Irwin Jacobs, co-founder of Qualcomm, speaks to the Brookings Institution on manufacturing. (Mattias Gugel/Medill)

WASHINGTON — The U.S. may be at the beginning of a “manufacturing job renaissance,” but industry growth will only remain a “trickle” if new policies to incubate innovation are not put in place, according to fellows at The Brookings Institution.

Panelists on Wednesday said high-wage jobs are going to come to the U.S. through innovation, by both creating entirely new products and changing current products incrementally.

The Connect Innovation Institute and Brookings, both nonprofit think tanks, released partner studies about the importance of innovation in manufacturing and how lawmakers should best promote innovation growth.

These studies point out areas in which the U.S. can improve, including shared assets among businesses, greater network structures to link pools of innovators and a more streamlined way of connecting innovators with capital.

To grow the industry, manufacturers need to think about “expanding the pie” through research and development instead of keeping costs low and increasing profits, said Susan Helper, economics professor at Case Western Reserve University.

President Barack Obama’s recent economic policy has focused on bringing more manufacturing jobs to Americans. He has been touring the country, touting companies such as Master Lock that have “insourced” jobs from China.

Labor costs may be rising in China, but Erica Fuchs, assistant professor of engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University, is still worried about companies outsourcing the supplies for their products. “They aren’t just low-cost locations, but low-tax locations,” she said.

Dan Breznitz, an associate professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology who specializes in global markets, said China’s strategy is to capture the supply chain with competitive tax rates so most products around the world originate there.

Other countries are becoming better at process innovation, Fuchs said, and the peril for the U.S. is if idea innovations also begin to occur abroad.

Irwin Jacobs, co-founder of Qualcomm and No. 782 on Forbes list of world billionaires, said infrastructure and knowledge are more reasons companies consider outsourcing to countries such as Taiwan. The specific expertise about materials such as glass and LCD screens make foreign countries attractive, he said.

Jacobs said the U.S. is lacking a trained workforce, specifically in engineering, and it is all because “K-12 education is a major problem that we have.” Qualcomm tried to do something about that deficiency by investing in High Tech High, a charter school with a project-based curriculum. Students go to study in research in math- and science-centered programs at college, which creates a more robust pipeline for U.S. jobs

Jill Biden, wife of Vice President Joe Biden, started a three-day tour Wednesday to highlight the role of community colleges to meet the workforce needs of manufacturers. Obama’s proposed budget includes $8 billion dollars for community colleges to train students for high-growth industries.

The administration also released a new plan to set the maximum tax rate on manufacturers at 25 percent in another effort to bolster business. The initiative, however, needs congressional approval, an unlikely prospect in an election year.

Fuchs said more significant reforms to the tax code are needed so the United States can compete with other countries. She said she hopes a lower corporate tax rate does not also mean a decrease in credits for innovation.

But decreasing taxes is not going to be enough, said Breznitz. “We have to come up with new services and products and continuously improve them.”

Jacobs said he thinks that lowering tax rates could help business that innovate, but “I’ve never met an entrepreneur who decided not to go into business because he would have to pay a higher tax rate later.”

Courtesy: kline.house.gov

WASHINGTON – In his time as a student teacher at a struggling Cincinnati public school, Jacob Towner led one class where his 16 students kept the peace and showed promise in the classroom. Then, Towner had to combine that group with another class, and the size doubled.

“These kids who were behaving great were all of the sudden behavior problems,” Towner said. “It’s because there are more people to hide behind, more people to be distracted. In the larger group like that, it’s hard to keep track of who’s learning and who’s not.”

Logic dictates that the smaller the class, the more individual attention each student receives. Yet, the policy of class-size reduction is mired in disagreement over a laundry list of potential benefits and drawbacks.

The ongoing debate does not focus on the effectiveness of small classes but on whether federal money should be spent to improve the student to teacher ratio.  Many educators who favor of class-size reduction emphasize the vital importance of one-on-one interactions between students and teachers. But those less enthusiastic about throwing federal dollars at the issue often cite the expensive nature of reducing class sizes and point to policies that could use money more effectively.

Class size “is sometimes used as a silver bullet, and it was never intended to be used that way,” said Donna Harris-Aikers, the director of Education Policy and Practice at the National Education Association. “It is a key component of what should be a comprehensive school improvement strategy.”

