Can We Create Equality Insurance?

By Karen Petrou

Much of the work posted so far on this blog centers on the traditional pillars of financial policy:  monetary policy and the sweeping post-crisis framework of bank regulation.  But, awesome though the Fed’s reach may be and as critical as banking is to income and wealth equality, these financial-policy channels are not the only ones that determine economic equality.  In this blog post, we assess another policy channel:  health, property-and-casualty, and life insurance.  With almost no research in this sector, we pose questions based on what we’ve read and what we think we know based on all our other works.  At the least, insurance requires equality evaluation and, quite likely, significant changes so it makes low-and-moderate income and wealth families healthier, readier to retire, better positioned to bequeath wealth to their children, and all around more equal. Continue reading “Can We Create Equality Insurance?”

If You Really Want to Be Unequal, Be Disabled

By Karen Petrou and Matthew Shaw*

Like most who assess U.S. economic inequality, we’ve focused in this blog on the way income and wealth divide across Americans in general, by race, by age, by gender, by ethnicity, and even by nothing more than where one lives.  However, working on another pro bono initiative – this time to speed biomedical research – it’s dawned on us that there’s another major factor that divides the haves from the have-nots that’s even less the result of individual action than all these well-studied demographic criteria:  disability. Continue reading “If You Really Want to Be Unequal, Be Disabled”