Category: Commentary

Medicaid, America’s safety-net program for more than 62 million low-income uninsured Americans, is broken. It’s broken at the state level, where program costs are swamping state budgets. Read More

By capping property taxes, Gov. Cuomo has tapped the brakes on local government and school spending outside New York City. He’s also taken steps to limit the growth in the local share of Medicaid over the next few years, and to curb public pension expenses further down the road. Read More

Sooner or later, New York will recover from the physical effects of this week’s super-storm, just as it did from the cataclysm of 9/11. Read More

One year ago, as Andrew Cuomo was about to wrap up his first year in the New York governor's office, the governor and state legislative leaders agreed on a series of personal income tax provisions they described in a joint news release as "fair tax reform that achieves the first major restructuring of the tax code in decades." Read More

New York operates the largest network of programs for the poor in the nation. It serves more than 5 million Medicaid clients at a cost of $54 billion annually. Read More

Don’t look now, but a quick deal to sidestep the federal government’s fiscal cliff could end up pushing New York state to the edge of its own precipice. Yet top New York officials seem oblivious to a wave of federal tax hikes due to hit the state’s tax base as soon as next month. Read More

New York’s Medicaid program is now testing, on a small and limited scale, giving people financial incentives and requiring compliance in changing their behavior. The approach has promise — if done right; it’s important to keep in mind the lessons of welfare reform. Read More

By the time they near the end of their second year in office, it’s not unusual for first-term governors to shift their focus from tackling problems to taking bows — and Gov. Cuomo certainly has been no exception. Read More