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JaredCo put together a great free wallpaper app for BlackBerry. The app does a good job of curating groups of images by theme to suit your mood making personalization a breeze.

The app is compatible with every modern BlackBerry including legacy devices, BlackBerry PlayBook and soon to be released BlackBerry 10. Designed to be low maintenance, the app gets updates via the web so you won’t have to visit app world to access fresh wallpaper images and categories.

Click here to download JaredCo’s Free Wallpapers for BlackBerry 10 and PlayBook from App World.

Is the iPhone falling out of style? Initial sales reports for the iPhone 5 appeared positive, with 2 million preorders in the first 24 hours following its announcement last September. But the forecast has since changed. Sales numbers after the initial push weren’t as strong as analysts originally thought, which caused the Apple stock to tumble in mid- to late-December. The latest tumble, which sent the stock to below $500 in pre-bell trading, further suggests lackluster sales.

According to Reuters, Apple has called many of its suppliers and had them halve orders for the January through March period. That means cutting estimates from 65 million iPhones produced to just over 30 million. While 30 million iPhones might seem like a lot to you and me, it apparently is not standing up with Apple’s previously heavy production totals. Does this put a damper on the future of the iPhone?

Apple took plenty of grief in the weeks, and then months, following the iPhone 5 announcement. While consumers generally embraced the larger screen, some thought it not large enough to keep up with the current oversized smartphone trend. It also added very few new features to the table; even the new iOS 6 provided only incremental improvements over iOS 5, with a few new bells and whistles attached.

In addition to the initial disappointment, which led many consumers (including your humble author) to seek Android alternatives, there was the whole Maps debacle. Apple has since rectified the situation, allowing Google Maps into the App Store, and that PR disaster does appear to be behind them. But with that wave of disappointment, combined with the initial wave, Apple could face some relatively lean times ahead.

It seems that Apple has taken some previously unthinkable measures to increase iPhone 5 sales. In December they reduced the price of iPhone 5 units sold in Walmart stores to $127. Even now they’re listed at $187. (Other retailers, such as Best Buy, continue to sell for the full $199 price.) While those kinds of deals might have improved holiday sales numbers, they won’t do much in the first quarter.

Two other factors play a part in Apple’s production cut. There is Samsung, which has sold 40 million of their Samsung Galaxy S III smartphones, and 100 million Galaxy S phones since the original in 2010. Samsung is also gearing up for a fourth edition to the series, which could further hamper iPhone sales. Samsung did a good job marketing the Galaxy S III during Apple’s launch phase, and could really cut into Apple’s market if they get the Galaxy S IV into the market place six or so months ahead of the next iPhone.

Another factor is the U.S. economy. While it has seen worse times, taxpayers just saw a small but significant tax increase, thanks to the end of a tax holiday. It might not be much, but any hike in taxes — resulting in a noticeable difference in paycheck amounts — can cause consumers to cut back on spending. Since many iPhone customers are upgrading old iPhones, and since the old iPhones are perfectly adequate, many might choose to hang onto their current models for now.

Finally, it’s easy to draw further speculation from this. Perhaps Apple is planning an iPhone release in the first half of 2013, to help combat the Galaxy S IV. While the S IV will certainly beat any new iPhone to the market, Apple might want to announce its new iPhone earlier, so Samsung doesn’t have a six-month head start. Again, that’s complete speculation, but it’s certainly possible.

Even amid bad news, it’s tough to predict long-term poor performance for Apple. There are numerous reasons why they might have cut production for the first quarter of 2013, and some of them might lead to positives. Still, the news is at least a little concerning in the short term.

The post What To Make of Apple’s Order Cuts appeared first on MobileMoo.

At University, as an Economics and International Development student, I remember one of the lectures we had on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). We covered some of the successes of CSR and some of the infamous failures of businesses trying to engage in international development. As a critically minded student, the failures naturally stuck in my mind more and I remember thinking about the unsuccessful programmes for weeks afterward. These were companies who had set up schools without teachers, hospitals with completely untrained doctors and sold discounted fertilisers to local communities that actually didn’t fertilise crops at all. After this my thoughts on business and international development were very simple: businesses should stay out and leave it to the experts.

