Associate Director and Senior Policy Analyst, Frontier Group
Elizabeth Ridlington is associate director and senior policy analyst with Frontier Group. She focuses primarily on global warming, toxics, health care and clean vehicles, and has written dozens of reports on these and other subjects. Elizabeth graduated with honors from Harvard with a degree in government. She joined Frontier Group in 2002. She lives in Northern California with her husband and son.
Elizabeth’s recent reports include Clean Water for the Three Rivers (2022), Trouble in the Air (2021), and Unhealthy Debt (2021).
A surprise medical bill is an unexpected charge not covered by insurance even though the patient received care at a facility or from a doctor they believed to be within their insurance network. State and federal policies, including some specifically aimed at COVID-19 patients, don't fully protect patients. The nation should expand surprise billing protections to include all patients, now and after the coronavirus pandemic ends.
Though the right response to wildfire often involves fleeing and the correct response to the coronavirus is to stay home, successful responses to public emergencies require a communal effort and rely on mutual trust that our individual commitments to do the hard thing will protect us all.
A handful of Frontier Group staff have regularly worked from home in recent years. As millions of Americans begin working from home temporarily, veteran work-from-home staff shared some tips on how they’ve grappled with the challenges of working away from an office.
The Trump administration has announced that it will revoke California’s ability to set strong global warming pollution standards for cars and light trucks. To understand why this is such bad news for public health and the climate, it’s helpful to review the history of air pollution in California and how California’s vehicle emission standards have led to cleaner air and more efficient vehicles for all Americans.
I recently spent 45 minutes making calls to straighten out a health care billing problem. Multiply my experience by that of millions of Americans, and we collectively must spend millions of hours on the phone and online each year with insurers and providers to obtain insurance coverage, schedule appointments and straighten out incorrect bills. Many of these activities are a direct result of how complicated our system of providing and paying for care is.
