This Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI) report synthesizes highlights of recent EBRI research on health issues. Health data in this document include: national health expenditures, employment-based health benefits, the uninsured, managed care, consumer-driven health benefits, Medicare and retiree health benefits, public opinion, and small employers and health benefits.

The Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI) is a nonpartisan, nonprofit public policy research organization based in Washington, DC, that has been researching economic security issues for almost 25 years. This EBRI Issue Brief synthesizes highlights of recent EBRI research on retirement benefits. Retirement data in this document include: Basics of employment-based benefits; Assets in retirement plans; Participants in retirement plans; 401(k) plan trends; Individual retirement accounts; Social Security; Lump-sum distributions; Public opinion on retirement; and, Small employers and retirement plans.

This book focuses on the distributional consequences of the public sector and examines and documents, theoretically and empirically, the effects of government spending and taxation on personal distribution, and includes chapters investigating the relationship between the public sector and functional distribution of national income.

The Employee Benefit Research Institute May 2010 policy forum addressed the topic “Retirement Income Adequacy: How Big Is the Gap and How Might the Market Respond?” This was EBRI's 66th policy forum, which brought about 100 policy and professional experts to Washington, DC, in May 2010, to discuss new research on retirement income adequacy. This paper provides highlights of the new research and experts' reactions to it. EBRI has been providing assessments of national retirement income adequacy using its proprietary Retirement Security Projection Model® (RSPM) since 2003. The 2010 EBRI Retirement Readiness RatingTM (RRR), based on the model, provides a benchmark for every American and their prospects for having sufficient resources to cover basic expenses and uninsured health expenses in retirement. This latest update includes consideration of the effects of automatic enrollment, auto escalation of contributions, and qualified default investments in terms of higher rates of participation, deferrals, and investment diversification. The 2010 EBRI RRRTM finds that almost two-thirds (64 percent) of Americans in the two lowest preretirement income levels will have insufficient resources to cover basic expenses and uninsured health costs after 10 years in retirement. Almost a third (29 percent) of those in the next-to-highest income level will run short of money to cover basic expenses and uninsured health costs after 20 years in retirement, as will more than 1 in 10 (13 percent) of those in the highest-income level. By age group, almost one-half of the Early Baby Boomer cohort (those now ages 56-62) are at risk of running short of money to cover basic expenditures in retirement. The PDF for the above title, published in the August 2010 issue of EBRI Notes, also contains the fulltext of another August 2010 EBRI Notes article abstracted on SSRN: “Coverage of Dependent Children to Age 26 Under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.”