After my MA I took a job as Programme Manager for Enactus UK (formerly SIFE), an organisation funded by corporate sponsors, many of which contributed under their CSR remit. Enactus trains university students to set up projects locally and abroad to empower people in need using enterprise as a tool. Many of these projects create social enterprises or set up small scale local entrepreneurs in the developing world. I didn’t have a problem with this sort of CSR: the giving of money to enable others to run projects. Logically, business has great potential to do good through sponsorship.

Enactus is an incredible organisation with inspiring projects and the programme wouldn’t exist without its corporate sponsorship. I applaud the companies who sponsor Enactus, but I think businesses could go one step further.

In my eyes sponsorship from a business’s perspective, never really seemed to maximise impact. For businesses, there is a bottom line. Some people’s, slightly pessimistic, view on CSR is that a primary reason to do this is PR, and to look good to customers (and therefore increase profits). If this were true, the incentive here for businesses would be to run projects that maximise how good they look rather than maximise social impact. Of course there are many businesses that genuinely do want to have a positive impact, but by the above logic there is rarely an absolute imperative to do so. Realistically if a business was going to go bust it would reduce its CSR spend and focus on staying afloat. This mismatch of aims never really sat right with me and is the primary reason I was uneasy about the role of business in international development.

Food Retail Industry Challenge Fund (FRICH): supporting African farmers through innovative business partnerships (Photo/DFID)

However, just a few months ago I was offered a place on DFID’s Graduate Development Scheme in the Private Sector Department.  On my first day I was introduced to the terms “shared value” and “inclusive business”, which offer a fantastic alternative to CSR (a term you never hear mentioned in DFID). Inclusive business models don’t have a CSR add-on, but instead embed development thinking into their core business model in a way that benefits the poor and contributes to the business’ bottom line; creating shared value.

The Business Innovation Facility (BIF): supporting inclusive business models to deliver commercial returns and new opportunities for the world’s poorest (Photo/DFID)

This is a really exciting concept and gives business a really tangible role to play in development whilst still meeting their business objectives. DFID runs several programmes to help businesses test and adopt inclusive business models. Programmes such as the Business Innovation Facility (BIF) and the Food Retail Industry Challenge Fund (FRICH) are great examples of these. BIF provides advisory support and information to businesses which are developing inclusive business projects in Bangladesh, India, Malawi, Nigeria, and Zambia. FRICH works with UK and European businesses to enable them to develop and test new ways for African food exports to reach European consumers. These programmes are great examples of how innovative business partnerships can deliver commercial benefits, as well as income and employment opportunities to thousands of farmers, labourers and their families in developing countries.

This is just a basic introduction to inclusive business and I look forward to telling you more about this, and the other exciting things we are working on in the Private Sector Department, in future posts.

 

Final Book Now Available

Climate change can reasonably be expected to increase the frequency and intensity of a variety of potentially disruptive environmental events–slowly at first, but then more quickly. It is prudent to expect to be surprised by the way in which these events may cascade, or have far-reaching effects. During the coming decade, certain climate-related events will produce consequences that exceed the capacity of the affected societies or global systems to manage; these may have global security implications. Although focused on events outside the United States, Climate and Social Stress: Implications for Security Analysis recommends a range of research and policy actions to create a whole-of-government approach to increasing understanding of complex and contingent connections between climate and security, and to inform choices about adapting to and reducing vulnerability to climate change.

[Read the full report]

Topics: Environment and Environmental Studies | Behavioral and Social Sciences | Conflict and Security Issues | Earth Sciences

President Obama discusses how we will end the war in Afghanistan and how our goal of ensuring that al Qaeda never again uses Afghanistan to launch attacks against America is within reach.

