Latest Urban Institute Reports

According to the 2010 American Community Survey, 1 in 10, or 1.3 million, nonelderly veterans neither has insurance coverage nor uses Veterans Affairs care. An additional 0.9 million adults and children in veterans families are uninsured. Uninsured rates among veterans and their families vary across states. Both uninsured veterans and family members report less access to needed health care than their insured counterparts. The Affordable Care Act could increase uninsured veterans coverage: nearly half would qualify for expanded Medicaid, and up to 40 percent could potentially qualify for subsidized health insurance exchange coverage if they lack access to employer coverage.

This brief draws on the experiences of five states-Colorado, Kansas, Minnesota, New York and Oregon—that received federal State Health Access Program (SHAP) grant funding to expand health coverage using approaches that included community-based outreach and improvements to Medicaid/CHIP eligibility and enrollment processes. We describe the best practices that these states shared with regards to activities related to outreach, streamlining application and enrollment processes, and modernizing eligibility determination systems, and consider the implications of these practices for implementing the Affordable Care Act (ACA).

Join Janice Eberly, the Treasury Department's assistant secretary for economic policy and chief economist, for a discussion of wealth distribution across generations that delves into what we have inherited and what we would leave for future generations. Her remarks will be followed by responses from Rodney Harrell, a senior strategic policy adviser at the AARP Public Policy Institute, and Leticia Miranda, the senior policy adviser for economic security policy at the National Council of La Raza. Rolf Pendall, the director of the Urban Institute’s Metropolitan Housing and Communities Policy Center, will moderate.

Topics Discussed are: Who wins and who loses from exemption? A focus on the current major pressure points: nonprofit hospitals and colleges and universities. Will global solutions remain elusive? Will we see more use of "voluntary" PILOTs? What should a well-designed PILOT program look like, and how should it be created?

Taxes and transfers at the state and federal level can have a large impact on the well-being of low-income families. How large a role states play varies, as demonstrated by the Urban Institute’s recently released Net Income Change Calculator (http://nicc.urban.org). In twelve states, state taxes account for over 10 percent of total support and in others, state income taxes provide no support.

The global financial crisis drained government coffers and rocked public confidence around the world. Many leaders now believe taxes on financial transactions and/or financial activities could relieve these shortfalls and shore up the public’s faith in the workings of economies near and far. Some policymakers and observers want to coordinate these new taxes internationally to avoid the flight of financial markets. But can financial taxes raise substantial revenue? And who would bear the taxes: the financial sector or the small investor? Will these taxes reduce risky financial activities or impede healthy market operations? Our panel of experts will discuss these and other timely questions.

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) requires that most Americans have health insurance by January 1, 2014. To help achieve this coverage goal, the ACA includes several provisions calling for major changes in state eligibility and enrollment processes currently used in public health insurance programs. To a large extent much of the responsibility for creating these eligibility and enrollment systems resides with the states. In this brief we draw on the experiences of five states—Colorado, Kansas, Minnesota, New York and Oregon—that had begun modernizing their eligibility and enrollment systems and processes prior to the ACA. We describe the best practices that these states have employed with regard to these activities, and consider the implications of these practices for implementing the ACA.

As unemployment surged during the Great Recession and subsequent recovery, older workers were less likely than their younger counterparts to lose their jobs. However, unemployed workers in their fifties were about a fifth less likely than those age 25 to 34 to become reemployed between 2008 and 2011, and they experienced steep wage losses. Median hourly earnings for reemployed workers age 51 to 61 were 21 percent lower on the new job than the prelayoff job, compared with only 7 percent for those age 25 to 34. These declines may reflect lost productivity or employer reluctance to hire older workers.

This evaluation examined the implementation and outcomes of a 2008 National Institute of Justice program designed to increase the volume of DNA evidence processing through innovative methods designed to increase efficiency instead of expanding laboratory capacities. Four crime labs funded by this program participated in the evaluation. The key implementation findings were that there were significant implementation delays, largely the result of external demands and administrative constraints; and, project management varied across the sites with a laboratory-wide collaborative approach appearing to be most successful. DNA evidence processing productivity and efficiency also varied across sites. Nonetheless, outcome findings did provide support for the hypothesis that DNA processing can be improved in novel and innovative ways besides simply increasing capacity.

Individuals who finished college were far less likely to live in households where any member received public assistance than those with less education, both before and after the Great Recession. The rates of receipt of aid in households of advanced degree holders roughly doubled between 2007 and 2010, but still remained under two percent. The rate for those with less than a high school education was 22 percent, and for high school graduates the rate is 13 percent, increasing by 8 and 6 percentage points, respectively, since 2007. The increases were in food assistance, not cash assistance.