Madonna Harrington Meyer, Ph.D.

Madonna Harrington Meyer has conducted extensive research on how gender, race, and class inequality affect health and economic security in later life. She is particularly interested in how source of health insurance affects access to care. She has worked on a series of articles that explore the impact of Medicaid's relatively low reimbursement rate for nursing home care on access to care for Medicaid recipients.

Harrington Meyer found that in many states the Medicaid reimbursement rate was significantly lower than the private pay rate, causing Medicaid applicants to wait longer for admission, settle for inferior nursing homes, or do without needed care. That work culminated in a major study funded by the Borchard Foundation and The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Changes in Healthcare Financing and Organization initiative (HCFO) in which Harrington Meyer and her colleagues compared aspects of the nursing home industry, Medicaid programs, and access to care in the 50 states over nearly 20 years. The researchers found that Minnesota and North Dakota provide a possible policy alternative; these two states have passed rate equity legislation that prohibits nursing homes from treating Medicaid applicants or patients differently than private payers. Harrington Meyer is now working with colleagues to evaluate the feasibility of a national rate equity policy.

"HCFO funding is notably different than many other funding streams," Harrington Meyer said, "in that in addition to documenting sources of inequality in health and health care, researchers are encouraged to evaluate policy solutions. This pragmatic component of HCFO propels scholarship and policymaking in ways that have the potential to alleviate inequalities due to source of insurance or other factors."

Harrington Meyer is currently working with her colleague, Pam Herd, on a book that explores the impact of gender, race, and class inequality on fiscal and physical health among the elderly in the United States. Retrenching Welfare, Entrenching Inequality: Gender, Race and Age in the U.S., is due out with Russell Sage Publishers in 2005. She and her colleagues have just completed a series of articles that analyze how the decline in marital rates, particularly among African American women in the United States, is causing a greater proportion of each successive cohort of older women to reach old age ineligible for Social Security's spouse and widow benefits.

Harrington Meyer is an associate professor of sociology at Syracuse University and the director of the Syracuse University Gerontology Center. Last year, the Center hosted a major national conference, "Changing Demographics, Stagnant Social Policies," in which they explored how major demographic shifts among the elderly in the United States will require more responsive policymaking. She is also a senior research associate at the Center for Policy Research in the Maxwell School at Syracuse. Harrington Meyer is a fellow of the Gerontological Society of America and a member of the National Academy of Social Insurance.