Related UI Researchers

Publications on Health/Healthcare

People uninsured for any part of 2008 spend about $30 billion out of pocket and receive approximately $56 billion in uncompensated care while uninsured. Government programs finance about 75 percent of uncompensated care. If all uninsured people were fully covered, their medical spending would increase by $122.6 billion. The increase represents 5 percent of current national health spending and 0.8 percent of gross domestic product. However, it is neither the cost of a specific plan nor necessarily the same as the government's costs, which could be higher, depending on plans' financing structures and the extent of crowd-out.

U.S. public policy has increasingly been conceived, debated, and evaluated through the lenses of politics and ideology. The fundamental question--Will the policy work?--too often gets short shrift or even ignored. A remedy is evidence-based policy -- a rigorous approach that draws on careful data collection, experimentation, and both quantitative and qualitative analysis to determine what the problem is, which ways it can be addressed, and the probable impacts of each of these ways. Examples of how evidence informs good policy and lack of evidence can invite bad include health insurance coverage, welfare reform, sentencing policy, and redress for housing discrimination.

This review of existing estimates confirms an upward trend in the number of facilities, beds, and residents in residential care alternatives to nursing homes, often collectively referred to as "assisted living." Estimates vary substantially, however, depending on the methodology and the type of data used. Key sources of differences are population included (i.e. aged, all ages); definition used to identify assisted living, and for population-based surveys that include both community and facility settings, survey-specific definitions of "facilities" and whether settings identified as assisted living are limited to those meeting the survey-specific facility definition. Greater disagreement exists with respect to trends in the number of nursing homes and users, even between estimates from the same data source.

Older adults with disabilities increasingly are entering residential care alternatives to nursing homes. This study used Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey data for 1992-1998 to compare the characteristics of nursing home and alternative facilities and residents. The proportion of elders in alternative residential care settings increased from 0.8% in 1992 to 1.3% in 1998, and characteristics of facilities and their residents suggest that alternative settings are caring for a more disabled clientele over time. Blacks, long under-represented in nursing homes, increased as a proportion of nursing home residents, but growth in alternative settings was disproportionately among whites and others. Further research is needed to understand the implications of these trends.

This brief examines the dental access problems experienced by adults ages 19 to 64 in families with incomes at or below 200 percent of the Federal Poverty Level (FPL) using the 2005 Kaiser Low-Income Coverage and Access Survey. This report finds that both dental coverage and access to care are limited for low-income adults and that even low-income adults with dental coverage are not getting sufficient levels of needed dental care.