Transcript | Download mp4 | Download mp3

President Barack Obama and President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan participate in a joint press conference in the East Room of the White House, Jan. 11, 2013. (Official White House Photo by Lawrence Jackson)

President Obama hosted Afghan President Hamid Karzai today at the White House for talks on the partnership between our two nations and the role of U.S. troops in that country.

And coming out of those talks, President Obama was able to discuss a milestone we'll reach this year when Afghan forces take full responsibility for their nation's security and the war draws to a close.

"This progress is only possible because of the incredible sacrifices of our troops and our diplomats, the forces of our many coalition partners, and the Afghan people who’ve endured extraordinary hardship," he said. "In this war, more than 2,000 of America’s sons and daughters have given their lives. These are patriots that we honor today, tomorrow, and forever."

In his statement, President Karzai echoed that message.

"During our conversations…I thanked the President for the help that the United States has given to the Afghan people," he said, "for all that we have gained in the past 10 years, and that those gains will be kept by any standard while we are working for peace and stability in Afghanistan, including the respect for Afghan constitution."

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For the first time in what seems like ages, the BlackBerry is garnering positive press. Ever since its ill-fated attempt to produce an iPhone competitor with the BlackBerry Storm, the BlackBerry brand has been on the decline. It started slowly, but in 2010 it hastened to a free fall.

The BlackBerry 7 line of smartphones might have helped in 2009 or early 2010, but a 2011 release just wouldn’t cut it. Yet all might not be lost for the former titan of the industry. Its much-hyped BlackBerry 10 phones will get their day at the market, as all four carriers have committed to the platform, with three of them jumping on board at launch.

At CES this week all of the Big 4 — Verizon. AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile — stated their support for the platform. That will give BlackBerry every opportunity to show consumers that they are not all talk. For the past year they’ve touted the potential of BlackBerry 10, but haven’t gotten devices into consumers hands. In fact, early in 2012 they delayed the target launch date of BlackBerry 10 from October, 2012, to Q1, 2013. Now they have to prove to people that the device is worth the wait.

Via PC World

Some carriers were a bit more optimistic than others. T-Mobile seemed the most enthusiastic, perhaps because they have the most to gain from a successful BlackBerry 10 launch. They lag far behind No. 3 Sprint, and will remain there even if their proposed merger with MetroPCs goes seamlessly. AT&T sounded a bit more pragmatic, recognizing its large population of BlackBerry business users will want to remain on the platform. Of the Big 4, only Sprint didn’t commit to carrying the devices when they launch, but they will eventually be in the fold.

Getting picked up by the four major carriers was pretty much the only way BlackBerry 10 stood a chance in the marketplace. The iPhone has a cult following that will continue for as long as Apple makes products. There are others, too, who simply prefer the simple interface and syncing capabilities of iOS, pairing the iPhone with Apple desktops, laptops, iPods, and the iPad. Android has caught on in a major way, with Samsung making a huge dent in the market. Other manufacturers, such as HTC and LG, are creating strong offerings as well, while other players, such as ZTE, have spread the market from the high end to the low.

In addition, Windows Phone got a considerable head start on BlackBerry. The seamless integration between Windows Phone and Windows 8 for desktops and laptops can give the Microsoft phones a considerable advantage in the business marketplace, which is BlackBerry’s bread and butter. That means Research In Motion has an upward hill to climb in terms of convincing North America to adopt its new platform.

We’ll all get a closer look at BlackBerry 10 later this month. RIM has an announcement set for January 30th, with the phones launching shortly afterward.

VIa FierceWireless.

The post BlackBerry 10 will get a fair shake with commitment from Big 4 carriers appeared first on MobileMoo.

Hello and thanks for reading my very first blog. Not long ago I also wrote my first ever tweet at the Open Up! conference on the 13th November which promoted open governance using technology in London’s tech city – let’s hope this blog goes down as more of a success than my tweeting prowess. Following my inaugural tweet to my 6 devoted followers, I was overshadowed by the success of a fellow Twitter newby on the same day; DFID’s Secretary of State @JustineGreening followed my lead with booming success – having almost 1,000 followers after her very first tweet.

