The nation’s long-term care system has struggled for many years, and those constraints are expected to deepen as our nation ages. In 2019, Washington State became the first in the United States to pass legislation that would enable a public state-operated long-term care insurance program, the Washington Cares Fund. We conducted research with the goal to identify concrete ways for Washington State to implement this fund so that it is accessible to all and it supports living-wage jobs for care workers. In this report, we discuss our research methods, we present personas of individuals seeking long-term supports and services from the Washington Cares Fund, and we offer a list of recommendations that, while intended for Washington State, we see as applicable to other states that will embark on offering similar long-term services to residents.
The first half of Rules as Code Demo Day was wrapped up with Thomas Guillet who has contributed to Open Fisca France and beta.gouv. He demoed the code for Mes Aides—or My Benefits—which is France’s social benefit simulator that leverages open source rule models for over 600 benefits while keeping the displayed complexity to its minimum.
We wrapped up Rules as Code Demo Day with Max Ghenis and Nikhil Woodruff, the founders of PolicyEngine. The PolicyEngine web app computes the impact of tax and benefit policy in the US and the UK. With PolicyEngine, anyone can freely calculate their taxes and benefits under current law and customizable policy reforms, and also estimate the society-wide impacts of those reforms. Policymakers and think tanks from across the political spectrum can analyze actual policy. PolicyEngine is built atop the open source OpenFisca US and UK microsimulation models and they are building an open unified data set utilizing data from the Policy Rules Database, Current Population Survey, Survey of Consumer Finances, Consumer Expenditures, tax records, and IRS Public Use File.
At Rules as Code Demo Day Seth Hartig from the National Center for Children in Poverty (NCCP) and Bank Street College demoed the Policy Rules Database (PRD), a collaborative effort between the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta and the NCCP. The primary purpose of the PRD is to simplify the interpretation of all programs by creating a common structure and a common terminology. The repository allows for research on public assistance programs and tax policies, and helps users model benefits cliffs on career pathways. The PRD is supported by a technical manual with pseudocode that helps guide integration and usage in other platforms.
If work is to provide a real pathway to financial security, public and workplace benefits need to reflect the realities of 21st century employment, which includes a workforce increasingly required to engage in nonstandard and sometimes multiple jobs and where job stability is not guaranteed. Download “The Complete Financial Lives of Workers: A Holistic Exploration of Work and Public and Workplace Benefit Arrangements” today to learn: - Four conditions of work and benefits that allow LMI workers to thrive – informed by front-line insights from Aspen’s Consumer Insights Collaborative - A new matrix to unpack and highlight the major connections between work and benefit arrangements and workers’ prospects for financial security - Five key recommendations to build a benefits system that meets the needs of all workers and addresses the inequities observed in the current labor market and benefits systems
MITRE’s Joe Ditre and Frank Ruscil demoed the code for the Comprehensive Careers and Supports for Households (C-CASH) at Rules as Code Demo Day. The MITRE team expanded the accessibility of the Policy Rules Database and the Cost-of-Living Database (the prior demo) by creating a web service API and a front-end Window’s application called C-CASH Analytic Tool (CAT). CAT provides a more scalable, flexible, and portable functionality which allows end-users to generate various households to run eligibility scenarios across different U.S. counties and states. They are currently working to create a national data hub and analytics tool, starting with utilizing U.S. Census data and populating the data warehouse by pushing large amounts of data through the PRD.
COVID-19 has highlighted the central role that technology plays in delivering essential services such as food, housing assistance, and unemployment insurance. How that technology is designed can make the difference between receiving or being denied the public benefits people are eligible for. The social safety net has been remade on the fly in response to COVID-19, but temporary patches to our systems aren’t sustainable. A growing field of tech-enabled safety net organizations have begun building tools that apply modern digital technology to the safety net. Getting people the services they’re eligible for requires the government to create policy and build technology that are inclusive, portable, interoperable, and people-centric. Read our new field scan, “Building the Tech-Enabled Safety Net” to understand a dozen fintech and civic tech organizations working across fourteen safety net programs and showing what’s possible when modern technology is married to a consumer insights perspective.
We kicked off Rules as Code Demo Day with Alex Soble of 18F and Mike Gintz of 10x presenting their Eligibility APIs Initiative that explores whether APIs and rules as code might improve the efficiency and effectiveness with which federal public benefits programs communicate their policy to states. They demonstrated their original prototype, and how the open source code has now been extended into several initiatives.
We continued Rules as Code Demo Day with Daniel Singer and Preston Cabe from Benefits Data Trust. Benefits Data Trust provides benefit outreach and application assistance services in seven states. Using Benefits Launch, their in-house interview and rules engine, they support two hundred contact center employees as they screen and apply thousands of clients each year. They also offer a self-service screener, Benefits Launch Express. Additionally, they offer an eligibility API to integrate with other services.
At Rules as Code Demo Day we heard from Song Hia of the NYC Mayor’s Office for Economic Opportunity and Ethan Lo of the NYC Office of Technology and Innovation who demoed the NYC Benefits Platform Screening API which provides machine-readable calculations and criteria for benefits screening that power the ACCESS NYC screening questionnaire. This makes it easier for NYC residents to discover multiple benefits they may be eligible for. The City is now extending the API to support the new MyCity platform, a one-stop shop for all services and benefits.
In this panel conversation, presenters at the Better Identity Coalition’s 2022 policy forum “Identity, Authentication, and the Road Ahead” discuss the challenges of identity verification and access in pandemic unemployment benefits. Presenters include representatives from government, advocacy groups, and private industry.
This rapporteur’s report features 5 key takeaways from the Aspen Institute Financial Security Program's 2022 Benefits Forum with 55 experts in public and private benefits, including corporate leaders, policymakers, worker advocates, entrepreneurs, and researchers, who came together to brainstorm solutions for closing gaps in our public and private benefits and strengthening their design and delivery to support all workers and their families. The goals were to identify areas of agreement across stakeholders and imagine and invent the benefits solutions that workers need today, and in the future, to promote household financial security. Participants concluded on five key takeaways from the discussions: 1. Households Need a Core Bundle of Benefits 2. Technology is Important, but it’s not a Panacea 3. Narrative change around Benefits is critical 4. Government and Employers have Important, Shared Roles 5. Financial Security Outcomes of Benefits must be Measured
