Jared Bahir Browsh, University of Colorado Boulder

As a top producer of children’s entertainment, Disney is no stranger to America’s culture wars.

Liberals have long criticized the company for its products’ promotion of gender stereotypes and racist tropes. Meanwhile, conservatives have excoriated the company for being “too woke,” whether it was casting actresses of color in live action remakes of the “The Little Mermaid” and “Snow White” or coming out against a Florida statute that curtails discussion of gender and sexuality in public schools.

As Disney CEO Bob Iger grapples with the unenviable task of navigating criticism from all sides, I can’t help but recall how executives decided to table an effort to “Disneyfy” American history 30 years ago.

My research and teaching investigates how media companies such as Disney construct historical narratives for popular consumption. I can only imagine how today’s culture wars would have expressed themselves at Disney’s proposed theme park, which would have featured everything from Civil War forts to Native American villages.

Disney eyes the outskirts of DC

From his early days as an animator, Walt Disney presented a sanitized and nostalgic view of America.

Mickey Mouse represented the “everyman,” while the company’s animators drew a largely optimistic portrait of America, first in the studio’s animated films and later in their theme parks. Anyone who has walked down Disneyland’s Main Street, U.S.A., witnessed Magic Kingdom’s Hall of Presidents or visited Epcot’s American Adventure can see how Disney strives to present an uncomplicated, uncritical view of the nation and its leaders.

In 1984, Michael Eisner became the company’s CEO. He was credited with revitalizing Disney’s brand through producing hit animated features such as “Beauty and the Beast” and “The Little Mermaid,” and spearheading theme parks such as Disney–MGM Studios – now known as Hollywood Studios – and Disneyland Paris.

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A visit to Colonial Williamsburg inspired Eisner’s next venture: a theme park based on U.S. history that would be built outside of Washington, D.C.

Beginning in 1993, the company quietly started purchasing real estate in northern Virginia using shell companies. The land acquisitions became public knowledge only a few days before the announcement of the theme park, aptly named Disney’s America.

The news was largely welcomed by politicians. Eisner had already gained the support of the state’s outgoing and incoming governors, along with the Virginia Commission on Population Growth and Development. The plan was to build the park in Haymarket, Virginia, a small, wealthy area southwest of Washington, D.C., a few miles from Manassas, the site of two major Civil War battles.

History isn’t so simple

Although Disney had diligently worked to consolidate support ahead of the announcement, signs of conflict emerged during the first press conference, which featured Bob Weis, a Disney vice president who had helped oversee the planning of several theme parks.

“This is not a Pollyanna view of America,” he told the group of assembled reporters. “We want to make you a Civil War soldier. We want to make you feel what it was like to be a slave or what it was like to escape through the underground railroad.”

Questions over how Disney would tell the complex – often discriminatory – history of the nation spurred a group of historians, led by David McCullough, to lodge their concerns: How would Disney construct its narrative of the United States? And how would the park affect Manassas, one of the most important Civil War battle sites?

According to the original plans and brochures, Disney’s America would contain nine sections: a Colonial-era Presidents Square, an Indigenous village, Ellis Island, a factory town from the Industrial Revolution, a Civil War fort, a county fair, an early 19th-century port, a World War II-era battlefield and a Depression-era family farm.

On the surface, these themed areas seemed fitting. You could easily see them as exhibits at the Smithsonian. But issues emerged when people took into account that this was still a Disney theme park, with entertaining guests and making money likely taking precedence over historical accuracy and contemporary sensitivities and sensibilities.

The story of immigration, for example, would have been told through the musical-comedy stylings of Kermit the Frog and the other Muppets.

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There were also concerns over how Disney would handle the exploitative and violent history of the treatment of a number of groups.

This included the enslavement of Africans and the genocide of Indigenous populations, the latter of which was also connected to the forthcoming 1995 release of “Pocahontas.” Historians later highlighted the film’s distorted history, and it isn’t far-fetched to imagine rides or attractions based on those misrepresentations at Disney’s America.

Mickey Mouse goes to Washington

Even as plans came together for Disney, criticism began to mount.

Disney issued an ultimatum to the Virginia legislature to improve infrastructure surrounding the site, threatening to abandon the project if the US$150 million for infrastructure improvements were not passed on the last day of the Virginia General Assembly’s legislative session in March 1994.

In June, the U.S. House of Representatives introduced a resolution opposing the park, and the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources held a hearing regarding the proposed project’s environmental impact.

The now-infamous hearing featured discussions regarding sewage, traffic and lodging, and even saw U.S. Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell of Colorado, who at the time was a registered Democrat, place a Mickey Mouse hat on the lectern in a show of support.

As criticism mounted, Disney decided to shift its approach. In the summer of 1994, it renamed the project Disney’s American Celebration.