Since joining DFID in September this year as part of the shiny new Graduate Development Scheme I have learnt an incredible amount and been introduced to a host of new experiences – joining twitter being one of the least impressive. Having previously worked elsewhere in the civil service I have found moving from being a statistician working on databases and programming in the Ministry of Justice to working on policy and managing events (working with written information!) in DFID was a shock to the system to say the least!

From my very first task looking into the use of technology in development, cowering in the safety of statistics, I was struck by the evidence in front of me. The initial statistic that really got me thinking was that:

Throughout the developing world there are 300 million fewer female mobile phone subscribers than male (GSMA, 2010).

Women have far less access than men to new technologies throughout the developing world. (Photo/Panos)

This means that in the developing world a woman is 21% less likely to own a mobile phone than a man. The reasons for this I found were numerous and woven throughout are the existing barriers for women and girls which permeate the developing world but also to some extent the developed. Having previously studied violence against women in the UK I found this finding particularly poignant:

74% of married women at the bottom of the pyramid (BoP) – those living on less than US$75 a month – surveyed by GSMA’s mWomen (2012) did not want a mobile phone as their husbands would not allow it.

I will be writing about issues as I discover them, from the perspective of someone who is not an expert but believes that they are important and that the discussion is worth having. I will be writing largely about the use of technology in development, the impact that it can have to empower citizens, to improve service delivery, to assist in free and fair elections … the list will go on… but also learning from the failures of the use of technology in development. I will write a special post on the Open Up! conference discussing using digital tools including mobile and open source technology to empower citizens and encourage open governance. I will write about gender and technology as I discover more – I can think of numerous positive examples of programmes both within DFID and outside that have empowered women using digital tools and look forward to starting a conversation in a later post!

Welcome to the West Wing Week, your guide to everything that's happening at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. This week, the President nominated a bipartisan slate of leaders to key administration jobs and the Vice President met with a wide array of organizations to talk about efforts to reduce gun violence. 

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The mathematical sciences are part of nearly all aspects of everyday life—the discipline has underpinned such beneficial modern capabilities as Internet search, medical imaging, computer animation, numerical weather predictions, and all types of digital communications. The Mathematical Sciences in 2025 examines the current state of the mathematical sciences and explores the changes needed for the discipline to be in a strong position and able to maximize its contribution to the nation in 2025. It finds the vitality of the discipline excellent and that it contributes in expanding ways to most areas of science and engineering, as well as to the nation as a whole, and recommends that training for future generations of mathematical scientists should be re-assessed in light of the increasingly cross-disciplinary nature of the mathematical sciences. In addition, because of the valuable interplay between ideas and people from all parts of the mathematical sciences, the report emphasizes that universities and the government need to continue to invest in the full spectrum of the mathematical sciences in order for the whole enterprise to continue to flourish long-term.

On September 8-9, 2011, experts in solar physics, climate models, paleoclimatology, and atmospheric science assembled at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado for a workshop to consider the Sun’s variability over time and potential Sun-climate connections.

While it does not provide findings, recommendations, or consensus on the current state of the science, The Effects of Solar Variability on Earth’s Climate: A Workshop Report briefly introduces the primary topics discussed by presenters at the event. As context for these topics, the summary includes background information on the potential Sun-climate connection, the measurement record from space, and potential perturbations of climate due to long-term solar variability. This workshop report also summarizes some of the science questions explored by the participants as potential future research endeavors.

The world’s ocean has already experienced a 30% rise in acidity since the industrial revolution, with acidity expected to rise 100 to 150% over preindustrial levels by the end of this century. Potential consequences to marine life and also to economic activities that depend on a healthy marine ecosystem are difficult to assess and predict, but potentially devastating. To address this knowledge gap, Congress passed the Federal Ocean Acidification Research and Monitoring (FOARAM) Act in 2009, which, among other things, required that an interagency working group create a “Strategic Plan for Federal Research and Monitoring of Ocean Acidification.”