A similar analysis is present in the Encouraging Innovation and Effective Teachers Act, a bill written by House Education and the Workforce Committee Chairman John Kline, R-Minn. Kline said the bill, part of the overhaul of the No Child Left Behind law, is designed to decrease the federal government’s role in education.

“Our bill also injects reason into the nation’s education system by giving school districts the freedom to use federal funds based on the needs of their own student populations,” Kline said. “It seems that ought to be self-evident.”

Counter to the general theme of the legislation, however, is a provision that would cap the amount of federal money districts can spend on class-size reduction at 10 percent. When asked about the limit, Kline said he would move “very carefully” when striking the balance between restrictions and flexibility.

In the expert’s office

Reducing class sizes requires hiring more teachers and creating new space for extra classes, making it one of the most expensive methods of education reform. Matthew Chingos, an education researcher at the Brookings Institution, said it is a question of cost effectiveness – not whether reducing class sizes has any value.

“It’s not that you should never do expensive things because education is clearly important,” Chingos said. “Our view is that there are probably other interventions that would get you more bang for your buck.”

There has been a wealth of research on class-size reduction but most of it, according to Chingos, has been of “dubious quality.” In a research paper published May 2011, Chingos and Russ Whitehurst, the director of Brookings’ Brown Center on Education Policy, concluded that there is some evidence of positive benefits from class-size reduction.

Chingos said he found the most thorough study to be the Student Teacher Assignment Ratio study conducted in Tennessee several decades ago. In an analysis of the experiment, Professor Frank Mosteller of Harvard University found that there was significant evidence to suggest  students in smaller classes performed better over time.

Even so, Chingos said trying to cap the number of students in classrooms across an entire state might not get the same result.

“The way that states tend to approach class-size reduction policies isn’t doing it in just a small number of schools. They do it for the whole state …” he said. In reference to research in California and Florida, Chingos added “the effects are much less positive than they are in the Tennessee experiment. So that’s some caution that the effects might not be as big as you hope.”

Leonie Haimson, founder and executive director of the nonprofit advocacy organization Class Size Matters, said there is strong evidence that some students benefit from small class sizes more than others.

“The research is absolutely clear that poor and minority students get twice the benefits from smaller classes than your average middle class student,” Haimson said. “Those are kids who come from disadvantaged backgrounds, often from single-parent homes … these are the kids who rely on getting individual attention from their teacher the most.”

Towner, who did his student teaching in 2011, now teaches full time at the same school — Winton Hills Academy, where 95 percent of the students are economically disadvantaged, according to the Ohio Department of Education. He said that the disadvantaged background of many of his students enhances the importance of his role as a teacher.

“You’re sometimes the only responsible adult in these kids’ lives…” Towner said. “If a kid doesn’t feel like they’re accepted, if their basic needs are not being met, then you really can’t expect them to do well in school.”

Haimson said larger class sizes, which teachers cannot control, often limit the amount of personal contact students receive.

“One of the most destructive effects of having large classes is that students actually feel that the teachers don’t care about them and don’t care whether they succeed or fail,” she said.

Because of this, multiple sources agreed that the key may not be broad class-size reductions, but rather focusing on carefully chosen districts with the aim at helping disadvantaged students.

“If anything, we should have targeted funding to hire more teachers to reduce class sizes, especially in our large urban districts, which suffer from some of the highest class sizes in the country with the most at-risk students,” Haimson said. “This is highly inequitable and it is doing tremendous damage to our education system and to our economic future as a country.”

Chingos said the Tennessee STAR study reduced class sizes from 22 to 18 students with effective results. The average class size in the United States in 2009 was 23.3 students, according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. This ranked 22nd out of the 34 countries listed; the average class size among OECD countries in 2009, meanwhile, was 21.4 students.

In Washington

Despite the evidence that targeted class-size reductions can be effective, Kline believes the policy should not be a staple of education reform.

“We don’t want funds diverted to that effort, just hiring teachers with this notion that if you get the class size down everything is going to get better,” he said. “What is better is when you get a really good teacher. Nothing makes more difference in the life and the future of our kids than if they have a good teacher.”

