- The face of the newly poor, By Yvonne Wenger, August 22, 2100, Charleston Post and Courier: “Every day, an average of 112 people — most of them the newly poor — sign up for free government health care in South Carolina. Since the recession officially hit in December 2007, some 3,300 people a month, on average, have signed up for Medicaid in a state that outpaces the nation for poverty, obesity and diseases such as diabetes. Yet, South Carolina’s political leaders have been among the most vocal in the country in opposition of the new health care law. The new law is intended to provide insurance coverage to a portion of the nearly 17 percent of state residents estimated to be without it. But it won’t come cheap: The law will cost the cash-strapped state nearly $1 billion more over the next decade, even after the federal government kicks in its share. Advocates and academics alike say the federal plan is critical for South Carolina’s future prosperity. Healthy workers draw in new businesses, they say, and an educated population starts with children who aren’t sick when they go to school. But many say Medicaid is only part of the answer to South Carolina’s grave health care needs. Others think government-run health care should not be the solution…”
- Signing up for Medicaid more difficult, By Yvonne Wenger, August 24, 2010, Charleston Post and Courier: “Tens of thousands of South Carolinians likely are eligible for government-run health care but aren’t signed up because bureaucratic red tape creates obstacles, advocates said Monday. Sue Berkowitz, director of Appleseed Legal Justice Center, and John Ruoff, program director for South Carolina Fair Share, said Medicaid enrollment isn’t keeping pace with the need, despite the seemingly rapid increase during the state’s deep and prolonged economic downturn. Advocates are working to identify how great the need is, but an exact number isn’t clear. More than 750,000 people are estimated to be without health insurance in the state, although not all of them are eligible for Medicaid. A report Sunday by The Post and Courier revealed that as many as 112 people a day sign up for Medicaid in South Carolina. More than 90,000 have enrolled since the recession officially hit in December 2007…”
Tag: Newly poor
Long-Term Unemployment in the US
- After training, still scrambling for employment, By Peter S. Goodman, July 18, 2010, New York Times: “In what was beginning to feel like a previous life, Israel Valle had earned $18 an hour as an executive assistant to a designer at a prominent fashion label. Now, he was jobless and struggling to find work. He decided to invest in upgrading his skills. It was February 2009, and the city work force center in Downtown Brooklyn was jammed with hundreds of people hungry for paychecks. His caseworker urged him to take advantage of classes financed by the federal government, which had increased money for job training. Upgrade your skills, she counseled. Then she could arrange job interviews. For six weeks, Mr. Valle, 49, absorbed instruction in spreadsheets and word processing. He tinkered with his résumé. But the interviews his caseworker eventually arranged were for low-wage jobs, and they were mobbed by desperate applicants. More than a year later, Mr. Valle remains among the record 6.8 million Americans who have been officially jobless for six months or longer. He recently applied for welfare benefits…”
- Frustration and despair as job search drags on, By Michael Luo, July 17, 2010, New York Times: “In her well-thumbed, leather-bound Bible, Terri Sadler recently highlighted in bright pink a passage in the Gospel of Matthew. In it, Jesus urges his followers not to ‘worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself.’ But Ms. Sadler’s tightening throat and halting breath when she tries to read the words aloud make it clear that she is having trouble mustering enough faith to follow them. Ms. Sadler, who lost her job at an automotive parts plant in October 2008, learned last month that her unemployment insurance had been cut off. She is one of an estimated 2.1 million Americans whose benefits have expired and who are waiting for an end to an impasse that has lasted months in the Senate over extending the payments once more to the long-term unemployed. Times have changed politically, however, and opposition is growing in Washington and abroad to deficit-bloating government spending, even for those who are hurting…”
- Obama assails G.O.P. for blocking benefits bill, By Helene Cooper, July 19, 2010, New York Times: “President Obama called on Congress on Monday to pass an extension of unemployment benefits, and leveled a sharp critique against Republican senators who have stopped passage of a bill that would give some relief to out-of-work Americans. Under pressure in an election year to reduce the unemployment rate, now at 9.5 percent, Mr. Obama also urged the Senate to approve a package of tax cuts and an expansion of lending to small businesses. ‘We all have to continue our efforts to do everything in our power to spur growth and hiring,’ Mr. Obama said at the White House. Senate Democrats are expected to bring the unemployment insurance bill back up on Tuesday, after they swear in another Democrat, Carte Goodwin of West Virginia, to be the interim successor to Robert C. Byrd, who died last month. Mr. Goodwin will provide Democrats with the 60th vote they need to close debate and pass the measure…”
- When being out of work becomes a chronic condition, By Floyd Norris, July 16, 2010, New York Times: “In the United States, unemployment has typically been a relatively brief affair. The vast majority of people who lost jobs soon found new work. That is not the way it has been in many other developed countries. In Europe and Japan, long-term unemployment is far more common. At any given time, most of the unemployed people in many European countries have been out of work for more than six months. Now the United States appears to be becoming similar to Europe. Even as the overall unemployment rate has begun to drop – falling to 9.5 percent in June from a peak of 10.1 percent last October – the proportion of the work force that has been out of work for more than six months has risen to 4.4 percent, as can be seen in the accompanying charts…”
Black Wealth and the Recession – Memphis, TN
Blacks in Memphis lose decades of economic gains, By Michael Powell, May 30, 2010, New York Times: “For two decades, Tyrone Banks was one of many African-Americans who saw his economic prospects brightening in this Mississippi River city. A single father, he worked for FedEx and also as a custodian, built a handsome brick home, had a retirement account and put his eldest daughter through college. Then the Great Recession rolled in like a fog bank. He refinanced his mortgage at a rate that adjusted sharply upward, and afterward he lost one of his jobs. Now Mr. Banks faces bankruptcy and foreclosure. ‘I’m going to tell you the deal, plain-spoken: I’m a black man from the projects and I clean toilets and mop up for a living,’ said Mr. Banks, a trim man who looks at least a decade younger than his 50 years. ‘I’m proud of what I’ve accomplished. But my whole life is backfiring.’ Not so long ago, Memphis, a city where a majority of the residents are black, was a symbol of a South where racial history no longer tightly constrained the choices of a rising black working and middle class. Now this city epitomizes something more grim: How rising unemployment and growing foreclosures in the recession have combined to destroy black wealth and income and erase two decades of slow progress…”