With the end of the child care payment freeze, DCF is working on rate increases in the next two years, based on the biennial budget passed a few months ago. A closer look at budget memos and details by your intrepid policy analyst indicates that the budget provided the Department of Children and Families (DCF) increases rates by...
CMS Is Accepting Public Comments until September 22 on Waiver Proposal A preliminary evaluation of changes to BadgerCare implemented in July 2012 shows that extending premiums to low-income families causes a dramatic decline in their participation in the program. Those results have important implications for the waiver recently...
Since July 2012, Wisconsin has been conducting a test of the effects of requiring more adults in BadgerCare to pay premiums. This 3-page report analyzes the preliminary results and examines their implications for the portion of the pending BadgerCare waiver proposal that would require all parents in the Transitional Medicaid program to...
Advocates Seek Additional Detail and Raise Questions about the Cost Comparisons We learned Tuesday that the average premiums for the improved individual insurance plans available through the new Marketplace next year will be higher than those for some of the individual plans available for 2013 – at least for the minority of...
Workers in Wisconsin and across the U.S. are still struggling because of a relatively weak labor market. That is especially challenging for low-wage workers who must cope with the declining value of the minimum wage, reductions in employer benefits like health care, and growing inequality. An interactive database posted online Friday...
With fast food workers in many parts of the country engaging in work stoppages today, I decided to dig through Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data to see what I could learn about their wages. Unfortunately, most of the BLS employment categories, with the exception of cooks, don’t clearly distinguish fast food workers from others in...
On the 50th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream speech, it is important to reflect on the progress we have made, and on the distance we still have to travel. I have known for some time that Wisconsin has some of the largest disparities between African Americans and Whites in the nation. These differences can be found...
Wisconsin schoolchildren are slinging on their backpacks and getting ready to head back to school. We often think of schools as safe places for children, but unfortunately, schools cannot block out all harmful influences on children. The Youth Risk Behavioral Survey, conducted by the Centers for Disease Control, shows that for many...
Annie E. Casey Foundation and the Wisconsin Council on Children and Families (WCCF) have worked together to provide a treasure trove of data on Wisconsin children on the revised easy-to-use KIDS COUNT website: http://datacenter.kidscount.org/data#WI/2/0Tips for Using the KIDS COUNT WebsiteThe website allows users to see Wisconsin...
A news release on 8/14 highlights a new UW-Madison study funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Wisconsin Partnership program Education and Research Committee, that confirms the link between exposure to lead and school suspensions. Specifically, the study found that "Our study found that children exposed to lead were more...
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