Rather than highlight periods or events in American history, the new concept would focus more on themes: Democracy, Work, Family, Generations, Streets of America and the Land.

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Many of the attractions featured in these lands would have resembled attractions already in Disney parks. For example, Generations would have been similar to the Magic Kingdom’s Carousel of Progress, while the Land was already a pavilion at Epcot.

This would have also opened more opportunities for sponsorship. The Work section of the park would have included virtual factory tours of popular brands such as Apple or Crayola, while Streets of America would have featured cuisine from around the country, similar to Downtown Disney, which opened in 1997 in Disney World and in 2001 at Disneyland.

It all falls apart

Disney abruptly announced on Sept. 28, 1994, that it would abandon these plans.

Although the criticism from historians was a factor, there were also concerns about the park’s profitability in colder months. The company faced mounting debt from its Paris theme park and uncertain leadership after the death of senior executive Frank Wells in a helicopter crash in April 1994. Eisner, meanwhile, had undergone bypass surgery in July 1994.

Many of the attractions that were planned for the Virginia site found their way into Disney parks, particularly in Disney’s California Adventure in Anaheim.

Disney, both under Walt’s leadership and after his death, has long leveraged patriotism for the sake of its media content and park experiences. From Mickey Mouse to the Hall of Presidents, Disney’s nostalgic, linear and uncomplicated view of American progress has been foundational to the Disney experience.

However, an entire park dedicated to this approach – just down the road from a real battlefield integral to the bloodiest war in U.S. history – was too much for historians and other critics to ignore.

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Disney’s failure to profit from an uncritical celebration of America may have been a blessing in disguise, as it avoided constructing yet another battlefield in the culture wars.

Jared Bahir Browsh, Assistant Teaching Professor of Critical Sports Studies, University of Colorado Boulder

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Natasha S. Vitek, Stony Brook University (The State University of New York)

A rare, nearly complete fossil of an extinct North American porcupine helped me and my colleagues solve a decades-long debate about how the modern North American porcupine evolved from its ancestors.

Published in Current Biology, our paper argues that North American porcupine ancestors may well date back 10 million years, but they wouldn’t be recognizable until about 8 million years later.

By comparing the bone structure of porcupines across North America and South America, we determined that for those 8 million years, North American porcupines unexpectedly still looked like their cousins, the Neotropical porcupines, which live across tropical Central America and South America today.

Our findings detail the North American porcupine’s evolutionary path from South America – and also solve the mystery of why it’s been so difficult to find its ancestors.

I’m a paleontologist who researches the fossilized bones and teeth of extinct animals. With museum curator Jon Bloch, I created a class where we analyzed bone structure to reach the conclusions of our study.

Why it matters

The modern North American porcupine is distinctive among its spiky relatives. It has a short tail, a jaw that can scrape bark from trees and weighs between 10 and 25 pounds (4.5 and 11.3 kilograms).

While clearly related, Neotropical porcupines look different. They have long, grasping tails, weaker jaws and weigh between 1.5 and 10 pounds (0.68 and 4.5 kilograms).

DNA analyses of modern animals estimate that these two groups separated about 10 million years ago.

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This is where the mystery comes in. Fossils of the North American porcupine are all younger than 1.8 million years old. In other words, roughly 8.2 million years’ worth of fossils of North American porcupine were missing.

All researchers had were bits of jaws and tails that looked like they belonged to Neotropical porcupines.

Two competing hypotheses could explain the similarity.

Some scientists argued that the jaw and tail fossils of early ancestors of North American porcupines should look more like their modern descendants. Researchers who backed this idea suggested that the fossil record was incomplete for some unexplained reason, but that it was still possible that fossils that supported their hypothesis may eventually turn up.

Other scientists suggested that all early ancestral porcupines might have had jaws and tails similar to today’s Neotropical porcupines. North American porcupine ancestors might be hidden in the existing fossil record because – based on jaws and tails alone – they look identical to Neotropical porcupine ancestors. Only younger fossils would show distinctive traits because that’s when those traits appeared.

This debate went on for decades. It was impossible to solve with the available fossils.

How we did our work

Then researchers from the Florida Museum of Natural History unearthed a 2 million-year-old nearly complete skeleton of a porcupine in north-central Florida in 2005.

The fossil had a long tail and no bark-gnawing jaw, similar to Neotropical porcupines. But it also had dozens more bones that we could use to resolve relationships.

Collecting that evidence required combing through all the bones, looking for hundreds of minute details – like the shapes of ridges or patterns of boundaries on bones – and comparing these details with skeletons of modern North American and Neotropical porcupines. Bloch and I created a course in which students each took on one portion of the project.

