Advances in data and policy permit improvements in poverty measurement. This panel takes advantage of recent developments -- major changes in the health care landscape, an improved capacity to link surveys with administrative records, and new techniques for contrasting poverty status with information on household’s material living conditions – to take a new look at three old issues in poverty measurement: the treatment of medical needs, the processing of missing income data, and the scaling of poverty thresholds by family size and age. Two of the papers consider facets of the federal government’s Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM), while one uses the official poverty definition to examine imputation patterns in Census data that have equally important implications for the SPM. Korenman and Remler note that the Affordable Care Act’s has effectively established and made available a minimum U.S. standard of health insurance. They propose treating health insurance as a basic need in the SPM. They apply this approach to data from Massachusetts, an early adopter of health reform. Hoyakem, Bollinger and Ziliak use administrative earnings records to show how current procedures for imputing missing earnings from nonresponders results in substantially lower official poverty rates. Sherman proposes a method for assessing how well alternative poverty measures match various indicators of recent material hardship, such as falling behind on rent or utility bills. When applied to the “equivalence scale” that is used for adjusting the SPM poverty threshold for families of different sizes and ages, and to a range of alternative equivalence scales, the method (which was not available at the time the scale was developed) provides preliminary support for an an alternative equivalence scale.