Month: November 2018

Times columnist Steve Lopez shares how he and photographer Francine Orr reported on the community and the school where nearly a quarter of the students are classified as homeless.

The number of children in the United States without health coverage increased for the first time in at least a decade last year, according to a new report that suggests several Trump administration moves may be behind the troubling development.

After years of steady declines in the uninsured rate for the nation’s children, the numbers are starting to climb again. Nowhere is it more apparent – and troubling – than in Texas where 835,000 children under 19 lacked health coverage in 2017, an increase of 83,000 children from the year before. That also means that one in five children without health coverage in the U.S. now live in Texas, according to an annual report released Thursday by Georgetown University’s Center for Children and Families.

About 96,000 Kentucky children are in the care of relatives other than their parents, most through informal arrangements.

White adults in Indianapolis on average outearn black adults whether both groups were born to poor, middle class or wealthy parents.

Wisconsin is expanding the pool of people who must work or train to qualify for food assistance.

A bipartisan deal on the multi-billion dollar farm bill would scrap new work requirements for some older food stamp recipients — rejecting a plan backed by House Republicans and President Donald Trump.

The report by Auditor Mary Mosiman also found officials and lawmakers have failed to file quarterly financial reports as required by state law.

“The long-term gender earnings gap has narrowed since 1968, but it has by no means disappeared,” the study’s authors wrote.

While climate change is poised to roil the entire country in the years to come, its consequences will be especially harmful to low-income communities, according to the blockbuster government report released on Friday.

The victories — which bring to 36 the number of states that have elected to expand Medicaid coverage — were the product of a new model of political action that may become increasingly common across the country in coming years, particularly in traditionally Republican states.

Tennessee is of the unhealthiest states in the country, where nearly 7 percent of the population, or 450K people, do not have any healthcare coverage.

Gov-elect Laura Kelly says she expects lawmakers to address Medicaid expansion in the coming session. Expansion is one of her top priorities.

A federal judge had blocked a similar approval in June, sending the proposal back for review.

The Bay Area’s hidden hungry are the Hayward delivery driver and homemaker who rely on the food bank to feed their family of five. They are the seniors struggling to get enough to eat in East Palo Alto, just 2 miles from Facebook headquarters and its free employee meals. They are the diabetics showing up in emergency rooms in Oakland with low blood sugar at the end of the month because they ran out of food. They are the undocumented families sharing tiny apartments in the South Bay, cooking beans on camp stoves in their bedrooms. More than 1 of every 10 people in the Bay Area today are hungry. But they are not only the visibly famished, digging through the trash in Union Square for the remains of someone’s lunch.

Tulsa County among the drivers of the increase.

The proposed legislation is very much a modest compromise, one that will result in about 7,000 federal inmates getting out early.

Lawyers in Philadelphia think so. They want the city, which is suffering from an eviction crisis, to spend more on helping people fight landlords in court.

This is part 1 in a three-part series. Click the below links to read parts 2 and 3.

Researchers call for an extension of services beyond the age of 18.

Texas children lag behind their peers across the country in educational opportunities, access to health care and financial security, according to a report released Thursday by the Center for Public Policy Priorities.

Small schools and high poverty schools are putting their students at the biggest disadvantage, according to a new report.

Tennessee’s reluctance to talk race has been challenged by the disproportionate graduation rates of low-income students throughout the state.

Researchers found eviction rates are disproportionately high in minority communities.

All homebuyers face a tough housing market, but larger shares of black and Hispanic buyers had to surmount more obstacles than white buyers.

While HUD Secretary Ben Carson pledged to fix low-income housing, the number of properties cited for health and safety violations has been on the rise.

As a company owned by the world’s richest man prepares to transform Long Island City, tenants of the Queensbridge Houses worry that they’ll be left behind.

Analysis: Thousands of well-behaved prisoners would win freedom earlier under the bill.

The hunger numbers reflect a level of hardship in Philadelphia that conflicts with national trends.

Arkansas has removed more than 12,000 people from its expanded Medicaid program over the past three months for not complying with a new work requirement.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services may now allow for states to pursue Medicaid reimbursements for short-term inpatient treatment in mental health facilities despite a decades-old exclusion, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar announced Tuesday.

Over the next nine years, St. Paul will roll out increases to the minimum wage, mirroring the Minneapolis plan but on a slower time-frame.

The minimum wage for upstate New York will reach $12.50 at the start of 2021, and will increase by a determined amount each year until reaching $15.