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The centrality of home equity to the balance sheets of American households, and the oppressive legacy of racial exclusion from mortgage markets, compel the design of intentionally anti-racist housing policy capable of building lasting wealth for Black families. In this study, we compare the home-mortgage terms offered to middle-income Whites in the New Deal era, with a contemporary New York City policy offered in formerly redlined districts. The city's Housing Development Fund Corporation policy is for limited-income households but does not limit down payments nor qualify for federal home loans. Using mined listing data and the 2017 Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we find more than 80% of income-eligible urban Black households lack the wealth to purchase the median listing, versus 51% of Whites. Moreover, the policy's market exclusions preclude access to what is now substantial accumulated equity. Unit owners face wide-scale housing-code violations and property seizure, highlighting the limitations of "limited equity" ownership, which counteracts wealth creation. We draw two primary lessons. First, anti-racist policy cannot demand substantial financial assets. Second, financing schemes for building improvement or climate-responsive adaptation, in addition to initial purchase, should be well-tailored to family budgets and designed to deliver equity to the formerly excluded. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the relationship between racial wealth inequality and access to care with high-deductible health insurance (HDHP). The study focuses on the impact of this trend on Black consumers, who may face affordability barriers due to income constraints and historical wealth disparities. The findings suggest that Black enrollees in HDHPs are more likely to have lower incomes and fewer assets compared to White enrollees. However, the study does not establish a causal link between racial wealth inequality and affordability disparities. The analysis finds that racial disparities in access to care are greater among high-deductible plan holders, but the inclusion of economic covariates, such as income and wealth, reduces these disparities. The study suggests that income and wealth play a larger role in explaining racial disparities in access to care among high-deductible plan holders. [Extracted from the article]

Medicaid provides virtually no-cost coverage to millions of low-income Americans. This study examines whether its beneficiaries realize similar health care access as their counterparts with private insurance. We draw on the 2014–2017 Medical Expenditure Panel Survey and control for observable confounding factors across coverage types by estimating and applying entropy weights. Medicaid beneficiaries were moderately more likely to report a usual source of care (74.5% vs 68.1%, p<.01) and approximately equally as likely to report a checkup in the past year as the privately insured (43.5% vs 44.5%, p>.1), each significantly more likely than the uninsured. Medicaid beneficiaries had significantly more prescription fills (12.6 vs 8.2) and emergency-care visits (.26 vs.15) annually than the privately-insured on average, with similar numbers of physician visits. On balance, we did not find evidence that Medicaid was associated with diminished access or utilization relative to private insurance, while both had more access than the uninsured. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective To examine the distributional effects of the 2008 recession and subsequent recovery across generational cohorts. Methods Using data from the Survey of Consumer Finances (2007–2016), we constructed a measure of economic well-being accounting for income, household size, and annuitized value of assets. We examine trajectories of adjusted income and inequality, using Gini coefficients and income shares by decile, for the overall population and by cohort during the recession and recovery. Results Inequality declined temporarily during the recession, but reached new highs during the recovery. During recovery, population-level increases in economic resources were not reflected among below-median households, as the more concentrated financial assets rose while broader-based home equity and employment fell or remained stagnant. Inequality measures increased for cohorts in their primary working years (Generation-X and Baby Boomers), but not among the younger Millennials, who were at early stages of education, workforce entry, and household formation. Discussion The study illustrates an integrative approach to analyzing cumulative dis/advantage by considering interactions between historically consistent macrolevel events, such as economic shocks or policy choices affecting all cohorts, and the persistent life-course processes that tend to increase heterogeneity and inequality as cohorts age over time. Although recovery policies led to rapid recovery of financial asset values, they did not proportionately reach those below the median or their economic resource types. Results suggest that in a high-inequality environment, recovery policies from economic shocks may need tailoring to all levels of resources in order to achieve more equitable recovery outcomes and prevent exacerbating cohort inequality trajectories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the Affordable Care Act successfully expanded health insurance access, the law's private insurance component drew far fewer participants than projected. This study investigates the attractiveness of Marketplace insurance relative to uncompensated care provisions for those who remain uninsured. Using restricted‐access Medical Expenditure Panel Survey data, I find that for one in four previously uninsured consumers, bankruptcy costs less than meeting the deductible of the subsidized benchmark policy. Marketplace insurance reduces spending in only the top 3% most catastrophic potential scenarios these consumers face, on average. Net financial gain is more common among individuals in poor health (11% vs. 1%) or with assets to protect (3% vs. <1%). High‐deductible insurance aims to protect wealth in catastrophic scenarios. However, hospitals substantially discount care for the uninsured in such scenarios. High‐deductible coverage might not be an effective driver of financial security for the uninsured, which may help to explain low Marketplace enrollment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The distribution of wealth has grown increasingly unequal, especially along racial lines. Lawmakers and researchers propose to address the issue with universal "baby bonds," paid