Sharing Risk: The Path to Economic Well-Being for AllExamining why society should pool and spread the financial risk that individual families now bear. Over the past sixty years, businesses and government have increasingly off-loaded financial risk onto US households. The toll has pushed tens of millions of people to the financial breaking point, worsened social inequity, and jeopardized US democracy. In Sharing Risk, consumer advocate and scholar Patricia A. McCoy draws on the nation’s traditions of risk sharing to argue that society should lift up families by pooling and spreading the financial risks that they now must bear alone. Most policy discussions of financial stress on households look at the milestones of economic well-being in isolation: making ends meet, homeownership, quality health care, financing college, and a secure retirement. McCoy offers the first integrated examination of how risk sharing can enable families to realistically achieve all five goals without sacrificing one for another. She makes specific policy recommendations and shows how risk sharing, with its long and venerable history that includes Social Security and the Affordable Care Act, would provide economic well-being for all. |
Contents
The Cash Strapped American Worker | 3 |
How Families | 13 |
The Fifty Year Assault | 21 |
The Broken Savings Discourse | 34 |
The Importance of Sharing Risk | 50 |
Making Ends Meet | 69 |
Owning a Home | 88 |
Affording Health Care | 103 |
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adults age sixty American asset caps average Bivens Board of Governors cash Center on Budget coinsurance Congress Congressional Research Service Consumer Financial Protection copays cost DC plans deductibles default Diamond and Orszag earnings economic Education EITC eligibility employers enroll Federal Reserve Bank Federal Reserve System Federal Student Financial Protection Bureau financial risks for-profit schools half health coverage health insurance higher Hispanic homeowners homeownership households https://www Institute Internal Revenue Service Journal Labor living income living wage lower Marketplace plans Meanwhile Medicaid medical bills Medigap million minimum wage mortgage National older Original Medicare paid participants payments Pell Grant pension percent Pew Charitable Trusts poor poverty premiums private insurance programs qualify recipients reforms risk sharing savings plans social insurance Social Security Administration Social Security benefits student debt student loans subsidies Tax Credit uninsured Washington workers workplace