There are lawmakers who disagree with Kline’s notion that reducing class size is not an effective way to improve education. Last October, Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., sponsored legislation that proposed new funding to directly support class-size reduction efforts.

“I will continue fighting to provide schools and districts with the resources they need to keep classes small and offer students the educational environment they need to learn and succeed,” Murray said in a statement. “I think now is the absolute wrong time to shift precious resources away from this critical priority and allow class sizes to increase. And I think we shouldn’t be taking away flexibility from districts that want to invest in smaller classes.”

Though Murray’s legislation stalled in committee, the Elementary and Secondary Education Reform Act, passed out of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, Pensions committee last fall, includes a stipulation on class-size reduction. The bill would allow schools to divert funds to “reducing class size for pre-kindergarten through 3rd grade, by an amount and to a level consistent with what scientifically valid research has found to improve student achievement.”

The House and Senate bills vary in content, but the method in which they were developed is also worth noting.  The Senate bill received bipartisan support in committee, while House Republicans proposed their draft without any input from Democrats or co-sponsors from the minority party.

Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., the top Democrat in the House Education and the Workforce Committee, said in January he was disappointed in the bill’s  lack of bipartisan support.

“I remain concerned that Chairman Kline has decided to draft a partisan bill, shutting the door on the tried and true way of achieving reform – bipartisanship,” Miller said. “This move will only leave America’s schools, teachers and students with the outdated No Child Left Behind law.”

The House education committee held its first hearing on the bill last Thursday, giving Democrats a chance to have their say on the legislation. Class size was not discussed during the hearing, but Miller criticized the bill in general, suggesting it would not be effective in improving education policy.

“Kids’ lives and their ability to have the opportunity to succeed are at stake,” Miller said at the hearing. “I am very protective of a single year in a child’s life – they don’t get that back. Our kids only get one shot at a decent education.”

The U.N. conference, planned for July in Rio de Janeiro, will bring together government representatives from around the world in a bid to renew commitment towards sustainability. This is the first time since 1992 that the U.N. has held such an event.

While the conference is set to address issues such as a green economy and renewable energy, a panel of activists met Wednesday in downtown Washington to push for more discussion on population growth and access to contraception.

“Contraceptive access is not just an issue for women. It’s not just an issue for young people. It’s an issue for everyone,” said Kim Lovell of the Sierra Club “As environmentalists, we have a stake in this as well, and really care about access to these services.”

A recent survey by Americans for the United Nations Population Fund showed that population growth is not a primary issue to many environmentalists.

Of 869 adults who reported donating time or money to an environmental organization in the past year, 26 percent considered slowing population growth as their first priority. However, 47 percent prioritized improving living conditions for women and ensuring they have options for contraception.

Nancy Belden, founder of the research group Belden Russonello Strategists, argued that Rio is an opportune time to bring overpopulation to the frontline.

In the past, according to Belden, population growth has been seen as a “toxic idea,” a topic we can’t talk about “even if we think it’s an issue.” By framing population growth with contraception and women’s empowerment, more environmentalists may engage in an issue that is often brushed aside.

Mother Jones environmental reporter Kate Sheppard said in the panel discussion that it is important to address the broader aspects of population growth and contraception, most importantly women’s health.

“It’s about making sure that maternal health is better, that women who, if they don’t want to have kids they don’t have to,” Sheppard said. “And if they want to have kids they can do it in a safe way, and that they have access to things that will make sure that they themselves are healthy and that they have healthy children.”

Lovell said that she hopes for family planning to initiate dialogue among environmentalists at the Rio conference in order to create long-term solutions.

“Rio is about sustainability. Rio is about moving forward on a sustainable path and looking at nutrition, agriculture, sustainable cities and all of these different components that make up creating a better future for our planet.”

Romney and Santorum remain in a near dead heat with President Barack Obama, who barely edges them out in a general election match-up, according to the survey released Wednesday by the Quinnipiac Polling Institute. Romney is slightly closer than Santorum when paired against the incumbent president, lagging only two points behind Obama.

In the GOP field, Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul trail the frontrunners with with 14 percent and 11 percent, respectively.

And in a hypothetical two-man race, Santorum’s lead polling lead widens, 50 percent to Romney’s 37 percent.

