Poverty

Safety Net Hospital Sues Poor Patients For Unpaid Bills

December 25, 2019 Blake Farmer, AP. Educate! Healthcare, Hospitals, Medical Debt, Poverty

Nashville, TN - Nashville General is the city-funded, safety-net hospital. For a patient without insurance, this is supposed to be the best place to go. But its emergency room has been taking more patients to court for unpaid medical bills than any other hospital or practice in town. A WPLN investigation finds the physician staffing firm that runs the ER at Nashville General sued 700 patients in Davidson County this year — roughly the same number as all the other hospitals and physician staffing firms combined. They include uninsured patients like Sonya Johnson, a social worker and single mother from Antioch. Between a nonprofit clinic and General Hospital, Johnson had figured out how to manage her health problems even though she was uninsured until recently.

Harvesting The Blood Of America’s Poor: The Latest Stage Of Capitalism

December 4, 2019 By Alan Macleod, Mintpressnews.com Educate! Capitalism, Inequality, Poverty

For much of the world, donating blood is purely an act of solidarity; a civic duty that the healthy perform to aid others in need. The idea of being paid for such an action would be considered bizarre. But in the United States, it is big business. Indeed, in today’s wretched economy, where around 130 million Americans admit an inability to pay for basic needs like food, housing or healthcare, buying and selling blood is of the few booming industries America has left.

US The Only Country That Measures Poverty By Fifty Year Old Measure

November 9, 2019 By Shawn Fremstad, Cepr.net Educate! Income, Income inequality, Poverty

For over half a century, the United States has measured income poverty by comparing a family’s income to a standardized dollar amount (a “poverty line”) that varies by family size. For a family of four, this poverty line was initially set at $3,104 in 1963. The current official poverty line — $25,701 for a family of four in 2018 — is simply the base-1963 poverty line adjusted for nothing but inflation over the last 55 years. Today the United States is the only country in the world that measures present-day poverty by using a poverty line set over half a century ago and since then only adjusted for inflation.

Economics Of Poverty, Or The Poverty Of Economics

October 18, 2019 Staff, Anticap.wordpress.com Educate! Economics, New Economy, Poverty

As every year, mainstream economists lined up to laud the choice. Dani Rodrik declared it “a richly deserved recognition.” Richard Thaler, who won the award in 2017 (here’s a link to my analysis), extended his congratulations to the Banerjee, Duflo, and Kremer and to the committee “for making a prize that seemed inevitable happen sooner rather than later.” While Paul Krugman, the 2008 Nobel laureate, refers to it as “a very heartening prize—evidence-based economics with a real social purpose.”

The 1% Rules, The 99% Lets Them!

October 6, 2019 Ralph Nader, Nader.org. Strategize! Free Speech, Hunger, Poverty, Wall Street

There has never been more access to food – domestic and imported – yet hunger is an ongoing problem everywhere. In the U.S. alone, 16.5 million children go to bed hungry and 20% of community college students are experiencing “food insecurity.” Never have there been more communications technologies, yet it is harder to get through to people personally than fifty years ago. Never have people been able to use their right to free speech so unencumbered, yet a torrent of lies are now spread so freely and are often unchallenged. Never have there been higher corporate profits, yet staggering amounts of poverty and near poverty remain along with stagnant wages. Never have there been more medicines to alleviate pain, yet far too many of these pain killers have caused massive fatalities and addictions.

Medicare For All Would Cut Poverty By Over 20 Percent

September 14, 2019 Matt Bruenig, People's Policy Project. Educate! Health Care, Medicare for all, New Economy, Poverty, Single-Payer

The Census released its annual income, poverty, and health insurance statistics earlier this week. The summary report shows that 8 million of the nation’s 42.5 million poor people would not be poor if they did not have to pay medical out-of-pocket (MOOP) expenses like deductibles, copays, coinsurance, and self-payments. Medicare for All (M4A) virtually eliminates these kinds of payments, meaning that these 8 million people (18.8 percent of all poor people) would find themselves lifted over the poverty threshold if M4A were enacted. This headcount poverty measure actually understates how significant MOOP expenses are to poverty in this country. According to this same data, in 2018, the total poverty gap stood at $175.8 billion.

The World Bank Needs To Understand Poverty And What It Actually Costs A Family To Live On

August 12, 2019 By Sharan Burrow, Ipsnews.net Educate! Inequality, Poverty, World Bank

The World Bank’s extreme poverty line of US$1.90 a day is in fact not based on real estimates of people’s cost of living within countries. This explains why it fails to capture the desperation experienced by so many. As soon as we focus on people’s lived experience, the picture becomes more stark. At a most intuitive level, we know that poverty is determined by a person’s inability to meet their material needs. Perhaps the most basic of these needs is food. The UN’s 2018 figures on hunger show that it is on the rise globally. It estimates that 821 million people are currently going hungry.