Review of the Federal Ocean Acidification Research and Monitoring Plan reviews the strategic plan on the basis of how well it fulfills program elements laid out in the FOARAM Act and follows the advice provided to the working group in the NRC’s 2010 report, Ocean Acidification: A National Strategy to Meet the Challenges of a Changing Ocean. This report concludes that, overall, the plan is strong and provides a comprehensive framework for improving our understanding of ocean acidification. Potential improvements include a better defined strategy for implementing program goals, stronger integration of the seven broad scientific themes laid out in the FOARAM Act, and better mechanisms for coordination among federal agencies and with other U.S. and international efforts to address ocean acidification.

President Barack Obama announces Chief of Staff Jack Lew is his nominee for Treasury Secretary to replace Timothy Geithner, right, in the East Room of the White House, Jan. 10, 2013. (Official White House Photo by Chuck Kennedy)

Today, in an event President Obama nominated Jacob Lew — the current White House chief of staff — to serve as the next Treasury Secretary.

"Over the past year, I’ve sought Jack’s advice on virtually every decision that I’ve made, from economic policy to foreign policy," the President said.

Jack Lew has decades of experience tackling some of the nation's toughest economic challenges. As director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Clinton, Lew helped to negotiate the deal that balanced the federal budget — and led to a budget surplus. In the Obama Administration, even before becoming chief of staff, he has helped to manage the day-to-day operations at the State Department and shepherd through the Budget Control Act to reduce federal spending in a second stint at OMB.

"One reason Jack has been so effective in this town is because he is a low-key guy who prefers to surround himself with policy experts rather than television cameras," said President Obama. "And over the years, he’s built a reputation as a master of policy who can work with members of both parties and forge principled compromises."

The President also offered his gratitude to his current Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner — who helped to guide the country through the financial crisis and get the economy growing again.

"When the history books are written," he said, "Tim Geithner is going to go down as one of our finest Secretaries of the Treasury." 

Read the full remarks here, or watch the video of the event: 

Editor's note: This post was originally published on the official blog of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

Today, we’re issuing one of our most important rules to date, the Ability-to-Repay rule. It’s designed to assure the reliability of mortgages – making sure that lenders offer mortgages that consumers can actually afford to pay back. This is a simple, obvious principle that needs to be cemented in the housing market.

In the run-up to the financial crisis, we had a housing market that was reckless about lending money. Lenders thought they could make money on a loan even if the consumer could not pay back that loan, either by banking on rising housing prices or by off-loading the mortgage into the secondary market. This encouraged broad indifference to the ability of many consumers to repay loans, which dramatically increased mortgage delinquencies and rates of foreclosures.

Earlier this year, we heard from a California man named Henry, who was in the process of foreclosure. He was desperate. During the overheated years, a lender sold him a mortgage valued at more than half a million dollars. This was far more than he could afford on his annual salary of less than $50,000. He said he’d assumed that the lender knew what it was doing when he qualified for such a large loan. He’s now worried not only about losing his home, but about losing his family’s entire future.

Henry is not alone. Unaffordable loans helped cause the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. People across the country were sold unsustainable mortgages. Some may have entered with their eyes open, seeking to ride the wave of rising housing prices, but many were led astray. For many borrowers, it appears that lenders ignored the numbers to get the loan approved. This kind of reckless lending was an endemic problem.

To put it simply: lenders should not set up consumers to fail.

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Prepublication Now Available

The world’s ocean has already experienced a 30% rise in acidity since the industrial revolution, with acidity expected to rise 100 to 150% over preindustrial levels by the end of this century. Potential consequences to marine life and also to economic activities that depend on a healthy marine ecosystem are difficult to assess and predict, but potentially devastating. To address this knowledge gap, Congress passed the Federal Ocean Acidification Research and Monitoring (FOARAM) Act in 2009, which, among other things, required that an interagency working group create a “Strategic Plan for Federal Research and Monitoring of Ocean Acidification.”

