April 27, 2007

U.S. Welfare Tickets

Just as the U.S. spends more per capita for health care than other industrial states only to get less in terms of actually delivered services, we spend (believe it or not) nearly on par with our peers in terms of overall welfare programs, but again come up short in the results department. Of course, it's a political problem not a technical problem... To get some perspective on what's happening I turned to Chris Howard, a truly nice guy and author of The Welfare State Nobody Knows. I don't think we actually got to any answers but in a roundabout, policy-wonkish way we did gather a lot of the necessary context. Total runtime here of an hour and eight minutes. Enjoy!