What are the next steps for Health Care reform?

Congress passed a historical bill this weekend to expand health care coverage to over 30 million Americans. What the Health Care Bill will accomplish for lower-income families cannot be understated:

MEDICAID Expands the federal-state Medicaid insurance program for the poor to cover people with incomes up to 133 percent of the federal poverty level, $29,327 a year for a family of four. Childless adults would be covered for the first time, starting in 2014. The federal government would pay 100 percent of the tab for covering newly eligible individuals through 2016.

Near-poverty Americans not covered by Medicaid: Some 15 million more Americans than currently have it will get health care through Medicaid.

Middle class families who can't afford to buy insurance: Some 15 million will eventually get subsidies.

INSURANCE MARKET REFORMS Major consumer safeguards take effect in 2014. Insurers prohibited from denying coverage to people with medical problems or charging them more. Higher premiums for women would be banned. Starting this year, insurers would be forbidden from placing lifetime dollar limits on policies, and from denying coverage to children because of pre-existing medical problems. Parents would be able to keep older kids on their policies up to age 26. A new high-risk pool would offer coverage to uninsured people with medical problems until 2014, when the coverage expansion goes into high gear.

Read more: http://www.kansascity.com/2010/03/18/1823150_whats-in-the-health-care-reform.html?storylink=omni_popular#ixzz0iuYu01I7

As many are aware, medical debt is one of the leading causes of bankruptcy. And among those who filed for bankruptcy, 75 percent reported having some type of medical insurance. But The Washington Post says people in bankruptcy with insurance were nearly $18,000 in the red. And those without insurance had an average of almost $27,000 in medical debt.

This bill is only a first step towards providing affordable health care to all Americans. There will be more tough decisions and more reforms to face in the future. However, surviving for a century of battles on the very topic, it is long overdue.

What are the next steps to assuring all Americans have access to affordable health care?

Low Literacy Affects 14 Percent of American Adults

"When Richard Handziak was hurt on the job in 1998, he was forced to share his secret.

Doctors couldn't understand why he was resistant to filing for worker's compensation. But after meeting with a counselor, Handziak revealed he was reading at a third-grade level.

"I didn't want these people to know I couldn't fill the paperwork out," said Handziak, now a 50-year-old semi-truck driver."

According to an article on literacy in the Lansing State Journal, "Demand for literacy remediation services statewide is high and waiting lists are common..."

www.lansingstatejournal.com/article/99999999/AAAA/3210575/-1/news0302

State Supreme Court to Hear Case Against Underfunded Indigent Defense System

"Michigan was a 19th century pioneer in providing legal aid to poor criminal suspects.

Now, it has one of the nation's stingiest and most fragmented systems for representing the 80 percent of defendants who can't afford a lawyer, a wide range of critics say."

See:

www.lansingstatejournal.com/article/20100320/NEWS01/303200003/1002/NEWS01/Michigan-pays-big-for-underfunded-indigent-defense

Cass County Woman: Clean and Sober for 100 Days Starts to Turn Her Life Around

According to the Dowagiac Daily News,

"How does an intelligent, vivacious young woman wearing a cross around her neck land in Cass County Family Treatment Court after losing her home and three children?

Jessica, a recovering drug addict and alcoholic, took her first drink at 12. At 14, “I not only drank, but I started smoking pot as well.”

Sweet 16? “I became severely addicted to cocaine, along with drinking and using pot every day,” which cost “thousands of dollars.”"

For more on Jessica's story and how Family Treatment Court, Hope's Door (a recovery residence), Southwestern Michigan Community College, and others helped her get a second chance, see:

www.dowagiacnews.com/2010/03/19/meth-addicted-mother-of-three-turning-her-life-around-slowly/

St. Louis Has a New Policy to Protect Rather Than Dispose of the Possessions of the Homeless

"St. Louis (Missouri) has established a policy which now provides sturdy bags and waterproof identification tags to make it easier for homeless residents to store their stuff — and to retrieve it when it does get (thrown out by city clean up crews.)

"We keep an inventory and make arrangements for people to pick up whatever they've left behind," Siedhoff says the Director of Health and Human Services in the city.

It's an unusual policy. Cities are more likely to confiscate and destroy the property of the homeless than to monitor and store it."

www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=124735830

Residence for Homeless & Disabled Veterans In Galesburg May Close

"Dozens of homeless and disabled veterans could be out on the street as the place they call home is in danger of shutting down. The Stone Cottage Residence, is a 29 bed facility in Galesburg. Many of the veterans living there have psychological problems and some of them were homeless before Stone Cottage took them in," per WWMT-TV3 Kalamazoo.