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Together, we came up with a list of nearly 150 informative details. Even though the specimen had a few traits similar to Neotropical porcupines, more evidence supported the idea that this fossil was a closer relative of North American porcupines.

Since this porcupine had a jaw and tail like its Neotropical cousins, it’s likely that most older relatives of the North American porcupine were also missing the distinctive traits of their modern descendants.

In other words, the solution to the mystery is that the fossil record for North American porcupines appeared young because the reinforced jaw and shorter tail evolved relatively recently. Porcupines looked different than what we expected for much of their 10 million years of ancestry.

The Research Brief is a short take on interesting academic work.

Natasha S. Vitek, Assistant Professor of Ecology and Evolution, Stony Brook University (The State University of New York)

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Alex Hoagland, University of Toronto and Michal Horný, UMass Amherst

Even though preventive care is supposed to be free by law for millions of Americans thanks to the Affordable Care Act, many don’t receive recommended preventive services, especially racial and ethnic minorities and other at-risk patient groups.

The Affordable Care Act exempted preventive services from patient cost-sharing for large chunks of the population. This means that if you receive preventive screening and have private insurance, including through the ACA Marketplace, there should be no copay at time of service, and you shouldn’t get a bill later on. Easy enough, right?

Wrong. Our team of health economists has shown that patients spend millions of dollars every year on unexpected bills for preventive care. The main reason for this is that no specific regulations were put in place to determine exactly which services should be exempted, or for whom, or how often. This omission has left many people on the hook to pay for valuable health care they thought would be free.

Now, in our recently published research in the journal JAMA Network Open, we’ve found that the burden of paying for what should be free preventive care disproportionately falls on some patient groups.

Inequitable claim denials

Looking at data from over 1.5 million patients, our study demonstrates that insurers deny preventive claims for patients from marginalized communities at higher rates than for those from majority groups.

For example, low-income patients were 43% more likely than high-income patients to have their claims denied. In addition, Asian, Hispanic and non-Hispanic Black patients were each roughly twice as likely as non-Hispanic white patients to have claims denied.

Not only were these patients denied routine benefits, but they also saw large differences in rates of billing errors. For example, patients with a high school diploma or less experienced denials due to this kind of billing error almost twice as often than patients with college degrees. All of these services should have been covered by an insurer.

Research on preventive care access is commonly based only on claims data, which doesn’t typically have information on patient demographics. This limits a study’s ability to detect differences across patient groups. Our study, however, uses a combination of linked claims data, remittance data containing information on why claims were denied and whether they were resubmitted, and demographic data from self-reports, purchase transactions and voter registries. Together, this richer dataset allowed us to examine differences in denials based on race and ethnicity, education and income, including reasons why patients were denied care.

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Preventive care is essential

Equitable access to preventive health care is about more than just physicals, although those are important, too. Preventive health care includes key screenings for cancers, cardiovascular disease and diabetes, access to contraceptives, and mental health checkups, among other services. Ensuring that insurers provide equal coverage for these services for all patients is important to improve health outcomes and quality of life for everyone while reducing future health care costs.

Our results paint a picture of the kinds of hurdles patients face when they seek health screenings. Patients from underrepresented groups were not only more likely to be told their care wouldn’t be covered. They were also more likely to have their claims processed incorrectly, leading to more frequent denials and, ultimately, larger medical bills. https://www.youtube.com/embed/Uc2uG6LhFQQ?wmode=transparent&start=0 Few patients appeal claim denials, even though rejections may be unjustified.

Unexpected bills can affect both a patient’s current health and their future use of health care services. These hurdles can exacerbate an already tenuous trust in a fragmented health care system, making patients less likely to return for follow-up screenings.

Stacked coverage denials for patients who live with multiple marginalized identities or who are less able to advocate for themselves can further entrench racial and socioeconomic inequities.

Ensuring equitable access

Our study paints a compelling picture of where different patients may face hurdles for getting preventive care, but more research is necessary to identify how to ensure equitable access.

As our study looked only at preventive services, we will also need to see how our findings generalize to other forms of health care. More research is also needed to understand how other vulnerable patient groups, such as LGBTQ+ patients or patients with multiple chronic conditions, fare when trying to access care.

Our team is currently studying how actual bills for care differ across patient groups and how patients respond when bills arrive. In our study, more than two-thirds of denied claims were never resubmitted to insurers, meaning that many billing errors go uncorrected at patients’ expense.

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Equitable policy on multiple fronts can help rectify the way preventive care is inconsistently and inequitably provided. These include uniform coverage of preventive care by insurers, standardized billing practices for physicians and improved means for patients to advocate for themselves. This can help ensure that everyone has appropriate access to lifesaving health care.

Alex Hoagland, Assistant Professor of Health Economics, University of Toronto and Michal Horný, Assistant Professor of Health Policy and Management, UMass Amherst

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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