There would be big changes to the Medicaid program under Westerman’s plan, with states having the option to adopt spending caps and move the Medicaid expansion population onto the private insurance markets. It’s an alternative form of the individual market, with important technical differences,’ Avik Roy, president of the free market Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity and an adviser on the Westerman bill, told me.”
The Wall Street Journal, August 21, 2020: “Preston Cooper, a visiting fellow at the center-right Foundation for Research on Economic Opportunity, said that part of the plan would cost $370 billion, more than what the government spent on stimulus checks as part of the Cares Act.”
Politico, June 10, 2020: “[Jonathan] Blanks observed that it was largely a phenomenon of how Republicans, a largely white demographic, interacted with police. ‘There’s this really huge disconnect between the law-and-order folks who think of police officers as people who come to help and try and keep the road safe, as opposed to people who are trying to prevent crime by harassing people who happen to look different than they do,’ he said.”
Variety, June 5, 2020: “In 80 informative minutes, this documentary, [Juice: How Electricity Explains the World], delves into the way inequality, women’s rights and climate change are impacted by questions of access to electricity.”
BBC News Mundo, June 4, 2020: “Los expertos están de acuerdo en que procesar penalmente a un policía es un asunto ‘plagado de dificultades’. ‘Hay varias razones por las que acusar y procesar a un policía es extremadamente difícil en Estados Unidos’, le explica a BBC Mundo, Jonathan Blanks, experto en justicia criminal e investigador en The Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity (FREOPP), un centro de estudios en Washington, DC. ‘Quizás la razón principal es que la Corte Suprema ha interpretado nuestra Constitución de manera que permite a los oficiales utilizar cierta cantidad de fuerza en el transcurso de sus labores’.”
The Wall Street Journal, April 5, 2020: “‘The vast disparity between the rich and the poor’ in the world is defined, [Robert Bryce] proposes, ‘by the disparity between those who have electricity and those who scrape by on small quantities of juice or none at all.’ There is a nearly direct relationship between reliable electricity and high living standards, Mr. Bryce tells us…Universal, affordable kilowatts should be a cause for the 21st century in the same way that rural electrification was a cause of the young Lyndon Johnson…[Bryce] goes on to show in persuasive detail that ‘there is simply no way to slash global carbon-dioxide emissions without big increases in our use of nuclear energy.’”
Chicago Tribune, March 20, 2020: “Overcharging healthy people for insurance to give sick people a better deal never was going to be sustainable, said Avik Roy, who served as a health care adviser to former presidential candidate Mitt Romney and founded the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity.”
El Nuevo Dia, March 17, 2020: “A través de una columna de opinión…Avik Roy, hizo un llamado para reformar el código de impuestos de Puerto Rico, con tal de que el Congreso impulse la manufactura de ingredientes farmacéuticos a nivel local. En el escrito, Roy aboga específicamente por la restauración parcial de la Sección 936 del Código de Rentas Internas. Por décadas, la Sección 936 ayudó a sostener la industria de manufactura de fármacos en Puerto Rico, proveyendo atractivos incentivos contributivos corporativos a empresas establecidas en la isla.”
Politico, October 16, 2018: “Inside Alex Azar’s first 90 days—the HHS secretary’s calendars were obtained by…a watchdog group. Azar was scheduled to make calls on March 7 to ‘health care thought leaders,’ a list that included…Avik Roy.”
NPR, October 23, 2017: “The president some weeks ago cut off subsidies for insurance companies which helped to keep down insurance premiums. That is one of the factors driving the latest round of insurance premium increases. We get one view of all of this from Avik Roy, a health policy analyst and president of the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity.”
