Week in Review: Why Her 'Princess' Dream Matters

When 3-year-old Keira Riley grows up, she wants to be Princess Elsa from the Disney movie Frozen.

That Keira, who has a rare and usually fatal genetic brain disease, is growing up in the first place is a testament to the power of personalized gene therapy—lifesaving treatment that outdated federal regulations wouldn’t let her access in the U.S, Goldwater Vice President for Healthcare Policy Naomi Lopez writes in the Washington Examiner. Keira’s family had to move to Italy to save their child’s life, highlighting the need to embrace innovative reforms like the Goldwater Institute’s Right to Try for Individualized Treatments, which expands the original Right to Try so that critically ill patients can obtain the personalized care they need without first begging the federal government for permission.

You shouldn’t need the government’s go-ahead to try to save your own life. That’s why Goldwater enacted this landmark reform last year in Arizona, and it’s why we’re now promoting it across the country. “Lawmakers and policymakers need to consider an important question: Will they keep up with the promise of 21st-century medicine, or will they leave even more patients behind in an outdated regulatory system that’s tangled in red tape?” Lopez asks. “Lives are hanging in the balance.”

Read more in the Washington Examiner. 

Anti-School Choice Group Endorses Racial Discrimination

The government should never discriminate against its own citizens based on their skin color. Save Our Schools Arizona, best known for its failed attempt last year to block Goldwater’s expansion of school choice to every family in the state, apparently disagrees.

As Goldwater Director of Education Policy Matt Beienburg writes in the Arizona Daily Independent, the liberal group is opposing a measure advanced in the state Senate last week that would give Arizona voters the chance to strengthen the state constitution’s ban on racial discrimination. The measure prohibits public agencies from discriminating against individuals on the basis of race or ethnicity—but Save Our Schools argues such racially motivated decision-making is necessary to “increase representation” in hiring among government employees and teachers.

Save Our Schools wants to undermine the Arizona Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection under the law. “Yet especially amid a purportedly severe teacher shortage, surely the last thing Arizona families need is for school districts to reject highly qualified teachers simply because their skin color checks the wrong box,” Beienburg explains. “Arizona workers, students, and citizens of all stripes deserve the full protection of the laws—applied equally and impartially, regardless of their race.”

In Arizona and across the nation, Goldwater will never stop fighting to defeat racial discrimination in public schools—and to enact school choice and Academic Transparency reforms to empower parents, not leftist activists, to have more say in their kids’ education.

Read more in the Arizona Daily Independent. 

How to Secure Arizona’s Water Future

Arizona’s water supplies are dwindling amid one of the worst droughts in our state’s history.

But delivering better water conservation does not require a dramatic expansion of the role of government, as detailed in a new Goldwater Institute report released in conjunction with the Property and Environment Research Center. “Bigger government isn’t the answer,” Goldwater Institute President and CEO Victor Riches says. “By implementing free-market reforms, lawmakers can improve Arizona’s water policy to help secure our state’s future.”

Specifically, the new report offers recommendations in four policy areas that would help improve water allocation and enhance water supplies:

1. Improve legal and policy institutions so the markets for surface water flourish, including by helping water-rights owners secure their property rights and establishing a state water trust;
2. Clarify rights to groundwater and innovatively use markets to ensure the sustainability of groundwater basins;
3. Explore strategies to augment water supplies, such as removing regulatory barriers and evaluating creative interstate opportunities to collaborate on increasing water supply; and
4. Support voluntary water conservation in urban areas, including by championing indoor water reuse.

Together, these reforms can help enable Arizona’s continued growth and economic success well into the future.

Read the report here.