The Brazilian economy grew by 4.2 percent annually from 2004-2010, more than double its annual growth from 1999-2003 or indeed its growth rate over the prior quarter century. This growth was accompanied by a significant reduction in poverty and extreme poverty, especially after 2005, as well as...

Americans pay far higher prices for prescription drugs than do people in other wealthy countries. The reason that other countries spend so much less on drugs is that their governments negotiate prices with the pharmaceutical industry. The United States government could adopt the same approach...

When Congress was debating the Medicare drug benefit in 2003, there were many who advocated that Medicare provide the benefit as part of the traditional hospital insurance program. This was expected to save money both due to lower administrative costs and also as result of Medicare’s ability...

Disability is both a fundamental cause and consequence of income poverty. The income-poverty rate for persons with disabilities is between two to three times the rate for persons without disabilities. Yet, contemporary policy debate and research about income poverty in the United States is...

Since the end of the 1970s, the United States has seen a dramatic increase in economic inequality. While the United States has long been among the most unequal of the world’s rich economies, the economic and social upheaval that began in the 1970s was a striking departure from the movement...

Leading health care reform proposals all require individuals to obtain health care coverage, but differ in how they would require employers to share in the costs of coverage for their employees. This report reviews the employer responsibility requirements in the leading proposals—often...

Leaders in both the House and the Senate have committed to "shared responsibility" as a basic principle of health care reform, meaning that the costs of health care coverage are shared by individuals, businesses, and the public sector. However, as this issue brief documents, the Senate version...

Two of the three leading health care reform proposals being considered by Congress—the House “Tri-Committee” health care reform legislation and the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee’s reform legislation—include sensibly designed “play-or-pay” provisions...

This issue brief examines the Child Tax Credit (CTC) in its current form and finds that many of the families with children most in need of additional assistance receive no or little benefit from the credit. The paper analyzes a restructuring of the present CTC put forth by the Brookings...

This report details how the dominant framework for understanding and measuring poverty in the United States has become a conservative one. The current U.S. approach to measuring poverty views poverty only in terms of having an extremely low level of annual income, and utilizes poverty thresholds...