At a news conference Wednesday announcing the results, Quinnipiac Polling Institute Assistant Director Peter Brown called Santorum’s lead “solid but not dramatic.” Brown said he still sees Romney as the GOP frontrunner, mostly due to the former Massachusetts governor’s delegate tally.

“Leads, as we all know this year, have been somewhat ephemeral during campaigns,” Brown told reporters. “They’ve come and gone.”

In the national survey, 48 percent of GOP voters said it would be bad for their party if none of the current candidates win enough delegates to be nominated before the national convention in August. That could force a “brokered convention,” Brown said. If party leaders were to nominate someone not in the primary race, 32 percent prefer New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, according to the poll.

Brown said the Quinnipiac poll confirms that voters want the primaries to pick their party’s nominee, not convention delegates.

He pointed to Santorum and Romney’s competitiveness in polling against Obama as evidence that a grueling primary season has not yet damaged the GOP brand.

“At this point, at least nationally, all the controversy in the Republican primary does not appear to be hurting the Republican vote as they look towards November,” Brown said.

The four candidates are set to take the stage Wednesday night for their first debate in almost a month at the Mesa Arts Center in Mesa, Ariz. The televised event comes five days before Arizona and Michigan’s primary contests, where Romney and Santorum have been rallying back and forth in state polling.

The Quinnipiac poll, the Hamden, Conn.-based institute’s first national gauge of the GOP primary season, was conducted from Feb. 14 to 20 and surveyed 2,605 registered voters. It has a 1.9 percent margin of error.

“This day has been a long-time coming,” Obama said of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, noting that first calls for such an institution came from black Civil War veterans.

The museum’s seven floors will feature exhibits on slavery, civil rights and black culture and feature artifacts such as Nat Turner’s bible, a plane flown by the first black military pilots the Tuskegee Airmen, and Louis Armstrong’s trumpet.

“It will do more than simply keep those memories alive,” the president said. “This museum should inspire us as well, should stand as proof that the most important things in life rarely come quickly or easily.”

The museum is being built between the Washington Monument and the National Museum of American History on the National Mall. Obama and former first lady Laura Bush said the prime location is fitting.

“Here on this very mall is where Martin Luther King Jr. stood and shared his dream of a nation,” Bush said.

Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback, who as a senator co-sponsored the bill authorizing the museum, said it is not meant as a place for an airing of grievances but rather for a celebration of perseverance.

“This museum is for the American grandchildren to see the triumph of great Americans,” he said.

President George W. Bush signed  the legislation creating the museum in 2003. The museum is scheduled to open in 2015. Like other Smithsonian museums, it will be free to the public.

C-SPAN covered the entire event live.

Policy experts discuss cyber security at The George Washington University. (Eddie Rios/Medill)

WASHINGTON – Cyber security legislation needs smarter regulation with room for technological innovation in the private sector, a former Homeland Security secretary said Wednesday.  The bill should raise the bar on private security capability and serve both business and national security interests.

Former Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff  and Vice Admiral Mike McConnell, one-time director of National Intelligence, discussed the cyber security legislation introduced  last week by Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., last week.

The Cybersecurity Act of 2012 would expand the Department of Homeland Security’s power to identify potential threats and also set regulations for private companies operating critical networks, requiring them to improve security or face penalties.

McConnell and Chertoff spoke about the cyber bill in a roundtable discussion with senior congressional staffers at George Washington University’s Homeland Security Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank that develops strategies to prevent current and future threats.

Chertoff, a lawyer who headed homeland security under President George W. Bush, wants better information sharing between the government and the private sector and  investments in a skilled workforce capable of combating potential threats. He also favors technologies that can quickly deal with possible attacks, rather than playing “catch up with threats we have already seen.”

Chertoff offered support last week for Lieberman’s bipartisan bill. Testifying before the senator’s homeland security committee, he called looming cyber threats “one of the most seriously disruptive challenges to our national security since the onset of the nuclear age 60 years ago.”

On Wednesday, Chertoff said the presumption of openness and security across the Internet posed challenges to how national security operates. The focus of legislation, he said, should be on high-risk threats to the nation’s networks and ability to combat such threats in real time.

He said the true victims of cyber threats are the private sector, not necessarily government agencies. He said the control systems of private sector companies are among the highest targeted areas for attack.