Review of the Federal Ocean Acidification Research and Monitoring Plan reviews the strategic plan on the basis of how well it fulfills program elements laid out in the FOARAM Act and follows the advice provided to the working group in the NRC’s 2010 report, Ocean Acidification: A National Strategy to Meet the Challenges of a Changing Ocean. This report concludes that, overall, the plan is strong and provides a comprehensive framework for improving our understanding of ocean acidification. Potential improvements include a better defined strategy for implementing program goals, stronger integration of the seven broad scientific themes laid out in the FOARAM Act, and better mechanisms for coordination among federal agencies and with other U.S. and international efforts to address ocean acidification.

[Read the full report]

Topics: Earth Sciences

Happy New Year to all my DFID friends and blog readers!

Traditionally, the new year is a time for making new resolutions. Go on that new diet, start that exercise regime, enrol in that evening class you’ve been eyeing for a few months now. We’ve all been here before and January always starts with the best of intentions.

My main New Year’s resolution is to get my finances in order – economists are notoriously bad at looking after their own money and I’m no exception! Apparently, trying to lose weight is the most popular New Year’s resolution amongst Americans. Similar surveys may find the same in other countries.

But New Year is not just a time for individuals to put their best foot forward. It’s also a time for countries and organisations to shape up. While weight loss might be popular for individuals, for countries and organisations working in development, one of the most popular 2013 resolutions is likely to be to increase transparency.

Is your organisation ready to open up and become more transparent in 2013? Picture: Yemi Adamolekun speaking about ‘Enough is Enough Nigeria’ at Open Up! Russell Watkins/DFID

The sad thing is that quite often, January best intentions end up fizzling out by May. There’s a risk that, just like many of our individual resolutions, pledges on transparency could slip.

There are a few great articles with tips for keeping New Year’s resolutions alive. Like this one from the Cabinet Office Behavioural Insights Team with 5 tips, or this from the Huffington Post with 10 tips. I won’t go through all of them, but I did see some really useful parallels for countries or organisations interested in transparency.

Take Tips 3-6 from the HuffPo article. These were especially relevant for countries or organisations taking first steps towards transparency. They were about visualising goals, formalising and declaring them – ideally in public – and breaking them down into quantitative sub-goals and a plan, then tracking progress against that plan. Economist Dean Karlan calls this creating a “commitment contract”, and cites several examples about how it can be used in development. It’s exactly what the common transparency standard has been created to help organisations do. Countries or organisations from all over the world – be that UK, Brazil or Ghana – can focus on achieving the standard, create their own specific timetable for how they will get there, and publish it so that they can track their own progress and everyone can hold them to their own goals.

There were also tips relevant to countries and organisations already doing pretty well on transparency, such as DFID. Doing well is dangerous, as it’s easy to become complacent. If one individual in DFID or another organisation is not transparent it may not matter too much, yet many individuals being opaque can add up to significant failure. How to avoid this? It’s hard to coerce staff or punish them for not keeping up. So the best alternative is to keep reminding staff of their goals, focus on the great things that will happen when these goals are achieved, find ways to actively lock-in gains, and celebrate success. These are all crucial to avoid sliding back. 

We will need to do this in DFID. For example, in 2012, we were at the top of the Publish What You Fund Aid Transparency Index. This year, another organisation might get there. Whatever happens, the competition will provide a good incentive to DFID to keep progressing. Hence, we are planning to do more work to code aid data geographically so that people can see and show data that’s relevant to a location anywhere in the world, and publish the data based on developing countries’ budget definitions rather than what’s relevant in the UK. Success in these will mean people in developing countries can better understand and illustrate through tools like infographics what UK aid is doing and have greater say over it. Success under the Aid Transparency Challenge which we launched at the end of 2012 will mean people can add up and understand how much UK aid, different non-governmental organisations or other organisations are administering. The Center for Global Development think-tank called this work a “game-changer”.

