Latest Urban Institute Reports

This report assesses the changes in coverage patterns and health care costs that will occur nationally if major reforms are not enacted. The authors find that by 2015, there could be 59.7 million people uninsured. The number could swell to 67.6 million by 2020, up from an estimated 49.4 million in 2010. As premiums nearly double, employees in small firms would see offers of health insurance almost cut in half, dropping from 41 percent of firms offering insurance in 2010 to 23 percent in 2020. Individual spending could jump 34 percent by 2015 and 79 percent by 2020.

The recession has increased joblessness among older Americans. These graphs and tables report unemployment rates and how they have varied by age, sex, race, and education since 2007.

The Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program, the nation's primary safety net program for families with children, is due for reauthorization this year. The Urban Institute held a roundtable of experts from federal and state governments, academia, and policy organizations to discuss the program's current status and effectiveness. Experts agreed that TANF's goals need to be better articulated and that many key features of the program ,including funding, work requirements, and its place within the broader safety net, should be reexamined. Any assessment should consider especially how well TANF responds to family needs during a serious recession.

As the federal government, localities, and housing authorities seek to revitalize scarred inner-city neighborhoods, a unique set of responses is needed to aid public housing's most vulnerable families. The Chicago Family Case Management Demonstration may have some innovative answers.

In this report the authors estimate that under the health reform bill passed by the Senate, the cost of uncompensated care will fall from $62.1 billion in 2009 to $46.6 billion in 2019. If no health reform is enacted, they project that uncompensated care would rise to between $107 and $141 billion in 2019. Over the six-year period of proposed health reform legislation, 2014–2019, the costs of uncompensated care without health reform would be between $560 and $700 billion. With reform, the cost would be $330 billion under the Senate bill and provide substantive savings to each level of government.

The Roadmap for America's Future Act of 2010 is a detailed reform package that overhauls Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the U.S. federal tax system. In a January 27, 2010, report, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) analyzed the spending provisions of the plan. This paper presents the Tax Policy Center's estimates of the revenue and distributional impact of the Roadmap's tax provisions.

Strongly held but conflicting values have shaped the U.S. social safety net and the policy debates since its expansion in the 1960s. A new Urban Institute Press book disentangles these beliefs and shows how they have led to the patchwork of mostly uncoordinated programs the safety net is today.

President Barack Obama on January 22 signed into law a provision allowing charitable gifts made for Haiti relief during February and most of January 2010 to be deducted on 2009 federal tax returns. This noble sentiment would work a lot better if deductions were allowed for all giving made to qualified charities by April 15.

The Multi-Site Evaluation of Adult Drug Courts will report on a mediation analysis to empirically test theoretical pathways to desistance. The analysis considers the theoretical mechanisms through which drug court practices are meant to impact outcomes and how such pathways can be operationalized. A path model is proposed that delineates how drug-court practices affect modifications in behaviors and attitudes, and how these changes affect outcomes. Proposed mediators include changes in: perceived risk and reward (deterrence), perceived legitimacy, and motivation to alter one's behavior. The analysis will suggest the pathways that are most crucial to desistance and the most effective drug-court components that impact these pathways.

The Multi-Site Adult Drug Court Evaluation compares outcomes between offenders in 23 drug court and six comparison sites. Such a research design poses several potential threats to validity, including selection bias (do drug court and comparison offenders vary in background), attrition bias (do offenders retained for follow-up interviews vary from the original baseline samples), and site-level bias (are the drug court and comparison sites comparable in ways other than drug court status). In addition to outlining the analytic strategy, simple outcomes are reported comparing drug court and comparison sites with respect to criminal re-offending, incarceration, and other psychosocial outcomes.