• Severe maternal morbidity (SMM)—defined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as unintended outcomes of labor and delivery that result in significant short- or long-term consequences to a woman’s health—is a major determinant of maternal mortality. Each year 15 of every 1,000 people hospitalized for a delivery experience SMM. In addition to adverse health outcomes, SMM can lead to disruptions in mother-infant bonding, which can compromise children’s social and emotional development, and confers substantial economic costs to families, communities, and insurers including Medicaid.

    November 19, 2021

  • The health and well-being of people are intimately tied to the conditions of life in their communities—conditions that structure opportunities and pathways for lifelong and even inter-generational well-being. Philanthropic efforts to improve community health must attend to the many systems that shape life conditions by focusing not only on whom, what, or where to fund, but equally importantly, on how to fund. The Urban Institute’s recent comprehensive review of health-focused community development investments made by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation between 2013 and 2019 yielded a wide range of insights about how philanthropic investments can drive enduring systems change needed to improve community health, well-being, and equity across the nation.

    October 1, 2021

  • Darrick Hamilton, the Henry Cohen Professor of Economics and Urban Policy at The New School, has gained national recognition for shaping policy solutions to close the racial wealth gap, which refers to how hundreds of years of structural racism have deprived Black families of resources that accumulate and transfer from one generation to the next. The typical White family has 10 times the wealth of the typical Black family and seven times the wealth of the typical Latinx family. This stark and persistent racial wealth gap has harmed generations, driven disparities and appears to be growing, even after controlling for household characteristics and long-term education and income gains by Black people.

    September 16, 2021

  • Childhood poverty is associated with worse health outcomes, including poor physical and cognitive development, and can adversely influence social and health outcomes in later life. While there is increasing interest in policies to address childhood poverty, limited research exists on whether current U.S. poverty alleviation policies, including the largest such program, the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), improve children's health.

    June 1, 2021

  • Since the early 1990s, Medicaid has been critical in providing insurance coverage for pregnant women with low incomes in the United States - pregnancy-related Medicaid coverage is available to women with incomes up to 200 percent of the federal poverty level in most states. Building on existing studies tracking changes in Medicaid coverage and uninsurance under the law, researchers Emily M. Johnston, Stacey McMorrow, Clara Alvarez Caraveo and Lisa Dubay examined data for new mothers with Medicaid-covered prenatal care in this study published in Health Affairs.

    April 5, 2021

  • Two pandemics upended our nation this year. The novel coronavirus (COVID-19) continues to sicken, kill, and reshape the lives of people everywhere, and is also testing our nation’s healthcare, public health, education, and social protection systems like never before. The second pandemic is one that has been with us since well before our nation’s founding but has come into much sharper focus this past year. Like a virus, it has infected virtually every aspect of our society including our laws and policies, a central focus of the Policies for Action (P4A) research program: systemic racism and its attendant social, economic, and political injustices. Although this time last year, the need for sound policy research was clear – especially in light of growing inequality in health and wealth, and the conditions that drive and are shaped by these – 2020 made these needs more visible and more urgent. As P4A enters its sixth year, a strong and growing community of policy researchers across the country, supported by a stellar National Advisory Committee, are generating a host of research findings crucially needed at this moment.

    January 29, 2021

  • To help people make ends meet, the United States offers a set of income supports for families with low-incomes, children, seniors and people with disabilities. Recent research from Policies for Action found these income support programs do more than reduce income inequality—they also save lives and promote health equity, particularly for women and children.

    December 14, 2020

  • Our homes and neighborhoods have a powerful impact on our physical and mental health, with the potential to exacerbate chronic and acute health problems and cost the U.S. billions of dollars annually. Sherry Ahrentzen and Lynne Dearborn investigated how the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC), the nation’s largest source of funding for the development and preservation of affordable rental housing, can contribute to shaping a healthier housing stock.

    December 1, 2020

  • The period before pregnancy is critically important for the health of a woman and her infant, yet not all women have access to health insurance during this time. Rebecca Myerson of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Samuel Crawford of the University of Southern California, and Laura R. Wherry of New York University evaluated whether increased access to health insurance under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) Medicaid expansions affected ten preconception health indicators, including the prevalence of chronic conditions and health behaviors, birth control use and pregnancy intention, and the receipt of preconception health services.

    November 1, 2020

  • Building on prior conflicting studies in the International Journal of Epidemiology and the American Journal of Epidemiology, researchers Daniel F. Collin, Laura S. Shields-Zeeman, Akansha Batra, Anusha M. Vable, David H. Rehkopf, Leah Machen, and Rita Hamad evaluated seasonal variation in the health effects of the EITC among U.S. adults in this study published in Preventive Medicine.

    October 1, 2020

  • In this report, P4A researchers Amelia Coffey, Eleanor Lauderback and H. Elizabeth Peters, along with their partners at the University of Oregon’s Department of Sociology Lola Loustaunau, Larissa Petrucci, Ellen Scott and Lina Stepick, examine Oregon’s implementation of S.B. 828, the first statewide predictive scheduling law in the nation, in its first year.

    September 22, 2020

  • The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) is one of the largest safety net programs in the United States. In 2019, the EITC reached 25 million tax filers at a total cost of $63 billion. Using variation in the federal and state EITC, Breno Braga, Fredric Blavin and Anuj Gangopadhyaya evaluated the long-term impact of EITC exposure during childhood on the health of young adults.

    September 14, 2020