Introduction

Many things have changed since we introduced the Gateway Policy Explorer. Now, the Explorer gives users more streamlined navigation tools as well as enhanced access to data about retirement, long-term care, and education policies.

The Policy Explorer provides details about the policy and institutional arrangements of countries and U.S. states over time. When the Explorer was initially released, it focused on retirement policies, including old-age pensions, social assistance, and health insurance. Now, it has grown to include long-term care (LTC) policies (including cash benefits, in-kind benefits, 24-hour care benefits, and service vouchers), and launched the education policy series, providing compulsory schooling policy information for several countries and Indian states. 

The Policy Explorer initiative was motivated by the rapid evolution of policies affecting older people across the world. As the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) is more than 30 years old and many of the international network of studies (HRS-INS) cover more than a decade, understanding policy in place at the time of the survey has become more demanding for researchers.

Individuals make choices based on current policies and the outcomes we see today may reflect responses to past policies. When looking at respondents’ answers in surveys, these policies are important for researchers to recognize and understand. Collecting this contextual information in the Explorer supports researchers who want to understand or use policy changes in their research and provides context for longitudinal or cross-country or state differences. 

New Features of the Policy Explorer Website 

Each policy area has its own introductory video (Retirement, LTC, Education). The Gateway recently launched three new Policy Explorer features aimed at enhancing the user experience for researchers interested in analyzing policy changes. The first feature allows users to view tables, formulas, and boxes from the Policy Explorer reports directly on the website, eliminating the need to download the report PDF as previously required. These are now hyperlinked, allowing users to click and view for easy access. Similarly, glossary terms and detail notes have been integrated into the Explorer to succinctly define key terms and present important information. These elements, displayed in gray text, are accessible by hovering over the terms or notes, as shown below. Notes are numbered and enclosed in brackets for ease of reference. 

The second new feature enables users to filter for a specific policy component, rather than having to view all components at once. For example, we can compare LTC Cash Benefit details in Austria and Belgium in 1998 if we make these selections in the Policy, Country, and Policy Component dropdown menus, and the Year slider. Demonstrated below, our output provides information on the qualifying period in both countries, as well as the minimum level of dependence for coverage. 

Finally, users can now export the current displayed result from the website as a PDF. Previously, users only had the option to download the entire policy document for a single country. This new feature allows users to download exactly what is displayed, refined to the specific country or countries, time period, and policy component. The currently displayed result can be downloaded by clicking the PDF button and then clicking the Export current result button (shown in image above). 

Retirement 

The Retirement Policy Explorer now captures historical old-age retirement policies (i.e., policies affecting people age 50 and older) from 1992 to today, and has grown to include detailed policy information for 15 countries. Policy types include: 

Own old-age benefits	Public, contributory benefits paid to an eligible person (i.e., beneficiary) to support them and their family through the end of the beneficiary’s life.
Dependent spouse old-age benefits	Public benefits paid to the living, dependent spouse, partner, ex-spouse, or ex-partner of an eligible beneficiary in an old-age contributory benefit system.
Surviving spouse old-age benefits	Public benefits paid to the surviving spouse, partner, ex-spouse, or ex-partner of a deceased eligible beneficiary in an old-age contributory benefit system.
Old-age social assistance	Public, non-contributory benefits paid to an eligible person (i.e., beneficiary) to support them and their family’s subsistence through the end of the beneficiary’s life.
Old-age health insurance	Public health care benefits provided to an eligible person with approved health needs.

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While there have been many updates to the Explorer, the main idea and function have remained the same. The key dimensions of the Explorer are policy, country, and time. Users can select a policy and one or more countries and click View to see policy details. Policies can be compared across multiple countries during a single year or one country’s policy changes across many years. 

Long-Term Care

The Policy Explorer has also expanded its coverage to include long-term care (LTC) policies, capturing historical public care policies affecting older people (i.e., age 50 and older) with persistent care needs.The LTC Policy Explorer currently details four different types of LTC benefits:

Cash benefits	Public LTC benefits paid directly to eligible care recipients with discretionary use
In-kind benefits	Publicly supported LTC services provided to eligible care recipients for specific needs, including: cash benefits for non-discretionary use, and care in institutional settings
24-hour care benefits	Public LTC benefits that support the use of continuous 24-hour care in a home setting
Service vouchers	Publicly subsidized benefits that can be used for in-home care services

 

The key dimensions of the LTC Policy Explorer are policy, country or state, and time. Currently, 11 countries and 14 U.S. states are included in the LTC Policy Explorer.

U.S. State-level policy comparison

The expansion of the Policy Explorer to include LTC also led to the decision to collect policy details at the U.S. state level. Because LTC benefits in the U.S. exist within Medicaid, the public health insurance program for low-income individuals administered at the state level, policy details for the U.S. can vary drastically by state. With variations from eligibility rules to benefits provided, it’s important for researchers to have access to state-level data. This effort began in 2022 and has grown to include fourteen states and a national overview. 

We can compare two U.S. states – New Jersey and Virginia – and filter for specific policy components; in this case, we have selected User costs, i.e., out-of-pocket costs paid by the beneficiary. Below we are able to see that for the same period (up to 2023), both had similar estate recovery policies (mandated by the federal government), but varied in other costs, including copayments for certain services and the personal needs allowance (PNA), an amount of money reserved for nursing home residents to spend on personal items. In New Jersey, this amount was $35 per month until 2017, when it was raised to $50. In contrast, Virginia’s PNA is $40 per month. 

Education

The Gateway Policy Explorer’s newest addition is the Education series. Education has increasingly been recognized as a factor that influences late-life cognition, and as a result, the Gateway has been collecting information on historical changes in U.S. and international education policies for periods when HRS-INS respondents and their children would have been affected. 

Our current efforts involve the compilation and documentation of compulsory schooling policies and educational tracking policies since 1900. The Gateway recently launched compulsory schooling policy documentation for 21 countries and 8 states in India, available for comparison and download on the Education policy website. Researchers can compare policies, such as minimum school leaving age, across countries and time, shown below.

Additional countries and Indian states will be added over time. The Education Policy Series is also being expanded to include state-level differences in compulsory schooling in the United States (expected September 2024) and cross-country differences in educational tracking, (expected 2025).  

Going forward, the Education series will expand its collection of compulsory schooling policies to encompass over 40 countries and all U.S. states. In addition, data collection and documentation efforts will broaden to include policies that affect disparities in access, quality, and type of education, as well as early childhood education policies. With this information, the Gateway hopes to further contribute to and promote cross-national and longitudinal studies on aging, particularly those focusing on factors contributing to Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and related dementias (ADRD).