Private Child Support: Current and Potential Impacts

This paper examines the effects of a number of methods for enhancing private child support collections: increasing the proportion of those children potentially eligible for child support who get child support awards; using a uniform standard for determining child support obligations; and collecting a greater percentage of current obligations. The paper also estimates the potential of all three methods used in combination to provide income to needy custodial families. The research demonstrates that the current private child support system falls far short of its potential to transfer income from noncustodial to custodial families. Although the use of a normative standard, improved collections, and extending child support to all those potentially eligible will greatly improve the economic circumstances of impoverished custodial families, private child support cannot be viewed as the sole answer for the economic plight of these families. Increased work opportunities and increased public support are also needed

The poverty-reducing effect of Medicaid

Medicaid provides health insurance for 54 million Americans. Using the Census Bureau's Supplemental Poverty Measure (which subtracts out-of-pocket medical expenses from family resources), we estimated the impact of eliminating Medicaid. In our counterfactual, Medicaid beneficiaries would become uninsured or gain other insurance. Counterfactual medical expenditures were drawn stochastically from propensity-score-matched individuals without Medicaid. While this method captures the importance of risk protection, it likely underestimates Medicaid's impact due to unobserved differences between Medicaid and non-Medicaid individuals. Nonetheless, we find that Medicaid reduces out-of-pocket medical spending from $871 to$376 per beneficiary, and decreases poverty rates by 1.0% among children, 2.2% among disabled adults, and 0.7% among elderly individuals. When factoring in institutionalized populations, an additional 500,000 people were kept out of poverty. Overall, Medicaid kept at least 2.6 million—and as many as 3.4 million—out of poverty in 2010, making it the U.S.’s third largest anti-poverty program

Child Support Guidelines Will They Make a Difference?

This article uses data from the Current Population Survey to examine the extent to which the new child support guidelines being developed by the states in response to the Child Support Amendments of 1984 and the Family Support Act of 1988 can be expected to increase child support awards and payments. The analysis focuses on the guidelines being developed in Wisconsin, Colorado, and Delaware, which are representative of those being implemented nationwide. The results suggest that the new guidelines will increase child support payments by somewhere between 47% and 54%. Child support awards are predicted to increase by between 77% and 88%, depending on the guideline being considered. Compliance with the new guidelines is predicted to be modest, averaging 61% across marital status groups, but this evidence on compliance is very tentative because it is based on an analysis of the current system and the results may not carry over to the new system