Implementing Health Reform, Broadband Access, and Much More

Quick Credit: The Fringe Economy, the Great Recession, and the Welfare State - This New America Foundation paper looks at the rapid growth of the fringe economy—financial service offerings including check-cashing and payday lenders—and its impact on low- and moderate-income families.  Many families waste their social service benefits on high-interest loans and often fall victim to abusive lending practices.

Prioritizing Approaches to Economic Development in New England: Skills, Infrastructure, and Tax Incentives - New England states, can no longer afford to spend scarce resources on tax credits and other business giveaways, argues a new report by the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) but instead needs to focus its economic development efforts on rebuilding neglected infrastructure and improving education for people at all levels, from pre-school youngsters to older adult workers. The latter investments are better at creating jobs and generating economic growth, while they often bring in additional matching dollars from the federal government. 

New Politics of Judicial Elections, 2000-2009 - Spending on state supreme court elections has more than doubled in the past decade, according to a new report from the Brennan Center for Justice, Justice at Stake, and the National Institute on Money in State Politics. $206.9 million spent in the decade 2000 to 2009, a massive increase from the $83.3 million spent in judicial elections from 1990 to 1999.  A select group of "super spenders" is seriously outgunning small donors. In the 29 most costly judicial elections in ten states, the top five spenders each averaged $473,000 per election to help install judges of their choice

Implementing Health Reform

• 50 Ways to Implement Health Reform: State Challenges and Federal Assistance - States  face key challenges and this paper by the the Alliance for Health Reform and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation looks at how the implementation of previous health legislation can help state policy makers determine the best way to proceed with implementation.


• Expanding Medicaid to Low-Income Childless Adults under Health Reform: Key Lessons from State Experiences -  Interviewing officials and experts from across the country, this Kaiser Family Foundation report finds that limited connection to public programs, fluctuating incomes, and language and cultural barriers all serve as challenges to reaching and enrolling childless adults in Medicaid.


• Strategic Engagement of Policymakers Is Key to Advancing a Children's Health Care Coverage Policy Agenda - This Insuring America's Children report looks at how children's health advocates in seven states (AR, CO, IA, OH, RI, TX, and WA) established strong relationships with policy makers in order to move their agendas forward and how such relationships can strengthen implementation of key policies.

• Speed Matters: The Benefits of Broadband 2010 -This SpeedMatters report highlights why the U.S. remains only 15th in the world in broadband access and the challenges and opportunities for energy savings, health care, education and job creation from a more active movement to deploy high-speed Internet access for all communities.


• Home Broadband 2010 - This Pew Internet study finds that after several years of double digit growth, broadband adoption slowed dramatically in 2010, although African-Americans increased adoption rates from 46% in April 2009 to 56% in May 2010. African-Americans, along with other minorities, continue to trail whites in their use of broadband technologies. 66% of Americans believe lack of broadband is a disadvantage when it comes to finding out about job opportunities, while half of non-internet users do not go online because they do not see the digital world as relevant to them and need help to feel comforable online.

Unauthorized Immigrants and Their U.S.-Born Children - An estimated 340,000 of the 4.3 million babies born in the United States in 2008 were the offspring of unauthorized immigrants.  Nearly four-in-five (79%) of the 5.1 million children (younger than age 18) of unauthorized immigrants were born in this country and therefore are U.S. citizens.

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