Bill Gardner

The US has split over whether to implement the Medicaid expansion in the Affordable Care Act. The dark blue states are expanding Medicaid. Let’s imagine they were a country — call it Liberalia. Liberalia had an estimated 146 million people in 2012. The remaining states have either rejected the expansion or are still debating it. […]

American politicians have debated the Affordable Care Act since it was introduced to Congress in 2009. Have these debates affected what citizens think about the ACA? Daniel Hopkins can’t find evidence that those myriads of words mattered. So, health policy bloggers: If Reid, Boehner, and McConnell can’t sway public opinion, despite the audiences they command, […]

From today’s New England Journal of Medicine, a report from Christopher Murray and colleagues summarizing the disability and loss of life attributable to diseases across the world. Murray and colleagues have a table summarizing these data for the United States in 2010. There is a widespread but mistaken belief that mental illness affects your happiness, […]

Equality of opportunity means that we are not a caste society. Who we will become is not fixed by the circumstances of our births. Some children will do better than others, but this should result from a fair competition. Nearly every American politician espouses a commitment to equality of opportunity. For example, Majority Leader Eric […]

What happens to children when their parents lose their jobs? My intuition is that job losses stress families and put children at increased risk of child abuse. But Jason Lindo, Jessamyn Schaller, and Benjamin Hansen have surprising data saying that the answer is more interesting than that. Previous data suggested that my intuition was wrong […]

Before reading further, stop and ask yourself the question in the title. Be specific: what proportion of children experience violence in a given year? What proportion of adolescent girls have been raped in their lifetimes? David Finkelhor and his colleagues looked at data from the National Survey of Children’s Exposure to Violence, a 2011 US […]

David Lazarus is a reporter on consumer issues for the LA Times. His family recently became big-time consumers of health when his wife spent a week in an intensive care unit. Coming out of this ordeal, he concluded that the US health system has flaws, but not in quality of care. This is reminiscent of […]

In 2006, the United States had the highest rate of child deaths due to negligence, maltreatment, or physical assault among 17 peer developed countries. The rate of child death due to maltreatment in the US was more than three times higher than the rate in Canada and more than four times the rate in France. […]

An enormous literature documents that better off people are healthier than worse off people (entry points here or here). But that’s not the same thing as showing that transferring resources from the rich to the poor would improve the health of the poor. In an ideal world — or at least in my ideal world […]

The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA, also known as ‘Welfare Reform’) changed US welfare by limiting how long clients could receive it and introducing a work requirement. How well has welfare reform worked for recipients? Supporters of the law pointed to many positive changes that followed welfare reform, including reductions […]