The Exploitation Time Bomb

July 29, 2019 Jayati Ghosh, Project Syndicate. Educate! Green New Deal, Poverty, Taxes, wealth inequality

New Delhi – Since reducing inequality became an official goal of the international community, income disparities have widened. This trend, typically blamed on trade liberalization and technological advances that have weakened the bargaining power of labor vis-à-viscapital, has generated a political backlash in many countries, with voters blaming their economic plight on “others” rather than on national policies. And such sentiments of course merely aggravate social tensions without addressing the root causes of worsening inequality. But in an important new article, University of Cambridge economist José Gabriel Palma argues that national income distributions are the result not of impersonal global forces, but rather of policy choices that reflect the control and lobbying power of the rich.

Retirement Shouldn’t Mean Poverty

July 26, 2019 By Katherine Newman, Otherwords.org Educate! Inequality, Poverty, Retirement

Vivian Majors spent her life cleaning houses while her husband, Martin, worked as a carpenter. Their bodies broke down in their 60s. Martin now lives in a nursing home and has Parkinson’s disease. Vivian, now 71, lives on her own and ekes by on a $960 in social security, plus $50 in food stamps. Hardened by years of physically taxing work that left her hovering around the poverty line, Majors, now retired, is girding herself for more years of financial hardship.

In Record US Expansion, Rich Get Richer And Others Not So Much

July 5, 2019 Trevor Hunnicutt, Reuters. Educate! Finance and the Economy, New Economy, Poverty, wealth inequality

New York - Last month Pink Floyd frontman David Gilmour sold his guitar collection for $21.5 million, including one piece - his famed “Black Strat” Fender Stratocaster - that went for nearly $4 million to the owner of the U.S. National Football League’s Indianapolis Colts. The “Money” singer set a musical instrument sales record in the charity auction, marking yet another milestone for a booming market just weeks after New York-based art dealer Sotheby’s Holdings (BID.N), auctioned Claude Monet’s “Meules” for $110.7 million, the most ever for an Impressionist painting. And it is not just instruments or paintings in high demand among the world’s billionaire set.

Man Builds Pantry Outside His Home To Feed The Hungry

July 4, 2019 Mayukh Saha, Activist Post. Create! Food and Agriculture, Hunger, Mutual Aid, Poverty

To all those people claiming humanity is in shambles and moral values are dead — you have no idea what you are talking about. Yes, humanity has certainly taken some hits to the chest, but it is still very much out there. People still believe in kindness, and people still engage in civility. This is a true event from Watertown, New York, where a citizen named Roman Espinoza has built a ‘blessing box’ — essentially a pantry for people to pick up and food at any point of the day. The box is built in the lawn facing their house; and just like Little free libraries, there are no restrictions for these either. The concept is extremely simple — the box contains food that people donate — the same food others might want. To put it even more simply, the box was simply a donation box where the poor ate, and the not-so-poor donated.

Poor Neighborhoods Need More Than ‘Investment’

June 6, 2019 By Amadi Anene, Otherwords.org Create! Development, Inequality, Poverty

Low-income neighborhoods need employee-owned businesses anchored to their communities, not investors looking to make a quick buck. Where some of us see distressed neighborhoods — where families endure poverty and homes fall into disrepair — others see dollar signs. In fact, the Trump administration now brands them “opportunity zones,” offering tax breaks to investors who invest capital there. What remains unclear is this: Opportunity for whom? Big investors may stand to cash in, but many communities are saying they’re not getting the benefits they were promised.

How Inequality Makes US Poorer

May 29, 2019 Staff, Stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com Educate! Inequality, New Economy, Poverty

My chart shows the point. It shows the 20-year annualized rate of growth in GDP per worker-hour. It’s clear that this was much stronger during the relatively egalitarian period from 1945 to the mid-70s than it was before or since, when inequality was higher. This might, of course, be coincidence: maybe WWII caused both a backlog of investment and innovation which allowed a subsequent growth spurt and a desire for greater equality. Or it might not. This is not the only evidence for the possibility that inequality is bad for growth.

Medical Madness: A Mother’s Choice Between A Child’s Care And Bankruptcy

May 16, 2019 By Sarah Kliff, Portside.org Educate! Health Care, Mothers, Poverty

Two years ago, 36-year-old Lindsay Clark was facing a terrible decision. Her 2-year-old daughter Lily had gotten into a small bottle of the anti-nausea drug Dramamine. “It had a child lock on it, but I caught her sitting there with a bunch of white stuff in her mouth,” Clark says. “I immediately swept her mouth with my finger, but I wasn’t sure how many pills she ate.” Clark had to decide: Should she take Lily to the emergency room?

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