OKPOLICY.ORG
What’s up this week at Oklahoma Policy Institute? The Weekly Wonk is dedicated to this week’s events, publications, and blog posts.
This week OK Policy Blog graphically dispelled the common myth that Medicaid is providing health care to adults who choose not to work. Our director David Blatt discussed in The Journal Record why refusing the Medicaid expansion leaves Oklahoma with few, if any, viable options to tackle our enormous health care challenges. Our director was also quoted in a Tulsa World article about steadily rising poverty in Tulsa County.
Oklahoma Policy Institute published a letter in The Oklahoman on why the state’s tax credit for horizontal drilling is past its usefulness. A longer version of this letter previously appeared on the OK Policy Blog. Lastly this week, guest blogger Barry Friedman wrote about what the recent violence in Newtown means for dialogue and public policies around guns in America.
- 93 percent – Percentage of SoonerCare/Medicaid enrollees who are children, pregnant women, seniors, or people with disabilities.
- 6,636 – Number of personal bankruptcies in Oklahoma attributable to medical debt, 2011
- 497,951 – Number of Oklahoma children in households claiming the Earned Income Tax Credit, 2010
Policy Notes
- The Huffington Post profiled some of the hard-working Americans in low-income jobs who would continue to be denied health care in states that refuse to join the Medicaid expansion.
- Pew Research Center provides key demographic information on Latino eligible voters in Oklahoma in 2012.
- Earth Track completed a detailed inventory of fossil fuel subsidies in Colorado, Kentucky, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Wyoming; they found that the industry made pervasive use of a wide-range of energy-specific subsidies, but had also captured a significant share of more general state incentive programs as well.
