View Research by Author - Kevin Perese

Citation URL: http://www.urban.org/KevinPerese

This report details the development of a third version of MINT (Modeling Income in the Near Term), a tool for simulating the retirement incomes of members of the Baby Boom and neighboring cohorts. MINT3 can produce projections of economic and demographic characteristics in the year 2020, at the time of retirement, and for other years and ages. It can be used both to construct a baseline using alternative economic and demographic assumptions and to analyze the distributional consequences of a variety of Social Security policy changes.

Employer-sponsored health insurance (ESI) coverage has special importance for the near elderly. Unlike elderly Americans, those in their late fifties and early sixties are not eligible for Medicare benefits, unless they are disabled. Because the risk of expensive health problems increases with age in adulthood, non-group health insurance coverage can be prohibitively expensive for the near elderly. Going without health insurance altogether can be especially risky, because the threat of serious health problems can expose uninsured near-elderly persons to catastrophic health care costs. Employers, then, may provide the only affordable source of health insurance coverage for most persons approaching the Medicare eligibility age.

The state-by-state descriptions of cash assistance programs show that states have used the flexibility TANF granted to take very different approaches to major decisions surrounding welfare reform in areas such as program eligibility and benefits, time limits, and work requirements. Easy-to-read charts simplify making cross-state comparisons on many features of state welfare reform plans. These include asset limits, income eligibility limits, diversion assistance payments, eligibility of two-parent families, time limits, exemptions to time limits, extensions of time limits, work sanctions, work exemptions, work requirement time limits, benefit amounts, earnings disregards, family caps, and child-support pass-throughs. Especially hospitals, to continue to provide care to the uninsured. Nine findings relating to changes to Medicaid, HIPAA, employer-sponsored coverage, and long-term care dominate the study's portrait of state health policy.

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