It is obvious to most of America, not just the readers of DailyKos, that health care is a significant crisis that is not going to be solved easily. A recent skirmish over how to handle health care involves the Children's Health Insurance Program, which unsurprisingly is always being underfunded. What's Bush's solution? Of course you know the answer--restrain spending. From the NYT:
In his budget this month, Mr. Bush said he wanted to return the program to its "original objective" of covering children with family incomes less than twice the poverty level. Budget documents note that 16 states cover children above that level and that "one state, New Jersey, covers children up to 350 percent of the federal poverty level."
Over the fold I do not intend to further criticize the abhorrent way that this administration seeks all answers to Domestic problems in the free market, but rather to consider what's wrong with our idea of poverty.
Ok, first, let me get this out of my system. Bush wants some States to stop throwing money at the problem. In other words, come on New Jersey, 350% above poverty is too much and just rewards bad behavior! How dare they!
Alright, I feel a slight bit better. What really caught my interest though is the fact that the Children's Health Insurance Program's (CHIP) "original objective" was to cover children at twice the poverty level. Wait a minute. You can be out of poverty but still need public assistance?
I'm being a bit glib here. I knew this beforehand--that the poverty line has only a limited direct correlation to actual living conditions. Our approach to poverty in this country is both counterproductive and counterintuitive. For an excellent synthesis of the arguments concerning poverty as a social problem, see Mark Rank's One Nation, Underprivileged: Why American Poverty Affects Us All. Rank's work demonstrates that a majority of Americans live in poverty at least once in their lives, and that people all too often move in and out of poverty repeatedly.
A statistic to get us started:
A family of four is classified poor if its annual income is less than $20,650.
This number is mind-numbing. I know many people who live on about $16,000, and they are single. And, they barely can make ends meet. Never mind having a reliable car, or an apartment that is not in constant disrepair. I am appalled that anyone thinks that a family of four could live on about $20,000 a year.
The Children's Defense Fund released a study called "Defining Poverty and Why It Matters for Children." In this study, the authors consider the problem of defining poverty itself. In reference to the formula for determining the poverty line of a family of four, the study states:
Of course, these levels of income are inadequate to cover a family’s basic expenses. The determination of the poverty thresholds is based on a model created in the 1960s that estimates the cost of minimally adequate food budgets for families. Other than minor changes and updating for inflation each year based on the Consumer Price Index, the method for determining poverty thresholds has not changed since it was first instituted. Yet the cost of items and services that families consume has changed considerably over time. For example, the 1960s model found that an average family spent one-third of their expenditures on food. Today, food
accounts for one-seventh of a typical family’s expenditures.
Even aside from the cost of food, there's the rising cost of Health Care, and there are several other costs that this model from the 1960's could not have anticipated. A short list would include cell phones, computers, internet access, and so on. Yes, I know that some people would consider things like these to be a luxury, but don't many parents now consider being reachable by a cell phone or giving their kids the riches of the internet as a necessity? These points could be debated, and are besides the point of this diary. The real point is that the cost of living in our modern world has grown significantly, and yet the government still calculates poverty on a model that comes from a wholly different age.
Bush's flap with the Governors Association is but a symptom of this. The fact that the government provides assistance for groups of people above the poverty level attests to the idea that our definition of poverty is inadequate.
But most importantly, it informs our entire way of distributing public assistance. As a disabled person, I've struggled countless times with this very issue. In order to receive Medicaid, you cannot earn x percent above the poverty level. If you do, then you will either loose your insurance or pay an exorbitant "spend down" fee which is equivalent to a health premium, but is prohibitively calculated. For an example, if I lived on my own, and earned $16,000 a year, I would be over the threshold for Medicaid. But I would also not have enough income to buy private insurance, aside from the tricky nature of insuring the disabled in general.
How can we address poverty in this country when we don't even admit to ourselves that we're gaming the numbers? The US Census has it that
The official poverty rate in 2005 was 12.6 percent, not statistically different from 2004.
Were we to redefine the definition of poverty, the number would be staggeringly higher.
I am not an economist, nor am I a Social Worker, or a scholar in any of these areas. I am someone who has suffered from this country's consistent doublethink over poverty. People aren't poor, yet they are. I invite others who have a better sense of the numbers and facts here to weigh in with options and possibilities. I urge everyone to write their Congressional representatives, and to ask them about their view of poverty.
Each Presidential Candidate should have to answer the following question: "How do you propose to fight poverty?" From our views on poverty flows so many issues, such as Health Care and Education.
I do not know about copyright for this material, so I'm only quoting a bit. This is from FDR's 1944 State of the Union:
It is our duty now to begin to lay the plans and determine the strategy for the winning of a lasting peace and the establishment of an American standard of living higher than ever before known. We cannot be content, no matter how high that general standard of living may be, if some fraction of our people—whether it be one-third or one-fifth or one-tenth—is ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed, and insecure.
FDR then continues to lay out his Economic Bill of Rights. It should be the core of the progressive ethos.