The Policies for Action Research Hub at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health has been working for nearly a year to investigate how Medicaid expansion has affected coverage, access to care, patient experiences, and employment. Last week, Ben Sommers and his colleagues released a JAMAviewpoint and podcast episode: “Medicaid Expansion and Health: Assessing the Evidence After Five Years.”
And click here to see the latest developments in their project “How Will Work Requirements in Medicaid Affect Low-Income Families?”
How paid family and medical leave can promote health and well-being
When it comes to supporting families through paid family and medical leave policies, the U.S. lags behind other developed nations. Just eight states and Washington, D.C., have a paid leave policy in place, and few U.S. workers have access to paid leave through their employer.
This spring, Policies for Action partnered with the Institute for Women’s Policy Research and the University of California, Berkeley, on a series of webinars that explore the latest research on paid leave, lifting the veil on the critical ways these policies can impact health and well-being for people across their lifespans.
What could we gain if we committed to increasing diversity in research?
Academia has a diversity problem. African Americans make up 12.7 percent of the US population but just 4 percent of tenured faculty, while Hispanics and Latinxs account for 17.6 percent of the US population but only 4.6 percent of tenured faculty.
In a new blog post for Urban Wire, we sat down with Jewel Mullen, the associate dean for health equity at the Dell Medical School of the University of Texas at Austin, to explore why committing to more diversity inside and outside academia is critical for improving policy and law research.
And learn more about our open call for proposals to increase equity, diversity, and inclusion in research. Letters of intent are due October 2, 2019, at 3:00 p.m. ET.
Closing the health gap for low-income workers
Economic security is vital to individual and population health and well-being. Yet for many workers, low wages and lack of paid leave policies put them at risk for poor outcomes.
Next month, Policies for Action and Evidence for Action researchers will present a panel at the Interdisciplinary Association for Population Health Science conference, exploring the effects of minimum wage on the health of children and early childhood education providers, living wage policy impacts on low-income adult health, and the effects of San Francisco’s Paid Parental Leave Ordinance on low-income workers.
In a new Catalyst brief, Urban Institute experts identify five strategies for the health care sector to help people address their health-related social needs and, in turn, narrow inequities in health and healthy life expectancy.
P4A researcher Daniel Miller published a paper in Pediatrics pointing to the unique and pervasive negative effects of household food insecurity on children’s health.
In partnership with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Urban Institute has awarded $3 million to 20 organizations across the country that are leveraging local health data to explore how communities can address disparities in health.
Upcoming conferences and events
2019 IAPHS Conference
Interdisciplinary Association for Population Health Science
October 1–4, 2019, Seattle
