California’s SNAP program faced record application volume due to the COVID-19 crisis, and other states must anticipate similar demand. This post summarizes key takeaways from GetCalFresh’s real-time data and client communications, and offers recommendations for how other states can implement effective responses.
Benefits Data Trust (BDT), in collaboration with the Center for Health Care Strategies (CHCS), conducted a nationwide analysis of how states coordinate across Medicaid and SNAP programs to streamline access to benefits.
The Summer EBT Playbook offers states practical strategies, tools, and examples to effectively implement the new Summer EBT program, ensuring low-income children receive food benefits when school is out.
The OECD report explores the concept of "Rules as Code" (RaC), proposing a transformation in government rulemaking by developing machine-consumable regulations alongside human-readable versions.
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)
Though the rhetoric of “waste, fraud, and abuse” is ubiquitous when it comes to welfare programs, low-income households receive little relief from benefits programs. Most efforts to make public benefits systems more “efficient” actually just waste time and money in practice. They instead serve to stigmatize low-income families and chip away at the little assistance that remains available to them.
When COVID-19 hit, the State of New Jersey recognized the need to both receive data on the spread of the disease from the public and provide information to them on how to mitigate it.
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.
Accessing safety net benefits can involve complicated and duplicative processes that create barriers to access. Using cross-enrollment strategies can minimize the difficulties community members face in getting access to life-saving resources.
This guide is intended to provide everything else, with a focus on the basics of UI technology projects, guidance on standards for equitable uses of technology, and strategies for how to have a positive impact on these projects.
The National Health Law Program released an updated Guide to Modified Adjusted Gross Income, including sections on ACA tax filing and reporting, clarification on commonly asked questions about Social Security Income, and updated IRS tax filing thresholds.
Alluma is a nonprofit that provides digital solutions to simplify eligibility screening and enrollment for social benefit programs, supporting cross-benefit access in 45 counties and two states. Their One-x-Connection product suite streamlines Medicaid and SNAP applications using a business rules engine, with a focus on human-centered design and anonymous, simplified eligibility checks, having helped screen over 10 million individuals and submitted over 67 million applications.