The full story may be found at:





www.wwmt.com/articles/margin-1373831-bottom-newschannel.html?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

The new poor: In hard times, lured into trade school and debt

From the New York Times:

One fast-growing American industry has become a conspicuous beneficiary of the recession: for-profit colleges and trade schools.

At institutions that train students for careers in areas like health care, computers and food service, enrollments are soaring as people anxious about weak job prospects borrow aggressively to pay tuition that can exceed $30,000 a year.

But the profits have come at substantial taxpayer expense while often delivering dubious benefits to students, according to academics and advocates for greater oversight of financial aid. Critics say many schools exaggerate the value of their degree programs, selling young people on dreams of middle-class wages while setting them up for default on untenable debts, low-wage work and a struggle to avoid poverty. And the schools are harvesting growing federal student aid dollars, including Pell grants awarded to low-income students.

“If these programs keep growing, you’re going to wind up with more and more students who are graduating and can’t find meaningful employment,” said Rafael I. Pardo, a professor at Seattle University School of Law and an expert on educational finance. “They can’t generate income needed to pay back their loans, and they’re going to end up in financial distress.”

For-profit trade schools have long drawn accusations that they overpromise and underdeliver, but the woeful economy has added to the industry’s opportunities along with the risks to students, according to education experts. They say these schools have exploited the recession as a lucrative recruiting device while tapping a larger pool of federal student aid.

“They tell people, ‘If you don’t have a college degree, you won’t be able to get a job,’ ” said Amanda Wallace, who worked in the financial aid and admissions offices at the Knoxville, Tenn., branch of ITT Technical Institute, a chain of schools that charge roughly $40,000 for two-year associate degrees in computers and electronics. “They tell them, ‘You’ll be making beaucoup dollars afterward, and you’ll get all your financial aid covered.’ ”

Read the full article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/14/business/14schools.html?pagewanted=1&hpw

The obesity-hunger paradox

The perceptions of what hunger is in America have changed quite a bit since the 1970's. With Lyndon Johnson's Great Society came programs such as food stamps, and in their current form the they are known as the bridge card. With these programs, hunger was significantly reduced in America. Our poorest populations could use these food credits to afford enough food to allow for basic nutrition.

However, things have changed drastically since the creation of government food assistance in the 1970's. The United States convenience economy has created the fast food industry, as well as a plethora of quick-stop style shops that offer foods and snacks high in salt, sugar and fat. Obesity is an epidemic and our belts are growing at an alarming rate.

One could assume that food stamp assistance could be a fuel to to that obesity trend, as people in poor neighborhoods use food stamps to purchase pop, unhealthy snacks and other items that would inflame their health maladies.

So why not cut food stamps? Isn't the obesity epidemic evidence that Americans need a reduction in food, not a subsidized fund for unhealthy habits?

The situation is in fact far more complex than it first appears.

A recent article by the New York Times speaks to the obesity-hunger paradox that is a common experience in many American cities and communities:

WHEN most people think of hunger in America, the images that leap to mind are of ragged toddlers in Appalachia or rail-thin children in dingy apartments reaching for empty bottles of milk.

Once, maybe.

But a recent survey found that the most severe hunger-related problems in the nation are in the South Bronx, long one of the country’s capitals of obesity. Experts say these are not parallel problems persisting in side-by-side neighborhoods, but plagues often seen in the same households, even the same person: the hungriest people in America today, statistically speaking, may well be not sickly skinny, but excessively fat.

Call it the Bronx Paradox.

“Hunger and obesity are often flip sides to the same malnutrition coin,” said Joel Berg, executive director of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger. “Hunger is certainly almost an exclusive symptom of poverty. And extra obesity is one of the symptoms of poverty.

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Such studies present a different way to look at hunger: not starving, but “food insecure,” as the researchers call it (the Department of Agriculture in 2006 stopped using the word “hunger” in its reports). This might mean simply being unable to afford the basics, unable to get to the grocery or unable to find fresh produce among the pizza shops, doughnut stores and fried-everything restaurants of East Fordham Road.

Precious, the character at the center of the Academy Award-winning movie by the same name, would probably count as food insecure even though she is severely obese (her home, Harlem, ranks 49th on the survey’s list, with 24.1 percent of residents saying they lacked money for food in the previous year). There she is stealing a family-size bucket of fried chicken from a fast-food restaurant. For breakfast.

