Writings

The Back to School season led me to ponder a public policy paradox that has interested me for some time. That paradox is the divergent trajectories of the healthcare sector and the education sector in the United States over the last several decades – especially in the last decade. Healthcare and education arguably are the two most important sectors in American life: both sectors engage nearly every American at some point in their lives, are massive in size, and...

From the standpoint of healthcare in New York State, which is the principal preoccupation of the Step Two Policy Project, the passage into law of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) on July 4, 2025, was highly consequential. What comes next for healthcare in New York is still a puzzle that policymakers and stakeholders are now beginning to confront.

There is an old saw that the United States and Great Britain are “two great countries divided by a common language.”

At the outset of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Chairman Mao reportedly said, “It is always darkest before it becomes totally black.”

We have begun Year Two of the Step Two Policy Project. ...

To be successful, New York’s health policies need to support the unique needs of rural communities.

This Commentary builds on two others regarding the controversy about the Cuomo administration’s nursing home policies during Covid-19.

There are two important facts that help account for why these transfers did not measurably increase deaths of nursing home residents ...

Four-and-a-half years after the Covid-19 pandemic began, people are still reckoning with nursing home policy decisions made by NYS officials

The principal focus of this paper is the Medical Indemnity Fund , which was created in 2011 as part of the Medicaid Redesign Team...

By “fiscal frameworks,” I’m referring to two different types of frameworks...

...this Commentary is more of a rumination about the challenges of creating not only transparency but “openness”...

The purposes of this Addendum to my March 19 Commentary titled California Dreaming and the MCO Tax are to ...

The Health section of the one-house budgets the Senate and Assembly released last week upended the usual pattern.

I want to use the analysis of this proposal as an example to describe the process of analyzing complex public policy issues.

What I want to talk about today is the dynamics of the Budget process...

Governor Kathy Hochul presented the FY 25 Executive Budget for State fiscal year 2024-25 on Tuesday in Albany.

Governor Kathy Hochul presented the FY 25 Executive Budget for State fiscal year 2024-25 on Tuesday in Albany.

In the Health sector, the most significant announcement in the SOS was that the State has received approval from CMS of its 1115 waiver...

We think it’s important to understand the background of the increasing numbers of financially distressed hospitals in New York...