As the future of health care coverage in the United States is heavily debated during this year’s presidential race, a Yale School of Public Health student is hoping to bring his own award–winning ideas on the topic to the next administration.
Robert Nelb, a student in the M.P.H. program, recently won the 2008 graduate–level Hamilton Project Policy Innovation Prize for a policy paper that argued that enrollment in health care plans could be increased and streamlined through the use of existing tax information.
“We were impressed with your innovative thinking and the rigor of your analysis,” said Douglas W. Elmendorf, Senior Fellow and Director of the Hamilton Project for the Washington, D.C.–based Brookings Institution. As the winner of the graduate–level competition, Nelb will be awarded a $12,500 cash prize and the opportunity to have his proposal turned into a Hamilton Project discussion paper.
Nelb’s paper, “Opportunity Options: Using Tax Information to Increase Health Insurance Coverage,” focused on the feasibility of using tax information to automate enrollment in Medicaid, SCHIP, and other health insurance programs. The approach would eliminate the redundant paper forms that no one likes, he said.
Enrollment policies like the one proposed by Nelb are important for any health reform initiative that plans to cover all Americans, particularly children (almost two–thirds of uninsured children are eligible but not enrolled in Medicaid or SCHIP).
“Robert is a wonderfully thoughtful student, who has raised the visibility of public health at Yale enormously. He is exceptionally energetic and talented and a delight to have at Yale. We are all learning from him,” said Elizabeth Bradley, his faculty adviser and director of Global Health Initiatives at the School.
The policy idea came out of Nelb’s work enrolling children in Connecticut’s HUSKY program with the Consumer Health Action Network and was strengthened during his internship last summer in the U.S. Senate. In September, he presented the policy idea at a Senate briefing as part of a new student health policy publication that he edited with the Roosevelt Institution.
“Now with this Brookings award, I’m hoping to continue to advocate for including this policy as part of health reform in the next administration,” said Nelb, who grew up in a small town in Pennsylvania. He will graduate in the spring with a combined bachelor’s and M.P.H degree.
During his time at Yale, Nelb has also worked as an intern in the U.S. Senate, traveled to France to study its health care system, organized a coalition of nearly 500 Yale undergraduates concerned about public health issues, and is the national health policy coordinator for the Roosevelt Institution, a student think tank with over 7,000 students working on progressive policy. He also recently won the Trong Nguyen Award for Student Leadership from the American Public Health Association (for work with the Roosevelt Institution and the Yale Public Health Coalition).