The decade-long theft of a Canadian communications company’s data, and the Stuxnet threat in 2010, casts doubt in the public eye about the nation’s cyber protection capabilities, Chertoff said.

“In the world of cyberspace, it is much more complicated,” he said. “The battlefield is not just at the border or overseas. The battlefield is at home, and it takes place in the private sector’s own networks.”

Chertoff said the rise of hacktivist groups like Anonymous that have disrupted federal and private activities over the past couple of months are becoming a problem for national protection. He said there needs to be incentives for private companies to partake in information sharing to subdue worries about how protected companies’ data are.

But Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., also speaking last week, shot down the legislation, saying it gave the department of Homeland Security — part of President Obama’s cabinet — too much regulatory power. McCain and his allies intend to introduce their own bill, giving more authority to the National Security Agency and the U.S. Cyber Command, a subunit of the United States Strategic Command that conducts military cyberspace operations to protect the defense department’s information networks.

The overarching concern with the cyber legislation deals with who should hold regulatory authority: the National Security Agency, which has the capacity to subdue threats, or the Homeland Security Department, which would get expanded authority over protecting the private sector.

McConnell, who directed the National Security Agency in the early 1990s, said the competing bills were “absolutely necessary but insufficient.”

He pointed to voluntary information sharing between agencies and the private sector as a primary weakness and called for a mandated transparency. He said unless it is mandated or incentivized, sharing would not happen.

He expressed concern that the debate over cyber security legislation will continue until “something happens that galvanizes the nation like 9/11 did.”

Former Israel Deputy Defense Minister Ephraim Sneh warned a nuclear Iran could accelerate other Arab nations' nuclear capability. (David Uberti/Medill)

WASHINGTON – Experts Wednesday called the situation in Iran a “budding crisis,” but they warned against military action to stop the country’s fledgling nuclear programs.

A strike against Iranian nuclear facilities could not only increase regional sympathy for the Islamic Republic, they said, but it could possibly accelerate the rate at which Iran becomes nuclear capable. These effects are in addition to an Iranian military response to Israel or the United States.

“This is the most confusing and complicated time for foreign policy in my lifetime,” said Jane Harman, director of the Woodrow Wilson Center and a former congresswoman from California. “The opportunity for miscalculation and mistakes is huge.”

A nuclear Iran poses great threats to Israel – a strong U.S. ally – and not only because of the country’s weapon’s capabilities, said Ephraim Sneh, Israel’s former Deputy Minister of Defense.

“There is no government in Jerusalem that may accept a nuclear Iran,” Sneh said. “The problem is the regime with imperial ambition and with no real inhibitions. And this regime must be toppled.”

A reason for more concern

Sneh and other experts spoke at a Wilson Center panel focused on the complicated diplomatic triangle between Israel, Iran and the U.S. The discussion came only a day after a huge blow to United Nations inspections of Iranian nuclear sites.

Officials from the International Atomic Energy Agency left Iran late Tuesday night after failing to reach an agreement to inspect a military site outside Tehran.  The two-day talks were the second time in a month the IAEA attempted to gain access to the facility.

A November IAEA report listed the military complex at Parchin – just outside Tehran – as a site where Iran’s nuclear program tests explosives for future nuclear warheads.

“We engaged in a constructive spirit, but no agreement was reached,” IAEA Director General Yukiya Amano said in a statement.

The denial of U.N. inspections is the latest development pointing to Iran using nuclear capabilities for future military use. Iranian officials have repeatedly stated the country’s enrichment of uranium is for use in civilian power plants.

President Barack Obama and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta agree a nuclear-capable Iran is unacceptable. At a Friday town hall meeting at Barksdale Air Force Base, Panetta hinted at the possibility of U.S. military action, saying Iranian weapons of mass destruction could “threaten the stability of the world.”

“We don’t want an Iran that basically spreads violence around the world, that supports terrorism, that conducts acts of violence,” Panetta said. “We, the United States, have all options on the table.”

Envisioning a military strike

But the panelists warned against military action on Iran’s nuclear sites. The current situation is similar to that of North Korea in 2006, said Trita Parsi, president of the National Iranian American Council. And it hasn’t reached the point at which economic and political sanctions aren’t enough.

