The Decline in Lifetime Earnings Mobility in the U.S.: Evidence from Survey-Linked Administrative Data
Published: | 5:22 pm | Posted in: Inequality
Abstract There is a sizable literature that examines whether intergenerational mobility has declined as inequality has increased. This literature is motivated by a desire to understand whether increasing inequality has made it more difficult to rise from humble origins. An equally important component of economic mobility is the ability to move across the earnings distribution […]
A Tale of Two Diseases: Mental Illness and HIV/AIDS
Published: | 5:10 pm | Posted in: Mental Health
In 2011, I was speaking at an international AIDS conference where the first two speakers were from UNAIDS and Harvard. UNAIDS announced a new campaign: Getting to Zero: Zero New HIV Infections, Zero AIDS‐Related Deaths, and Zero Discrimination. (A year later, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called for an AIDS‐Free Generation.) The Harvard researcher reported the […]
County Jail or Psychiatric Hospital? Ethical Challenges in Correctional Mental Health Care
Published: | 5:31 pm | Posted in: Mental Health
Abstract Approximately 20% of the roughly 2.5 million individuals incarcerated in the United States have a serious mental illness (SMI). As a result of their illnesses, these individuals are often more likely to commit a crime, end up incarcerated, and languish in correctional settings without appropriate treatment. The objective of the present study was to […]
Projected Workforce of Psychiatrists in the United States: A Population Analysis
Published: | 5:59 pm | Posted in: Mental Health
Abstract Objective: This analysis quantified and assessed the projected workforce of psychiatrists in the United States through 2050 on the basis of population data. Methods: With use of data from the Association of American Medical Colleges (2000–2015), American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology (2000–2015), and U.S. Census Bureau (2000–2050), the psychiatrist workforce was projected through […]
Health Care Spending in the United States and Other High-Income Countries
Published: | 6:11 pm | Posted in: Health Care Policy and Reform
Key Points Question Why is health care spending in the United States so much greater than in other high-income countries? Findings In 2016, the United States spent nearly twice as much as 10 high-income countries on medical care and performed less well on many population health outcomes. Contrary to some explanations for high spending, social spending and […]
Minnesota Managed Care Longitudinal Data Analysis
Published: | 7:28 pm | Posted in: MLTC
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY This study tests the hypothesis that delivery of Medicare-funded and Medicaidfunded services to dually eligible beneficiaries aged 65 and older via fully integrated managed care plans is associated with stronger community-based service utilization patterns compared to service delivery when Medicare- and Medicaid-funded services are delivered independently. The hope is that integrated Medicare-Medicaid managed […]
Inequality in the long run
Published: | 5:49 pm | Posted in: Inequality
The distribution of income and wealth is a widely discussed and controversial topic. Do the dynamics of private capital accumulation inevitably lead to the concentration of income and wealth in ever fewer hands, as Karl Marx believed in the 19th century? Or do the balancing forces of growth, competition, and technological progress lead in later […]
How social democrats may become reluctant radicals: Thomas Piketty’s Capital and Wolfgang Streeck’s Buying Time
Published: | 6:23 pm | Posted in: Neoliberalism
Abstract The continuing ramifications of the financial crisis of 2007–2008 have forced social scientists to raise fundamental questions about the relationship between capitalism, democracy and inequality. In particular, Thomas Piketty’s Capital and Wolfgang Streeck’s Buying Time focus on, respectively, the economic and the political contradictions of capitalistic societies. Piketty argues that capitalism naturally tends towards […]
Medicare and Social Security: What you paid compared with what you get
Published: | 5:41 pm | Posted in: Social Security
Earlier this week, we published a story and several charts showing that average government spending on each elderly person is $26,355, compared to $11,822 for each child. Almost immediately, readers wrote to condemn us for overlooking what they considered a key issue. “Your statements as to expenditures on the elderly is specious at best, and at the […]
Family Options Study: Short-Term Impacts of Housing and Services Interventions for Homeless Families
Published: | 6:14 pm | Posted in: Poverty and Public Policy
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) undertook the Family Options Study to gather evidence about which types of housing and services interventions work best for homeless families. The study compares the effects of three active interventions— permanent housing subsidy (SUB), community-based rapid re-housing (CBRR), and project-based transitional housing (PBTH)—to one […]
