Need a doctor? This anti-poverty program will get you a lawyer, too, By Seth Freed Wessler and Kat Aaron, December 13, 2014, NBC News: “When Tony Cox, 53, woke up in the hospital after suffering a heart attack when he fell off a ladder during a roofing job, he figured he’d hit bottom. ‘All I could think about was getting better and getting back to my family,’ he says. But that day in the hospital was not his lowest point. Over a year later, a sheriff’s deputy arrived at the modest two-bedroom house Cox shares with his wife Donna and their now 16-year-old son bearing a notice that their home was in foreclosure. Out of work from the injury, Cox had fallen behind on mortgage payments. ‘We were getting ready to be homeless, to move in with family,’ Donna says. ‘We would have been separated.’ The couple tried to catch up, to renegotiate their mortgage, but could not make the payments—not until they sought help from a legal services attorney, who brought the foreclosure case to court and compelled the bank to renegotiate the terms of their loan. Over the coming years, the person who saved Cox from the worst consequence of his heart attack was not a doctor but a lawyer…”
Poverty-related issues in the news, from the Institute for Research on Poverty