“I think the risk for a military confrontation is higher than it has been in the past,” Parsi said. “But we’ve seen this movie about five times in the last decade.”

“There are far more options on the table. We’re not at a point at which such negative options are the only ones on the table.”

Ghaith Al-Omari, executive director at the American Task Force on Palestine, said while a strike might temporarily delay Iran’s nuclear programs, it could strengthen ties among the country’s regional allies.

“An attack on Iran could create a resurgence of sympathy,” he said, especially from such allies such as Hamas and Hezbollah. Both groups are considered terrorist organizations by the U.S. State Department.

There are various estimates as to when Tehran could become nuclear capable. A 2009 Congressional Research Service report on Iran’s nuclear programs estimated no sooner than 2013. Other sources suggest 2015 at the earliest.

Regardless, Parsi said, military action against Iranian nuclear sites will reinforce the regime’s desire for warheads and accelerate its related military programs.

A nuclear-capable Iran will multiply regional security threats – and not just from within the Islamic Republic. Sneh, a former member of Israel’s Knesset, said once Tehran gets the bomb, “it’s a matter of several years…that Saudia Arabia, Egypt and Turkey will have a bomb of their own.”

Hope for a peaceful solution

Despite the multiplied threats, military action is not the best way to inhibit Iranian nuclear proliferation, he added. Current sanctions on the Iranian Central Bank are slowly taking their toll on the nation’s economy.

The New York Times reported on Feb. 8 that sanctions against the Islamic Republic are leading to rampant inflation and a plunging currency, placing strain on the nation’s population. In response, Iran has been in talks with Russia and China to replace the U.S. dollar in order to up its oil exports, according to the state-backed Fars news agency.

Despite the reports, the regime downplayed the effects of sanctions yesterday, Fars reported, saying economic and political pressure “will not yield any results.”

The Islamist government’s stoicism has led experts – including Panetta – to predict an Israeli strike against Tehran’s nuclear sites as early as April.

But Sneh cautioned against overestimating the Jewish state’s willingness to strike. Attacking the Islamic Republic’s nuclear facilities is a merely a last resort, he added.

“No one in Israel is trigger happy about Iran,” Sneh said. “We all know the repercussions. We all know the unavoidable price for a military strike. But all of us know that, in a certain situation, the price is worth paying.”

There is still reason for hope in the Islamic Republic, Sneh said, and it comes from within.

“The Iranian people want this regime to be changed,” he said. “Not be external force, not by military action from an external power, but by its own will. They want to live freely.”

The deteriorating economic outlook for Iran’s people is likely to decrease their faith in the regime. Sneh said continued sanctions could expedite an uprising against it.

“I believe that a revolutionary situation can be created in Iran,” he said. ” It’s almost unavoidable. The question is when.”

A new company called RxAlly has created a network of pharmacies that will share technology and create more personal relationships with patients.

“Pharmacists are the most underutilized professionals in the health care industry,” Greg Wasson, the CEO of Walgreens, said at the National Press Club Wednesday.

Walgreens’ 8,000 locations are joining 12,000 pharmacies in the RxAlly network to streamline patient care.

Bruce Roberts, the CEO of RxAlly said patients visit the pharmacy more than their primary doctor, yet $290 billion is wasted on improper use of medicine.

“The pharmacist needs to play a more meaningful role in patient care with face-to-face interaction,” Roberts said.  “I want to create a virtual army of coaches.”

Roberts has started many companies in the pharmaceutical industry with a focus on technology.  He started this new venture because he saw a need for an overhaul in pharmaceutical patient care.

According to a study by the New England Health Care Institute, 10 percent of annual health care costs can be avoided.

“The single greatest opportunity to bend the curve is helping patients take their meds appropriately,” said Valerie Fleishman, the executive director of the institute.  “Medication adherence is the 800-pound gorilla in our health care system today and if we are serious about reigning in health care costs we need to make this a national priority.”

RxAlly wants to change the culture of patient and pharmacists interactions.  Roberts said patients are more willing to take medication correctly if they meet with their pharmacist.  His company plans to offer incentives for patients to talk with their pharmacists outside of the over-the-counter interaction.

“Pharmacists are the most-accessible professionals in the health care industry,” Wasson said.  “70 percent of Americans do not have or don’t utilize a primary care physician.  Who is positioned better than community pharmacists to fill that void?”

