A common story: Caring for others without health care for oneself, By Sandy Butler and Luisa Deprez, October 25, 2013, Bangor Daily News: “Helen, 45, works seven days a week caring for other people. While she plays an essential role in our health care system as a home care provider for people with chronic health conditions, she herself lacks health insurance. She earns $9.25 an hour and works irregular hours ranging from 20 to 40 each week. Helen, like many other hardworking Maine people, would have been eligible to receive health insurance through MaineCare — what Medicaid is called in Maine — if Gov. Paul LePage had not vetoed the bill to expand Medicaid this past June…”
No easy answer for those stuck in low-income jobs, By Hannah Hoffman, October 25, 2013, Statesman Journal: “Kay Cullens opened the apartment door at 9 a.m. on a Monday in September expecting to see Lynn. What she did not expect to see was Lynn lying prone in her brown suede Lazy-Boy recliner, naked save for her oxygen mask and damp underpants. She did not expect to see Lynn’s eyes glazed over and staring at the ceiling. She did not expect to see her own health insurance vanishing with every word Lynn could not quite get out. Cullens, 55, has been a health care worker for 19 years, and for nearly five of those years helped Lynn with her daily needs. She is a member of Oregon’s growing class of low-income workers, a group whose livelihoods are increasingly precarious. With middle-income jobs disappearing, more and more Oregonians are trapped in jobs that barely pay enough to cover bills, and they have no clear path up and out…”
Children who grow up poor shown to have smaller brain volume, By Michelle Castillo, October 28, 2013, CBS News: “Growing up poor may have an effect on brain size, a new study suggests. Researchers wrote in a study published in JAMA Pediatrics on Oct. 28 that children who grew up in impoverished environments had smaller white and cortical gray matter volumes in the brain, in addition to a smaller hippocampal and amygdala volume…”
The Lasting Impacts of Poverty on the Brain, By Emily Badger, October 28, 2013, Atlantic Cities: “Poverty shapes people in some hard-wired ways that we’re only now beginning to understand. Back in August, we wrote about some provocative new research that found that poverty imposes a kind of tax on the brain. It sucks up so much mental bandwidth – capacity spent wrestling with financial trade-offs, scarce resources, the gap between bills and income – that the poor have fewer cognitive resources left over to succeed at parenting, education, or work. Experiencing poverty is like knocking 13 points off your IQ as you try to navigate everything else. That’s like living, perpetually, on a missed night of sleep. That finding offered a glimpse of what poverty does to a person during a moment in time. Picture a mother trying to accomplish a single task (making dinner) while preoccupied with another (paying the rent on time). But scientists also suspect that poverty’s disadvantages – and these moments – accumulate across time. Live in poverty for years, or even generations, and its effects grow more insidious. Live in poverty as a child, and it affects you as an adult, too…”
