Improving Information for Social Policy Decisions -- The Uses of Microsimulation Modeling Volume I, Review and Recommendations (1991) / Chapter Skim
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1 Introduction
1 Introduction
Pages 21-28
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From page 21... ...
The act represents a policy compromise among the goals of providing more adequate income support to poor children, strengthening family ties, and strengthening attachments to the labor force. It also represents a budgetary compromise: under the guidelines agreed to by both political parties at the outset, the 5-year projected cost of the legislation cannot exceed $3.0-$3.5 billion.
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From page 22... ...
Analysts at other federal agencies, including the Food and Nutrition Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Family Support Administration in HHS, and the Health Care Financing Administration (HCFA)
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From page 23... ...
Health care policy in the United States is of immense and growing complexity: policy issues run the gamut from how to provide health insurance coverage to the working poor and longterm care benefits to the elderly to how to alter the behavior of hospitals and physicians to achieve the most cost-effective medical care. Correspondingly, the world of health care policy analysis is highly fragmented.
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From page 24... ...
THE TOOLS OF POLICY ANALYSIS Twenty-five years ago, no one would have anticipated the major role that quantitative information about the effects of alternative proposals now plays in shaping legislation. In the early 1960s, computer technology was in its infancy, data sources were limited, and modeling techniques were primitive.
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From page 25... ...
Similarly, the huge growth in the labor force participation of women, along with other factors, has generated renewed interest in legislative initiatives for child care, through both tax credits to parents and funding for day care services. The large federal budget deficits, resulting from the tax cuts of the early 1980s and growth in government spending throughout the decade, are another strong and continuing source of demand for policy analysis.
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From page 26... ...
The remaining policy areas that fell within our scope—support for the low-income population, support for retirees, health care benefits, and taxation (which intersects at many points with social welfare policy~were sufficiently broad to strain our capacity to carry out a useful study. In considering the utility and cost-effectiveness for analyzing social welfare policy issues of the particular class of techniques called microsimulation modeling, we found it necessary to look more globally at the policy analysis process.
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From page 27... ...
We conclude that the policy analysis world needs a "second revolution." The "first revolution" of the past two decades institutionalized the use of detailed estimates of cost and population effects of alternative proposals as part of the legislative process, and contributed to the development and widespread application of large computerized models as estimation tools. The second revolution requires significant investments in data, research knowledge, and computing to improve the quality of these models and the estimates they produce.
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