401(K)/IRA HOLDINGS IN 2016: AN UPDATE FROM THE SCF
Published: | 8:18 pm | Posted in: Private Pensions
Introduction The key supplement to Social Security benefits is accumulations in employer-sponsored retirement plans. Increasingly these accumulations occur in 401(k) plans and Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs). The release of the Federal Reserve’s 2016 Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) is a great opportunity to see how a strengthening economy, the continued maturation of the 401(k) system, […]
The German Long-Term Care Insurance Program: Evolution and Recent Developments
Published: | 8:07 pm | Posted in: Long-Term Care
Abstract Background and Objectives: Since 1995, Germany has operated one of the longest-running public programs providing universal support for the cost of long term services and supports (LTSS). Its self-funding, social insurance approach provides basic supports to nearly all Germans. We discuss its design and development, including recent reforms expanding the program and ensuring its ongoing […]
The Ryan Budget and Medicare – Headed The Wrong Way
Published: | 8:00 pm | Posted in: Health Care Policy and Reform
As today’s older Americans look forward to retirement, they worry about whether Medicare will meet their needs – indeed, whether it will even be there. Both worries are justified. Medicare has been a godsend to senior citizens, but its protections are eroding and need to be improved. Unfortunately, many politicians in Washington want to place […]
Are Retirees Falling Short? Reconciling the Conflicting Evidence
Published: | 1:44 pm | Posted in: Retirement Security
Abstract This paper examines conflicting assessments of whether people will have adequate retirement income to maintain their pre-retirement standard of living. The studies that it examines use data from the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF), the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), and the HRS supplement Consumption and Activities Mail Survey (CAMS). Critical components of the analysis are behavioral assumptions about household […]
Investment Returns: Defined Benefit vs. Defined Contribution Plans
Published: | 1:42 pm | Posted in: Private Pensions
The brief’s key findings are: The analysis compares returns by plan type from 1990-2012 using data from the U.S. Department of Labor’s Form 5500. During this period, defined benefit plans outperformed 401(k)s by an average of 0.7 percent per year, even after controlling for plan size and asset allocation. In addition, much of the money accumulated in 401(k)s […]
The Affordable Care Act, Medicare Costs, and Retirement Security
Published: | 1:38 pm | Posted in: Medicare
The brief’s key findings are: The 2010 Affordable Care Act (ACA) included roughly 165 provisions to improve Medicare’s finances. The Medicare Trustees Report, which reflects the ACA provisions, shows dramatically lower cost projections for Medicare in the future. The Medicare actuaries also produce alternative projections assuming that the legislated restraints on growth in payments to health providers are […]
Why the Surge in Income Inequality?
Published: | 6:13 pm | Posted in: Inequality
Income inequality is more severe in the United States than in any other affluent longstanding-democratic country, and it has increased sharply in the past generation. The rise in inequality is mainly a story of growing separation between households in the top 1 percent and those in the ‘‘bottom’’ 99 percent. Income inequality within the lower 99 […]
50 Years of Cognitive Aging Theory
Published: | 6:31 pm | Posted in: Alzheimer's Disease: Cure & Care
This special edition commemorates the roughly 50 years of theoretical work on cognitive aging. As an Introduction to this issue, we first briefly review cognitive aging efforts prior to the mid-1960s, then describe the mid-1960s as a pivotal point for cognitive aging theory, and finally comment on how the field has evolved since then. Cognitive Aging […]
Inequality: What Can Be Done?
Published: | 6:30 pm | Posted in: Inequality
As discussed in Inequality: What Can Be Done?, the study of income inequality was “marginalized” in mainstream economics for much of the twentieth century. The most notable exception to this generalization is the work of Anthony B. Atkinson, the British economist who is the leading authority and pioneer of the economics of inequality. He even […]
Stumbling towards Stockholm
Published: | 6:27 pm | Posted in: Inequality
Lane Kenworthy believes that within the next half-century the United States will very likely become a “modern social democracy,” using government to advance a “good society” of economic security, opportunity (at least in the Amartya Sen sense of “capabilities”), and rising living standards for all. It will do this through generous and employment-friendly social policies […]