This is the first of what will be an ongoing series of posts looking at the impact of the new federal health care reform law on Oklahoma and Oklahomans. For full information on health care reform, the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation website is excellent. We encourage your contributions as comments or as  a guest blog.

Last June, I posted a blog which I titled “Sorry, I can’t afford that raise” discussing the cliff effect. This is the situation  that occurs whereby low-income working families lose eligibility for public benefit and work support programs as their incomes rise.  As described in a 2007 report prepared for the Women’s Foundation of Colorado and the Women and Family Action Network Coalition:

A benefit cliff occurs when just a small increase in income leads to the complete termination of a benefit. The result is that parents can work and earn more, while their families end up worse off than they were before.

I noted that:

At a certain threshold, workers find themselves in a situation where the rational response to an offer of a raise or a better job is to respond, “Sorry, but I just can’t afford it.” Read the rest of this entry »