Health safety net frays with fixes still years off, By Noam N. Levey, June 20, 2010, Chicago Tribune: “Despite passage of the landmark health care overhaul this spring, the nation’s health system is continuing to fray, raising the prospect that the country could experience a crisis before the law establishes a health care safety net in 2014. Three months after President Barack Obama signed the law, that unsettling possibility is increasingly casting a shadow over its implementation, which the White House and its Democratic congressional allies had hoped a wary public would begin to embrace. Instead, state governments struggling with budgets savaged by the recession are contemplating further cuts in health care aid for the poor, despite the promise of more federal dollars. At the same time, several million unemployed Americans and their families who have used federal assistance to hold on to health insurance from work will lose coverage in coming months as the special assistance program expires…”
Poverty-related issues in the news, from the Institute for Research on Poverty