Most Americans support minimizing administrative burdens for Medicaid recipients as the public health emergency ends.

During the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) public health emergency (PHE), states were barred from disenrolling anyone from Medicaid unless the beneficiary asked to be disenrolled, moved out of state, or died. Coverage increased, but as the PHE ends an estimated 7 million eligible Americans are expected to lose insurance due to difficulty navigating the renewal process. The end of the PHE therefore offers state policymakers a chance to reassess the value of such administrative burdens as a variety of policy tools are available to mitigate these losses. We inform this discussion via a national survey that captures public preferences around administrative burdens in public health insurance. We find strong public support for burden-reduction techniques that minimize coverage losses such as using administrative data to shift burdens onto the state and better outreach and communication, with an average of 74% of respondents supporting each policy tool. This support holds across the ideological spectrum and demographic groups, but it is stronger among liberals than conservatives, for those with more direct experience of burdens, those who struggle with such burdens, and for those with lower racial prejudice.

Human Capital and Administrative Burden: The Role of Cognitive Resources in Citizen-State Interactions.

One means by which the state reinforces inequality is by imposing administrative burdens that loom larger for citizens with lower levels of human capital. Integrating insights from various disciplines, this article focuses on one aspect of human capital: cognitive resources. The authors outline a model that explains how burdens and cognitive resources, especially executive functioning, interrelate. The article then presents illustrative examples, highlighting three common life factors-scarcity, health problems, and age-related cognitive decline. These factors create a human capital catch-22, increasing people's likelihood of needing state assistance while simultaneously undermining the cognitive resources required to negotiate the burdens they encounter while seeking such assistance. The result is to reduce access to state benefits and increase inequality. The article concludes by calling for scholars of behavioral public administration and public administration more generally to incorporate more attention to human capital into their research.

How Different Forms of Health Matter to Political Participation.

Physical and mental health is known to have wide influence over most aspects of social life-be it schooling and employment or marriage and broader social engagement-but has received limited attention in explaining different forms of political participation. We analyze a unique dataset with a rich array of objective measures of cognitive and physical well-being and two objective measures of political participation, voting and contributing money to campaigns and parties. For voting, each aspect of health has a powerful effect on par with traditional predictors of participation such as education. In contrast, health has little to no effect on making campaign contributions. We recommend additional attention to the multifaceted affects of health on different forms of political participation.

A Life Worth Living: Evidence on the Relationship Between Prosocial Values and Happiness.

Employees with a desire to help others provide benefits to their organization, clients, and fellow workers, but what do they get in return? We argue that the prosocial desire to help others is a basic human goal that matters to an individual's happiness. We employ both longitudinal and cross-sectional data to demonstrate that work-related prosocial motivation is associated with higher subjective well-being, both in terms of current happiness and life satisfaction later in life. Cross-sectional data also suggest that perceived social impact (the belief that one's job is making a difference) is even more important for happiness than the prosocial desire to help. The results show that the relationship between prosocial motivation and happiness is not limited to government employees, suggesting that in this aspect of altruistic behavior, public and private employees are not so different.