The latest recipients of the 2020 Frank R. Breul Memorial Prize are professors Sanders Korenman and Dahlia Remler and scientist Rosemary Hyson from Baruch College’s Marxe School of Public and International Affairs and the CUNY Institute for Demographic Research. This award is for their extensive research on poverty and healthcare.

The Social Service journal from the University of Chicago collects scholarly work related to bringing about social reform and following prominent social issues.

Each year, the University of Chicago’s School of Social Service Administration awards the Frank R. Breul Memorial Prize to writers of exceptional published work from the previous year.

The prize is meant to honor Frank R. Breul’s career as an “educator, administrator and editor of the Social Service,” according to the University of Chicago’s Press Journal.

The recipients’ work “revealed Medicaid expansion is associated with substantial HIPM poverty reductions for children, persons 55–64 years old, blacks, Hispanics and those who have not completed high school. These populations are particularly vulnerable to proposed rollbacks in Medicaid expansions,” published the University of Chicago’s Press Journals’ Social Service Review.

Their research is especially relevant to the ongoing COVID-19 crisis. Currently, social security and Medicare funds are quickly becoming depleted as they’re used to provide aid for citizens. At this accelerated rate, the funds will be completely exhausted by 2023, according to KTVN.

Hence, the research from the winning paper highlights which communities would be most negatively affected if Medicaid were reduced. In fact, this was their motivation for researching this social issue.

“Some states have turned down Federal money available to expand Medicaid, and we show that, counting health insurance benefits, poverty is worse in those states than we would expect. Attempts to erode Medicaid benefits, such as through tough work requirements, strengthened interest in the paper. Now that we have a further, massive coronavirus care crisis, the way we leave so many exposed to inadequate care or to financial crises resulting from care, this paper and our measure are all the more salient,” Remler said in the Marxe School of Public and International Affairs’ press release.

The Social Service chose these researchers to be the recipients of the prestigious award because of the relevancy and timeliness of their paper. They also did not just simply strive to explain data to define a problem, but rather provided a solution as well.

In their effort to convey just how necessary it is to consider the impact a reduction in Medicaid will have on the poor and other communities, they “develop[ed] the first U.S. poverty measure to include a need for health insurance and to count health insurance benefits as a resource to meet that need.”

This is not the first time that Baruch educators have received this prize. In 2012, the award was given to Korenman for his and his colleagues’ research dealing with bias and treatment within child and adult care systems.