Health care as income for the poor, By Eduardo Porter, October 2, 2012, New York Times: “As a nation, we devote almost one-sixth of our spending to health care, twice the share of 30 years ago. Medical bills for the elderly are climbing, threatening to blow up the budget in a few decades. Politicians from both parties are consumed by how to pay for it all. Yet we cannot quite agree on how valuable government health care benefits are to Americans. In July, the Congressional Budget Office — the nonpartisan arbiter of the costs and consequences of government spending — decided that we had not been valuing these benefits enough. In a report on how income and taxes are distributed across the population, it decided, for the first time, to value health benefits provided by the government at every penny they cost…”
Poverty-related issues in the news, from the Institute for Research on Poverty