Laudan Aron
Laudan (Laudy) Aron, MA, is a Senior Fellow with the Urban Institute’s Health Policy Center and co-directs Urban’s cross-center initiative on the Social Determinants of Health. She directed the groundbreaking 2013 study, Shorter Lives, Poorer Health, for the National Research Council and the Institute of Medicine. That study documented a large and growing US “health disadvantage” affecting almost all Americans. Laudy first joined Urban in 1992 and has spent over 25 years conducting research and policy analysis on a wide range of social welfare issues, including health and disability, education, employment and training, housing and homelessness, and social protection and justice. Her work focuses on how social and economic conditions shape health and well-being, and how social welfare programs and policies (broadly defined) can best support healthy human development across the life course and over time and place.
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Research into ActionThree Lessons About Building Trust and Advancing Equity on the Path to Justice
As part of Policies for Action’s (P4A’s) recent call for proposals to investigate policies to reduce the racial wealth gap, we recognized the opportunity to center the people and places most distant from privilege and power.
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Turning research into actionNew Insights on How Philanthropy Can Improve Community Health
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.
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Children and FamiliesPost-ACA, More Than One-third Of Women with Prenatal Medicaid Remained Uninsured Before or After Pregnancy
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.
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Turning research into actionA New Era Built on Actionable Policy-Oriented Evidence
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.
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Children and FamiliesCombating Unstable Schedules for Low-wage Workers in Oregon
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.
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Children and FamiliesThe Long-Term Effects of Childhood Exposure to the Earned Income Tax Credit on Health Outcomes
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.
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Turning research into actionThe Need for Actionable Policy-Oriented Evidence Is Greater Than Ever
Policies for Action is entering its fifth year with a growing community of researchers across the country and a maturing pipeline of research to support critical policy development. Find out how we're expanding the quality and reach of our work in 2020.
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Children and FamiliesCredit Where It's Due: Investigating Pathways from EITC Expansion to Maternal Mental Health
While Earned Income Tax Credit expansions are typically associated with improvements in maternal mental health, little is known about the mechanisms through which the program affects this outcome. Anuj Gangopadhyaya, Fredric Blavin, Jason Gates, and Breno Braga of the Urban Institute assess the impact of more than two decades of federal expansions in EITC credits and the implementation of state-specific EITC programs on maternal mental health in a new working paper.
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Income and WealthFailing health of the United States
Last week, an editorial on the decline in US life expectancy, authored by P4A codirector Laudan Aron and Stephen Woolf, director of the Center on Society and Health at Virginia Commonwealth University, was published in the British Medical Journal.
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