Research Briefs

Massachusetts’ Health Care Reform and Emergency Department Utilization

“Does an expansion of health insurance increase or decrease the use of the emergency department?” is the question posed in a paper coauthored by Professor of Public Policy Amitabh Chandra. It’s a question that has often been at the heart of the heated debate over expanded coverage. The researchers looked at the experience of Massachusetts following its 2006 health care reform, which was a model for the federal Affordable Care Act, and found that emergency-room use in Massachusetts was no different from that in other states where no reform was enacted. “It is possible,” the authors conclude, “that this null result arises from two equal forces pushing in opposite directions — that the Massachusetts insurance expansion increased prevention, thereby reducing emergency department use, but that this effect has been offset by the reduced out-of-pocket cost of using the emergency department or difficulties in finding primary care physicians.”

Amitabh Chandra, “Massachusetts’ Health Care Reform and Emergency Department Utilization” New England Journal of Medicine

Three Ways to Combat Inequality

“The market system distributes rewards increasingly inequitably,” Lawrence Summers, Eliot Univeristy Professor writes in The Washington Post. “On one side, the debate is framed in zero-sum terms, and the disappointing lack of income growth for middleclass workers is blamed on the success of the wealthy. . . . Meanwhile, those who call concerns about rising inequality misplaced or a product of class warfare are even further off base.” Summers suggests three ways to combat the rise in inequality: the government’s elimination of special concessions for the wealthy; tax reform that is pro-growth and pro-fairness and doesn’t reinforce existing trends in pre-tax incomes; the public sector’s ensuring of greater equity in the most important areas, such as education and health. “Neither the politics of polarization nor those of noblesse oblige on behalf of the fortunate will serve to protect the interests of the middle class in the postindustrial economy.”

Lawrence Summers, “Three Ways to Combat Inequality” The Washington Post

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Arab Awakening, Act 2

“Think of the revolutions in the Middle East as Act 1 in a five-act play that may not conclude for a generation or more,” Nicholas Burns, professor of the practice of diplomacy and international politics, writes in The Boston Globe. “The old Middle East is vanishing. A new one is forming in the crucible of war and revolution. The stakes could not be higher for the United States. Since the revolutions began, President Obama has skillfully balanced support for reformers in Cairo, Tripoli, and Tunisia while maintaining ties to conservative Gulf leaders at the other end of the region. As he walks that precarious tightrope in the full glare of the international spotlight, there are more difficult challenges ahead as Act 1 closes and Act 2 begins in the Arab Awakening.”

Nicholas Burns “Arab Awakening, Act 2” The Boston Globe

The Atlas of Economic Complexity

“What are things made out of? One way of describing the economic world is to say that things are made with machines, raw materials, and labor. Another way is to emphasize that products are made with knowledge.” That is the premise of “The Atlas of Economic Complexity,” a new work by a team of authors co-led by Ricardo Hausmann, director of the Center for International Development and professor of the practice of economic development. A country’s wealth is driven by its productive knowledge, the book argues. “Because individuals are limited in what they know, the only way societies can expand their knowledge base is by facilitating the interaction of individuals in increasingly complex webs of organizations and markets. Increased economic complexity is necessary for a society to be able to hold and use a larger amount of productive knowledge, and we can measure it from the mix of products that countries are able to make.”

Ricardo Hausmann, The Atlas of Economic Complexity

Amitabh Chandra Lawrence Summers Nicholas Burns Ricardo Hausmann

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