Copyright

(c) 2010-2024 Jon L Gelman, All Rights Reserved.
Showing posts with label Poverty. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Poverty. Show all posts

Friday, December 13, 2013

The Minimum Wage Ain’t What It Used to Be

Today's post was shared by Steven Greenhouse and comes from mobile.nytimes.com

David Neumark is professor of economics and director of the Center for Economics and Public Policy at the University of California, Irvine.
Proponents of raising the minimum wage often point out that the real minimum wage is lower now than it was decades ago. But the federal policy aimed at low-wage work and low-income families has shifted — wisely — away from reliance on the minimum wage and toward a generous earned-income tax credit, which is better focused on poor families. There is nothing wrong with reducing our reliance on a less effective policy when we have adopted a more effective one. In fact, we should hope that research on public policy leads to exactly this kind of outcome.
The decline in the real value of the minimum wage is indisputable. As shown in the chart below, the real value of the federal minimum declined sharply over the 1980s, and then further in the mid-2000s, before partly recovering with the fairly steep increases in the minimum wage in 2007-9. But despite those increases and low inflation in recent years, it still remains well below its real value in the 1970s.
There has been a significant policy shift, however, in how to guarantee a minimally acceptable income to families with low-wage workers. In particular, the earned-income tax credit was instituted in 1976, and its generosity has since been expanded considerably.
Through the tax system, the earned-income tax credit pays benefits to families with low income and employed workers. For...
[Click here to see the rest of this post]

Wednesday, November 13, 2013

Professionalism and Caring for Medicaid Patients — The 5% Commitment?

Today's post was shared by NEJM and comes from www.nejm.org

Interview with Prof. Sara Rosenbaum on the health care safety net, Medicaid expansion, and access to care.
Interview with Prof. Sara Rosenbaum on the health care safety net, Medicaid expansion, and access to care.
Medicaid is an important federal–state partnership that provides health insurance for more than one fifth of the U.S. population — 73 million low-income people in 2012. The Affordable Care Act will expand Medicaid coverage to millions more. But 30% of office-based physicians do not accept new Medicaid patients, and in some specialties, the rate of nonacceptance is much higher — for example, 40% in orthopedics, 44% in general internal medicine, 45% in dermatology, and 56% in psychiatry.1 Physicians practicing in higher-income areas are less likely to accept new Medicaid patients.2 Physicians who do accept new Medicaid patients may use various techniques to severely limit their number — for example, one study of 289 pediatric specialty clinics showed that in the 34% of these clinics that accepted new Medicaid patients, the average waiting time for an appointment was 22 days longer for children on Medicaid than for privately insured children.3
Physicians have good reasons for not accepting Medicaid patients, as I learned from direct experience as a member of a nine-physician primary care practice in California. We accepted Medicaid patients, but it was difficult. Medicaid's payment rate was very low — we lost money on each Medicaid visit. When referrals were necessary, we often had to personally ask specialists to accept our patient....
[Click here to see the rest of this post]

Monday, November 11, 2013

Worried About Costs And Unaware of Help, Californians Head Into New Era of Health Coverage

Today's post was shared by Kaiser Health News and comes from www.kaiserhealthnews.org
As uninsured Californians head into a new era of health coverage, they're worried about costs and unaware of the help they'll get from the government, a new survey finds.
The survey, by the Kaiser Family Foundation, found that three out of four Californians who earn modest incomes and could buy government-subsidized private coverage believe, wrongly, that they're not eligible for federal assistance or they simply don't know if they qualify.
In addition, many undocumented immigrants, who comprise about a fifth of the state's uninsured population, erroneously believe they will be eligible for coverage. The law specifically bars them from getting coverage from the state's new health insurance exchange, which opens Oct. 1, for coverage beginning Jan.1, 2014.
"This has been, for so long, a political debate," said Anthony Wright, executive director of Health Access, a Sacramento-based consumer advocacy group. "We're just starting to move it into a practical reality. Now that the benefits are close at hand, there is a concerted effort to educate people about what their benefits are."
California is one of two dozen states preparing to dramatically expand Medicaid, the federal-state insurance program for the poor, yet the survey found only half of newly eligible low-income Californians presume they will qualify. The nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation surveyed some 2,000 uninsured Californians from mid-July until the end of August, a summertime lull before a burst of...
[Click here to see the rest of this post]

Thursday, October 3, 2013

Report Finds 8 Million California Residents Lived in Poverty in 2011

Today's post was shared by votersinjuredatwork and comes from www.californiahealthline.org


There were about 8 million California residents living in poverty in 2011, according to a new report that factored in health care and other costs, the Riverside Press-Enterprise reports.
The figure is significantly higher than federal estimates of nearly 6 million state residents living in poverty that year.

Federal poverty estimates for California and other states use a formula from 1964 that defines poverty as income less than three times the cost of a "minimum diet," which would have been $22,811 for a family of four in 2011.
However, some observers have called this method outdated because food is a smaller part of most families' budgets than it was 50 years ago.

The study was conducted by researchers at the Public Policy Institute of California and the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality.
Unlike federal figures, the study's poverty estimates include:
  • Government benefits;
  • Housing prices;
  • Health care costs; and
  • Other expenditures (Olson, Riverside Press-Enterprise, 9/30).
According to the report, the poverty rate in California was about 22% in 2011, the highest in the U.S. and significantly higher than the official rate of 16% (Holland, Los Angeles Times, 9/30).
When the study factored in cost of living:
  • Poverty rates increased in places with high housing costs and other expenses, such as Orange County and the San Francisco Bay Area; and
  • Poverty rates decreased in areas where housing is less expensive, such as some Northern California and...
[Click here to see the rest of this post]