That it is greasy chicken, and that she vomits it up in a subsequent scene, points to the problem that experts call a key bridge between hunger and obesity: the scarcity of healthful options in low-income neighborhoods and the unlikelihood that poor, food-insecure people like Precious would choose them.

Full-service, reasonably priced supermarkets are rare in impoverished neighborhoods, and the ones that are there tend to carry more processed foods than seasonal fruits and vegetables. A 2008 study by the city government showed that 9 of the Bronx’s 12 community districts had too few supermarkets, forcing huge swaths of the borough to rely largely on unhealthful, but cheap, food.

In Kalamazoo, we have struggled to maintain a grocery store on the North Side Neighborhood that is economically sustainable. It doesn't make the need any less apparent. Our communities need healthy food options and we need to work together to create ways to generate these opportunities.

One final though from the article:

Poor people “often work longer hours and work multiple jobs, so they tend to eat on the run,” said Dr. Rundle of Columbia. “They have less time to work out or exercise, so the deck is really stacked against them.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/14/nyregion/14hunger.html?hpw

Benton Harbor Editorial Calls for More Investment in Young Children and Their Mothers

According to an editorial in today's Benton Harbor Herald Palladium:

"Michigan's Children is a Lansing-based organization that advocates on the behalf of children and their families. According to a recent Budget Basics report issued by the organization, "More than one of every five (22.4 percent) Michigan children under the age of 5 lives in poverty, and poverty rates are disproportionately high for children of color."

Let me repeat: More than one in every five Michigan children live in poverty. If this was the flu, it would be called an epidemic. Yet, I hear few, if any, of our leaders in Lansing or locally talking about the issue."

The full editorial may be found at:

heraldpalladium.com/articles/2010/03/10/opinion/editorials/1261636.txt

Consumer protection bill lacking... consumer protections

As the US Senate works to draft a consumer protection bill, a key piece has been negotiated out of the bill that would affect millions of low-earning consumers. The bill's drafters have removed a key provision in the legislation that would have empowered federal authorities to crack down on payday lenders.

From the New York Times:

The Senate Banking Committee’s chairman, Christopher J. Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut, proposed legislation in November that would give a new consumer protection agency the power to write and enforce rules governing payday lenders, debt collectors and other financial companies that are not part of banks.

Late last month, Mr. Corker pressed Mr. Dodd to scale back substantially the power that the consumer protection agency would have over such companies, according to three people involved in the talks.

Mr. Dodd went along, these people said, in an effort to reach a bipartisan deal with Mr. Corker after talks had broken down between Democrats and the committee’s top Republican, Senator Richard C. Shelby of Alabama. The individuals, both Democrats and Republicans, spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the negotiations.

Under the proposal agreed to by Mr. Dodd and Mr. Corker, the new consumer agency could write rules for nonbank financial companies like payday lenders. It could enforce such rules against nonbank mortgage companies, mainly loan originators or servicers, but it would have to petition a body of regulators for authority over payday lenders and other nonbank financial companies.

Consumer advocates said that writing rules without the inherent power to enforce them would leave the agency toothless.

Why remove legislation that would address one of the largest financial scams in the country? The only blowback is apparently from payday Lenders themselves, who have financially supported several senators in the past. It seems that politics are once again getting in the way of progress.

W. Allan Jones, who started Check Into Cash, in Cleveland, Tenn., in 1993, has been a longtime friend and supporter of Mr. Corker’s. The company says it is now the country’s third-largest payday-lending chain, with 1,100 stores in 30 states. Payday loans are short-term, high-interest loans — typically 400 percent on an annualized basis — to help borrowers cover expenses until their next paycheck. Many take out more loans, digging themselves deeper into debt.

Payday lenders are great at accomplishing one thing: making money. And yes, that money is taxable and brings in revenue to our country. According to the times, "The industry’s trade group estimated that payday loan companies contributed $10 billion to the economy in 2007, and directly employed 77,000 people."

But is this the kind of economic gain we want in our country, the kind that preys on our citizens, increases our debt, and sustains poverty? Aren't these the vary reasons we got ourselves into this economic mess in the first place?

If the feds won't regulate these organizations, we need to take back our communities on a local level. Initiatives such as Bank On San Francisco (and soon to be Bank On Kalamazoo) work with local mainstream financial organizations to open up credit and short term loans to low-income and consumers with debt. Through this kind of work, we can eliminate the market for payday lenders by offering a reasonable alternative.