New Year’s resolutions are never easy to maintain, and I doubt that 2013 will be any easier. But the good news is that whether we’re new starters or we’ve already been making progress, there are some simple tips we can use to maintain our best intentions. Let’s use them all, for transparency’s sake!

Prepublication Now Available

The mathematical sciences are part of nearly all aspects of everyday life—the discipline has underpinned such beneficial modern capabilities as Internet search, medical imaging, computer animation, numerical weather predictions, and all types of digital communications. The Mathematical Sciences in 2025 examines the current state of the mathematical sciences and explores the changes needed for the discipline to be in a strong position and able to maximize its contribution to the nation in 2025. It finds the vitality of the discipline excellent and that it contributes in expanding ways to most areas of science and engineering, as well as to the nation as a whole, and recommends that training for future generations of mathematical scientists should be re-assessed in light of the increasingly cross-disciplinary nature of the mathematical sciences. In addition, because of the valuable interplay between ideas and people from all parts of the mathematical sciences, the report emphasizes that universities and the government need to continue to invest in the full spectrum of the mathematical sciences in order for the whole enterprise to continue to flourish long-term.

[Read the full report]

Topics: Math, Chemistry and Physics

Final Book Now Available

The United States has seen major advances in medical care during the past decades, but access to care at an affordable cost is not universal. Many Americans lack health care insurance of any kind, and many others with insurance are nonetheless exposed to financial risk because of high premiums, deductibles, co-pays, limits on insurance payments, and uncovered services. One might expect that the U.S. poverty measure would capture these financial effects and trends in them over time. Yet the current official poverty measure developed in the early 1960s does not take into account significant increases and variations in medical care costs, insurance coverage, out-of-pocket spending, and the financial burden imposed on families and individuals. Although medical costs consume a growing share of family and national income and studies regularly document high rates of medical financial stress and debt, the current poverty measure does not capture the consequences for families’ economic security or their income available for other basic needs.

In 1995, a panel of the National Research Council (NRC) recommended a new poverty measure, which compares families’ disposable income to poverty thresholds based on current spending for food, clothing, shelter, utilities, and a little more. The panel’s recommendations stimulated extensive collaborative research involving several government agencies on experimental poverty measures that led to a new research Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM), which the U.S. Census Bureau first published in November 2011 and will update annually. Analyses of the effects of including and excluding certain factors from the new SPM showed that, were it not for the cost that families incurred for premiums and other medical expenses not covered by health insurance, 10 million fewer people would have been poor according to the SPM.

The implementation of the patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) provides a strong impetus to think rigorously about ways to measure medical care economic burden and risk, which is the basis for Medical Care Economic Risk. As new policies – whether part of the ACA or other policies – are implemented that seek to expand and improve health insurance coverage and to protect against the high costs of medical care relative to income, such measures will be important to assess the effects of policy changes in both the short and long term on the extent of financial burden and risk for the population, which are explained in this report.

[Read the full report]

Topics: | |

The United States is among the wealthiest nations in the world, but it is far from the healthiest. Although life expectancy and survival rates in the United States have improved dramatically over the past century, Americans live shorter lives and experience more injuries and illnesses than people in other high-income countries. The U.S. health disadvantage cannot be attributed solely to the adverse health status of racial or ethnic minorities or poor people: even highly advantaged Americans are in worse health than their counterparts in other, “peer” countries.

In light of the new and growing evidence about the U.S. health disadvantage, the National Institutes of Health asked the National Research Council (NRC) and the Institute of Medicine (IOM) to convene a panel of experts to study the issue. The Panel on Understanding Cross-National Health Differences Among High-Income Countries examined whether the U.S. health disadvantage exists across the life span, considered potential explanations, and assessed the larger implications of the findings.

U.S. Health in International Perspective presents detailed evidence on the issue, explores the possible explanations for the shorter and less healthy lives of Americans than those of people in comparable countries, and recommends actions by both government and nongovernment agencies and organizations to address the U.S. health disadvantage.