to every newborn and preserved until young adulthood. Bond values are tied inversely to wealth up to a $50,000 maximum investment. This study uses longitudinal data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics on the assets of young adults to simulate contemporary racial inequalities under a counterfactual policy environment in which the United States had administered baby bonds when the current cohort of young adults were newborns. Initial bond values are defined categorically by quintiles of household wealth observed in 1989 and 1994, smoothed across the inverse hyperbolic sine of household wealth, and then assumed to grow at 2% per year through 2015. Without baby bonds, young White Americans hold approximately 16 times the wealth of young Black Americans at the median ($46,000 vs. $2,900). Baby bonds reduce the disparity to a factor of 1.4 ($79,143 vs. $57,845), in the absence of intervening behavioral responses to the policy. The share held by the top decile decreases from 72% to 65%, marginally approaching the more egalitarian societies. Baby bonds considerably narrow wealth inequalities while simultaneously improving the net asset position of young adults and alleviating asset concentration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives. To evaluate the effect of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) Medicaid expansions on national rates of home eviction and eviction initiation in the United States. Methods. Using nationally representative administrative data from The Eviction Lab at Princeton University, we estimated the effects of the ACA Medicaid expansions on county-level evictions and filings from 2000 to 2016 with a difference-in-difference regression design. Results. We found that Medicaid expansions were associated with an annual reduction in the rate of evictions by 1.15 per 1000 renter-occupied households (P <.001), a reduction of 1.59 eviction filings per 1000 renter-occupied households (P <.001), and a reduction in the average number of evictions by 46 (P <.05). We found additional evidence that increasing rates of African American residents in a county was associated with a greater rate of evictions filed, and increased rates of poverty and rent burdens relative to income were associated with more evictions both filed and completed. Conclusions. Evictions decreased after Medicaid expansion, demonstrating further evidence of the substantive financial protections afforded by this coverage. The reduction in the eviction filing rate suggests that Medicaid expansion could be reducing evictions by preventing the court proceeding entirely. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Out-of-pocket Spending on health care pushed over 10.5 million Americans into poverty in 2016. Medicaid helps offset this risk by providing medical coverage to millions of poor and near-poor children and adults and thereby constraining out-of-pocket medical spending. This article examines whether recent state-level expansions to the Medicaid program resulted in reductions in poverty and whether future changes to the program are likely to have similar impacts on poverty. Using a difference-in-differences research design, we found that the recent Medicaid expansion caused a significant reduction in the poverty rate. Moreover, by simulating a counterfactual poverty rate for a hypothetical world without Medicaid coverage, we found that the program's antipoverty impact grew over the past decade independent of expansion, by shielding beneficiaries from growing out-of-pocket spending. Future expansions or retractions of Medicaid are likely to produce associated effects on poverty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Evictions are increasingly recognized as a serious concern facing low-income households. This study evaluated whether expansions of Medicaid can prevent evictions from occurring. We examined data from a privately licensed database of eviction records in fourteen states (286 counties) and used a difference-in-differences research design to compare rates of eviction before and after California's early Medicaid expansion (51 counties). Early Medicaid expansion in California was associated with a reduction in the number of evictions, with 24.5 fewer evictions per month in each county from a pre-expansion average of 224.7. These results imply that for every thousand new Medicaid enrollees in California, Medicaid expansion was associated with roughly twenty-two fewer evictions per year. Additionally, we found a 2.9-percentage-point reduction in evictions per capita associated with early expansion. The effects were concentrated among counties with the highest pre-expansion rates of uninsurance. We conclude that health insurance coverage is associated with improved housing stability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several states are considering competitive procurement to help shape Medicaid managed care markets. In New York state, the focus of our study, regulators propose contracts that reward quality improvement and simplify state administration by rewarding plans that operate across several of the state's 62 counties. This case analysis uses novel regulatory data from New York state, obtained via public records request, to examine incentives underlying Medicaid markets and help inform contracting design. The data report plan enrollment by county and plan spending across administrative activities for all 16 Medicaid plans in New York state for 2018. We examine the counties in which plans operate, profitability, and administrative resource allocation. We compare outcomes by tertile of plan profitability, measured as net income per member-month. Plan profitability ranged widely, with the most profitable plan realizing nearly $30 per member-month while the least profitable 5 plans realized net negative earnings. Operational differences across plan profitability emerged most clearly in administrative spending. The most profitable plans reported greater spending on salaries overall and for executive management, and taxes, while the least profitable plans spent more on operational functions including utilization management/ quality improvement, claims processing, and informational systems. We observe modest differences in county rurality and little in geographic breadth. Procurement design that rewards capacity-building in key administrative functions might impact market evolution, given that on average, highly profitable firms spent less on these activities in New York's Medicaid managed care market in 2018., Competing Interests: Declaration of Conflicting InterestsThe author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.