Hospice is a system of end-of-life care that’s not used to its full potential. That is, hospice is not used in the way that would benefit patients and families as much as it could. My argument is that this is an issue of usability, or ergonomics—the science of design. I illustrate how to...

In developing health care reform proposals, it is important to recognize that our health care system has evolved over a long period of time and reflects values in which Americans believe deeply--values like pluralism and entrepreneurialism, consumer choice, limited government, and low taxation....

This policy brief is designed to raise awareness of the current and future economic circumstances of older women, and the ways in which Social Security reform can help alleviate their unmet needs. It considers the gaps in benefit adequacy and economic security that are not addressed by current...

Over the past 30 years my colleagues and I have been focusing on conceptual and empirical work (the aging and society paradigm) that does not create policies, but can inform them. The most immediate phase of this long cumulative history is leading us now to hidden changes in people's lives and...

In 2001, the homeownership rate in the United States reached 67.8 percent--an all-time high. The benefits of homeownership were not evenly spread across ethnic groups, however. In fact, the homeownership rate was 74.3 percent for non-Hispanic whites, 48.4 percent for non-Hispanic blacks, and...

I start with the premise that the success of our efforts in health care is best measured by our ability to impact the health status of our citizens in the most affordable way possible. This brief provides an overview of the history of organized health care systems, then discusses several of the...

How long we live, and how long members of our families and social groups live, is extraordinarily important to us. It's not a subject of daily discussion, but it would be if we were threatened with a return to earlier conditions. Unfortunately, the subject of longevity falls between the cracks...

Inequality measures are often presented in the form of a rank ordering to highlight their relative magnitudes. However, a rank ordering may produce misleading inference, because the inequality measures themselves are statistical estimators with different standard errors, and because a rank...

In this paper we analyze microdata to explore differences in the rates at which American and German workers leave their salaried jobs to become self-employed. We document that the rate of self-employment is lower in Germany than in the U.S., and the rate of transition from wage-earning to...

Using two different measures of relative cohort size--one indicating the size and placement of an individual's own birth cohort, and the other the ratio of young to prime-age adults in the United States in that year--it has been possible to isolate strong effects of the population age structure...