The passage of the Affordable Care Act in March 2010 set off a parsing extravaganza in the United States. Citizens of every stripe were suddenly forced to ask a big question of an expansive thicket of legislative language: how would they and their families be affected?
As the U.S. media and government set out to answer the question for the general public (and, one has to imagine, some brave layperson actually tried to read the thing), Erin Bronchetti, an Assistant Professor of Economics whose interests include the economics of health and child wellbeing, set out to answer it for a more specific population: the children of immigrant families.
She had been offered the chance to take a research-oriented sabbatical, and in deciding what to study, she said, “I chose the topic because this population is growing so rapidly (one in every four children in the U.S. now belongs to an immigrant family) and because there are striking disparities in health care and health outcomes between children of immigrant families and children of U.S. natives,” Bronchetti wrote in an e-mail.
Now, with her sabbatical completed, Bronchetti will be presenting her findings in a Faculty Lecture today (Thursday, Sept. 6) at 4:30 p.m. in the Scheuer room. The lectures are generally given by professors returning from sabbatical. For Bronchetti, her talk, titled “Recent Changes in Public Insurance: Implications for the Health of Immigrant Children,” will be an opportunity to share her ideas with a broader audience than she usually sees in class.“
As a junior faculty member, this is really one of the first chances I have had to [reach a campus-wide audience],” she wrote. “It also forces me to think carefully about how to present my approach and results to an audience with wide-ranging interests and different areas of expertise.”
The lecture will be taking place in the Scheuer room at 4:30 p.m. today.
