- National study looks at impact of recession on children, finds poverty up in 38 states, By Cristina Silva (AP), August 17, 2011, Washington Post: “Karla Washington worries how she will afford new school uniforms for her five-year-old daughter. Washington, an undergraduate student, earns less than $11,000 a year from a part-time university job. The salary must cover food, rent, health care, child care and the occasional splurge on a Blue’s Clues item for her only child. ‘My biggest fear is not providing my daughter with everything that she needs to be a balanced child, to be independent, to be safe, to feel like she is of value,’ said Washington, 41. Washington’s economic woes are seen throughout Nevada, where the nation’s highest unemployment and foreclosure rates have combined to devastate families and empty neighborhoods and construction yards. A national study on child well-being to be published Wednesday found that child poverty increased in 38 states from 2000 to 2009. As a result, 14.7 million children, 20 percent, were poor in 2009. That represents a 2.5 million increase from 2000, when 17 percent of the nation’s youth lived in low-income homes…”
- Study: Child poverty up in 38 states in past decade, August 17, 2011, National Public Radio: “Nearly 15 million children, or 20 percent of America’s juvenile population, were living in poverty in 2009, according to a child welfare study released Wednesday. More than double that number were in households where no parent had a full-time year-round job, according to the report by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, which noted that the child poverty rate grew about 18 percent over the past decade. ‘This is really troubling because we had made so much progress in the 1990s in reducing the percentage of children in poverty,’ said Patrick McCarthy, the foundation’s president and CEO. ‘Essentially the recession has put us back to where we were in the early 1990s.’ In the foundation’s first examination of the impact of the recession on the nation’s children, researchers concluded that low-income children will likely suffer academically, economically and socially long after their parents have recovered. As a result, they are less likely to be gainfully employed as adults…”
Day: August 17, 2011
Unemployment and Underemployment – Oregon
Think Oregon’s 9.5 percent unemployment is bad? Try 19.6 percent, once everyone’s counted, By Richard Read, August 16, 2011, The Oregonian: “In the official world of government reports, Oregon’s economy has stalled at 9.5 percent unemployment with almost no job growth since February. Economists call the July numbers, issued Tuesday, distressing. And in the real world inhabited by Scott Pickard and many others no longer counted as jobless, actual unemployment is far higher. Pickard, 49, of Tigard, lost a human-resources job in early 2009, exhausted his unemployment benefits and moved in with his mother in February. Pickard scrapes by. He earns a few bucks coaching other jobless people on interviewing skills. He falls into a broader government measure, called the U-6, of under- and unemployed people. Some label this figure, a whopping 19.6 percent in Oregon during the year that ended March 31, the real unemployment rate. Oregon’s ‘U-6’ rate is fourth highest in the country, behind Nevada, California and Michigan. It’s far above the national 16.5 percent U-6 level…”
Medicaid and Prescription Drug Costs
Medicaid pays less than Medicare for many prescription drugs, U.S. report finds, By Robert Pear, August 15, 2011, New York Times: “Medicaid gets much deeper discounts on many prescription drugs than Medicare, in part because Medicaid discounts are set by law whereas Medicare prices are negotiated by private insurers and drug companies, federal investigators said Monday in a new report. The report, from the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services, could be used by lawmakers trying to cut drug prices as Congress looks for ways to rein in the cost of Medicare under the new deficit-reduction law. Under existing law, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that the cost of Medicare’s outpatient drug benefit will increase an average of nearly 10 percent a year, to $175 billion in 2021, from $68 billion this year. Medicaid and Medicare receive discounts in the form of rebates, which are paid by drug manufacturers when their products are dispensed to people enrolled in the programs…”