Background: Post-traumatic stress disorders (PTSD) pose a high burden for individuals and societies. Although prevalence rates are rather low, high co-occurrence rates and overall impairments cause deleterious suffering and significant costs. Still, no long-term data on costs and trends in cost...

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...

In 2018, California lawmakers sought to design and create a state Health Care Cost Transparency Database, an all-payer claims database (APCD), to collect information on the cost of health care in the state. The law tasks the Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development (OSHPD) with...

The open-ended nature of Medicare and Medicaid funding in the US has made increased governmental oversight of the health sector partly an exercise in fiscal self-preservation. Most EU countries, on the other hand, exert tighter control over total health care spending through budgetary processes,...

Native American women have suffered years of systematic injustice; the most tyrannical act in modern times may arguably be eugenics' practice through forced sterilization. Despite recent feminist movements and reproductive health reform, Native American women are missing from the conversation. The...

The Great Recession has left tens of millions of families facing unemployment, underemployment and the threat of losing their home. However,concerns over the deficit threaten to derail efforts to turn around the economy and spur employment. This report attempts to correct many of the...

Many proponents of conservative fiscal policies talk of the budget deficit as being a matter of intergenerational equality. However, this paper shows the younger generations (and those yet to be born) will contribute more to the deficit than older generations. This analysis uses data from the...