PubMed Health⌕ Search

Biomedical subjects

T M Smeeding

Publications and source records attributed to T M Smeeding.

6 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed1999

Cross-national income inequality: how great is it and what can we learn from it?

In recent years there has been increasing interest in the topic of income distribution in a cross-national context. A secular growth of income inequality has taken place over the past two decades affecting almost every rich nation, matched by the growth in comparable household income inequality data which makes these types of comparisons possible. While clear patterns of disposable income inequality differences are found in both level and trend, we are still a long way from explaining why these differences came about, whether they will continue to grow or stabilize, and what the social consequences of these changes might be.

Australia↗
PubMed1990

The poor, the rich, and the insecure elderly caught in between.

Although the elderly are as well or perhaps better off on average than younger groups, measures of the elderly's economic well-being have to gauge the security of their income and assets relative to the financial and health problems they may face. These measures include the adequacy of older Americans' health insurance vis-à-vis their health status, and the sufficiency of their resources to meet possible contingencies, such as severe inflation and costs of long-term care. By applying such measures to the 1984 Survey of Income and Program Participation, 4.5 million elderly may be categorized as economically insecure. Action is needed to ease the insecurity current public and private insurance policy implicitly imposes on this group, which constitutes 20 percent of the elderly population.

Aged↗
PubMed1987

Health care financing among the elderly: who really pays the bills?

This paper investigates the issue of who pays the health care bills of the elderly by considering the types of subsidized health insurance protection enjoyed by the noninstitutionalized elderly and the way that increased Medicare cost-sharing efforts in the 1980s are affecting those without additional health insurance subsidies. In making this examination we estimate the out-of-pocket health care expenditures of the elderly either directly or as nonsubsidized medigap premiums by income level, taking into account four types of health insurance subsidies received by elderly persons: Medicare, Medicaid, Veterans Administration health care, and subsidized health insurance from either current or former employers. We find that increased cost sharing is likely to fall most heavily on those elderly least likely to afford it: the poor and near-poor elderly who have only Medicare as a health insurance subsidy, particularly those who are older and sicker and who use Medicare services more heavily. These persons are caught between well-intentioned federal cost-cutting efforts and the often confusing panoply of health insurance programs for the aged, and they will bear an inequitably large portion of any future Medicare cost-sharing initiatives.

Aged↗
PubMed1984

Alternative Medicare financing sources.

Medicare is financed principally by taxes--some of which burden the general population and others the elderly beneficiaries. Proposals to adjust these revenue sources are evaluated for equity, efficiency, stability, and administrative costs. A package is offered to redistribute the tax burden among all groups; it may also be good health policy.

Cost Control↗
PubMed1977

The antipoverty effectiveness of in-kind transfers.

In recording its poverty statistics, the U.S. Census Bureau ignores the impact of in-kind transfers on the extent of poverty. In this paper, we estimate that when in-kind food, housing, and medical care transfers are counted and measured at their cash-equivalent value, and when Census income is adjusted for underreporting, federal taxes, and intrahousehold income-sharing, the 1972 poverty count and the poverty gap are halved. In addition, we find that in-kind transfers are relatively inefficient devices for reducing income poverty, delivering only about 31 cents of anitpoverty effect per dollar of program cost.

Health Planning↗