How is the economic status of the elderly changing and what are their prospects for the future? My portrait tells us how well off they are on average, but also about the vast disparities that exist among them. This description includes an often neglected measure of their economic well-being--the...

Perhaps the single greatest achievement of social policy in the United States over the last three decades has been reducing poverty in old age. The transition from work to retirement is no longer economically perilous for the vast majority of older American workers. For most married couples, the...

In June 2003 the New York State Court of Appeals altered the education-finance landscape with its ruling in Campaign for Fiscal Equity v. New York. This ruling called for “[r]eforms to the current system of financing school funding” designed to ensure “that every school in New York City...

One is always hesitant to speak about the future. A famous philosopher from New York, Yogi Berra, said "Making predictions is difficult, especially about the future," and I have some trepidation about doing so now. There is also the difficulty of understanding what really has happened in the...

Just as managed care has changed utilization and incentives in other parts of health care, there is a whole set of incentives built around long-term care that really matter. For example, if nursing homes have a financial incentive to hospitalize people with certain health conditions, then in the...

Hippocrates noted that the patient must be attended in light of “his†diet, work, home, and community setting. Since that time, we have struggled with the dilemma of how to put the patient’s presenting problems in the context of the patient’s life circumstances. That goal...

This policy brief contains a formal consideration of ideas discussed during a presentation to the 2012 Syracuse Seminar on Aging. Like most briefs, it will appeal to policy makers and academics craving detailed demographic, fiscal and policy data. This brief focuses on limitations faced by...

This paper is a synthesis of the 2012 Lourie Lecture, framed as a series of questions and responses, and supported by images used in the lecture. I’m going to focus on the growth of this new field called palliative care and will make the connection that the crisis afflicting healthcare in the...