Inequalities

Tag: health insurance

  • Has Income Inequality Really Ballooned Since the 1970s?

    One of the most influential lines of research on income inequality come from Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez’s study of income tax records in the United States and elsewhere. Summarizing this work in Slate, Timothy Noah states: “The share of national income going to the top 1 percent (the Rich) more than doubled during the […]

  • The Oregon Health Study and the Medicalization of Health Policy

    Daniel Goldberg considers the polarizing debate about the recently published results from the Oregon Health Study on public insurance — and argues that we may be missing the point. According to the website, the Oregon Health Study “is the first randomized controlled experiment to examine the causal effects of having some type of insurance coverage […]

  • Adding Health Care Spending to the Poverty Equation

    I discussed the challenges of measuring poverty in the United States in a three part series on this blog last year. The official poverty line is based on pre-tax income adjusted for household size. The main alternative to the official poverty measure is the Census Bureau’s Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM), which adjusts for many more […]

  • How much is health care worth to the poor?

    In my very first Inequalities blog post I considered the argument that the United States has a more generous safety net for the poor than conventional comparisons with European states would suggest because we spend so much on public health care programs for the poor, elderly, and disabled. Subsequently, I reviewed work by Richard Burkhauser […]

  • Inequality Roundup, Stories in the News

    Today I want to post a roundup of some items in the news that piqued my interest, we have poverty measurement, disabilities, spending on children in the US, Medicaid and mortality, getting high schoolers to go to college, and health/income inequalities in the OECD:  “Official Poverty Measure Ignores Key Improvements in the Safety Net Since […]