Do the current poverty thresholds include any amount for health care?
Richard Bavier (The author is a policy analyst at the Office of Management and Budget. The views expressed are the author’s personal views and do not represent the views of OMB or the Administration.) In a recent posting on the Census poverty measurement working papers web page, David Betson provided a forceful restatement of the National Research Council’s rationale for proposing a poverty measure with no amounts included for health care.1 No doubt there will be much more debate before we know which of the NRC’s proposals, including a recommended separate health care measure, will be adopted as the official measure of poverty. The current Census program of experimental poverty statistics based on combinations and variations of the NRC proposals should inform that debate. Other postings on the working papers web page present reasons and data in support of adding to the experimental data program a threshold variation that includes something for medical out-of-pocket expenses. Instead of