RxAlly’s launch comes just a month before the Supreme Court examines the constitutionality of President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul.  Robert’s said the services that RxAlly provides will be increasingly valuable once health care is available to millions more patients.

Don Anderson, the president of the Independent Pharmacy Cooperative, said RxAlly is a “game changer.”

Peter Adamson of the Children's Oncology Group said Congress needs to step up and pass legislation to curb future drug shortages. (Safiya Merchant/Medill)

WASHINGTON  – To counter the shortage of two important cancer drugs, the Food and Drug Administration reached out to U.S. and foreign manufacturers Tuesday in an attempt to increase the flow of the drugs to American markets and hospitals.

FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg said Tuesday her agency has chosen a foreign manufacturer to produce  an alternative to Doxil, which is often used to treat ovarian cancers and AIDS-related Kaposi’s sarcoma. And to ease the shortage of Methotrexate, another drug that treats diseases like lung and breast cancer, the FDA has approved a preservative-free version from APP Pharmaceuticals for manufacture and distribution as early as next month.

“We stand ready to do all that we can, and to continue our collaboration with industry and other stakeholders so that patients have products that are not only safe and effective, but products that are there when they need them the most,” Hamburg said at the FDA’s announcement.

Doxil and Methotrexate were in short supply last year, according to Valerie Jensen, associate director for the FDA’s drug shortage program.  Hospitals actually started running out of Methotrexate last week, she said.

To make up for the lack of Doxil, the FDA has arranged to temporarily import an alternative drug, Lipodox, from Sun Pharma Global FZE, an India-based pharmaceutical company with a distributor in Detroit.

The FDA said in a statement it has “prioritized review” of APP’s version of Methotrexate. APP’s medication is expected to hit the mass market in March.

Sandra Kweder, the deputy director of the FDA’s Office of New Drugs, said that when the agency expects a drug shortage, multiple steps are taken to ensure a continued supply for American patients. Some of these actions include urging the original manufacturers of the drugs to increase production, and looking to international vendors who make the same drug.

Besides finding new sources for the cancer drugs, the FDA also provided drug manufacturers Tuesday with new guidelines on when and how to inform the agency of any looming drug shortages.

The agency acted in response  to President Obama’s Executive Order last October , when he urged the FDA to deal aggressively with future drug shortages.

Still, Peter Adamson, the chairman of the Children’s Oncology Group, said he thinks Congress also needs to act in order to prevent drug shortages. Adamson said Congress should approve  passthe Preserving Access to Life-Saving Medications Act, which requires drug manufacturers to report any suspicions of shortages.

“I certainly understand that passing legislation is complex, it’s difficult. I suspect, however, that it is no more difficult than curing a child with cancer,” Adamson said. “And I can absolutely tell you that it is no more complex or difficult than what children every day face…in their fight against child cancer.”

Kit Fox / Medill

WASHINGTON — The first time Danica Patrick sat behind a steering wheel, her Go Kart had no brakes.  She slammed into a concrete wall and ruined her parent’s gift to their two daughters.

The first time she raced professionally in an Indy car, she woke up in a hospital with her mother and a priest standing over her.

And on Sunday, Patrick will compete in her first NASCAR Daytona 500.

Patrick’s story is one of firsts: The first woman to lead an Indianapolis 500; the first to win an IndyCar series race, and the best finish for a woman in an Indianapolis 500 at third place.

“The media started asking me who my role model was.  That was a really weird question for me because I never really had one,” Patrick said at the National Press Club Tuesday.  “I always wanted to be the first me, not the next somebody else.”

In a forum usually reserved for diplomats and political figures, Patrick answered questions from members of the media and public at the National Press Club about her transition to NASCAR, being a woman in a male-dominated sport and life as a racecar driver.

Q. What is the biggest difference between an IndyCar race and a NASCAR race?

Q. Why did you decide to leave Indy racing and transition into NASCAR racing?

Q. How do you prepare physically and mentally for the rigors of driving in a race?

Q. How much weight do you lose during a race?

Q. What would constitute a success for you in NASCAR?

Q. Have you ever received a speeding ticket or do you find it difficult to drive slowly on the freeway?