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).
We’re surrounded by advertising. Every day, we see billboards, TV ads, advertisements in magazines, and corporate sponsors at all sorts of events. Much of the time we don’t notice these ads, much less think about how they shape our desires and encourage us to want things we otherwise wouldn’t want.
In 2013, more than 550,000 Oregonians lacked health insurance. By 2017, thanks to the federal Affordable Care Act, that number had fallen by more than half. Recent changes by the federal government threaten to undermine this progress by making it harder for Oregonians who purchase insurance in the individual market to continue to do so. Our new report, A Better Health Insurance Market for Oregon: Options for Oregon to Maintain Consumer Access to Affordable Health Insurance, explores several options for how Oregon might respond to policy changes that threaten to weaken the individual insurance market.
Health care in the U.S. is incredibly expensive, and becomes more so every year. Thus it isn’t surprising that health care – especially the high cost of care – was a top concern for voters in the 2018 midterm elections. In the next two years, both Democratic and Republican policymakers will grapple with state and federal legislation that has the potential to modestly reduce the cost of health care.
National elected leaders would have us believe Republicans and Democrats are from different planets, unable to communicate, much less agree on anything. Last weekend I canvassed for a local city council candidate and received a welcome reminder that partisan identity isn’t at the top of voters’ list of concerns. People care more about issues and solving problems.
