Session 11 update HEALTHCARE

Obamacare should be renamed.   Robinhoodcare, Jesuscare, Ghandicare or just Care For the Expendable.  This session’s material on health care reform coincides with our discussions on poverty in this class.  Our group assignment exercise showed that in addition to childcare, healthcare costs are a huge part of many household budgets. 

For the poor, uninsured and underinsured, learning that healthcare is important always comes at the worst times.  A cancer diagnosis for an unemployed person struggling on unemployment insurance can mean death.  Health insurance companies are businesses dedicated to turning huge profits.  Benevolence is not the issue for them.  Denying healthcare coverage is not a means to making a profit, rather a means to increasing it. 

According to the course material, people without healthcare in the United States has dramatically increased over the last two years.  Considering the economic downturn and the fact that most healthcare insurance is paid for by employers, I am confident that these numbers will increase.  People under the age of 30 are least likely to have health care insurance and represent the highest amount of uninsured.  Senior citizens and children under 18 are most likely to be insured because of governmental programs.  The southern states have the highest uninsured rates including Texas, Georgia and much of the southeast and the numbers of uninsured have grown over the years in these regions.  Racially enumerated, it seems that Hispanics and African Americans have the least access to healthcare, followed by Asians and finally, whites.

I have personally been affected by the greed and evil of health care insurers.  After leaving work to return to school, I am forced to purchase my own health care insurance in cash through COBRA.  Since the premiums are extremely high, I applied for direct pay coverage through Kaiser Permanente.  I was immediately denied coverage for a pre-existing condition.  This means I am an unemployed student paying $410 a month for healthcare coverage through COBRA with the only option is no health insurance at all.  Oddly enough, my car payment for my 2008 car is $409 a month.  Since my only financial means is student loans and my retirement savings, I have recently been forced to choose between one of these items as my resources have dwindled.  I have personally lamented over the decision and have struggled to keep both payments current in hopes that the Obamacare initiative would provide some relief for those of us who have preexisting healthcare conditions.  It appears that I will have to allow my car to be voluntarily repossessed so that I can continue to have adequate health care.  My logic is that I can live without a car, using a bicycle and a train pass to get me around Atlanta while I attend school.  I can try to purchase another car sometime in the future and rely on neighbors to help me get groceries.  My sister can lend me her car to get to important appointments and I will figure the rest out as it comes.  I cannot live without health insurance and the medications that I need are very expensive without it.  The first wave of relief for Obamacare is important and encouraging but my relief is still on its way. (I hope)

I see that health care coverage is in need of major change and its impact on the poverty stricken has been horrible.  With no income, I understand its impact like never before and applaud our government for doing what it has done.  I am proud to have cast my vote for the current administration and am making my way to the polls to vote for the mid-term elections.  I feel personally responsible to ward off attempts to repeal healthcare reform by a republican controlled Congress.

To the smug opponents to healthcare reform, it may seem easy to devalue the necessity for coverage when a person or family is in the low income groups affected by it.  However, healthcare affects us all.  Disease, sickness, emergency injuries and preventative care are needs that everyone wants to avoid but that no man can eliminate.

Session 9 UPDATE

Our government and our people have a responsibility to acknowledge the indicators of the success, or lack thereof, of the welfare to work reform projects.  Jason DeParle’s in depth look into several Milwaukee families’ path from Welfare to the work force provides a rational view into the Federal Works Program.  Angie’s entrance into the full time works force can be seen as successful on the surface.  Her children, Redd and Keisha seem to be heading down the same road that got Angie to welfare in the first place. 

Angie’s new job, that she loves, pays her only an amount to keep her coming back.  She is oftentimes unable to maintain her familiy’s most basic necessities including food, electricity, gas and other needs.  The reality, oddly enough, is that for Angie and her family, there is no significant improvement in their structure.  If our society insists on being myopic and downright ignorant, we might collectively say that Angie is doing exactly what we expect her to do.  However, those of us who chose to be fair minded, will probably acknowledge that the long term goal of WELFARE TO Work was to improve the life of people so they can see the benefit of not being assisted by the government.

One could argue that Angie has formed associations at work, enjoyed the pride of a job well done, contributed to a tax base that we all benefit from, realized self worth and her ability to accomplish the seemingly impossible, and experienced the reward of sacrifice.  I would simply rebut that Angie’s family financial budget before her working experience has not seemed to improve at all.  In fact, it has worsened.   Additional detriment to Angie through this program is removal of the matriarch of the family.  Angie’s children are left to do the things Angie cannot.   Angie is most suited to teach her children the moral and ethical teachings they desperately need to avoid repeating her mistakes, however, she is forced to be away from the family.

A similar operation with Atlanta’s Housing Authority called CATALYST requires all adults in the household to work full time if they are to continue receiving housing voucher benefits.  Despite its intentions, the program often does not provide adequate job training, transportation, any affordable childcare, or proper assistance in budget management.  Program participants are left to fail as the authors of these ill-considered programs take credit for eliminating dependence on poverty.  In actuality, they have merely conducted a failed experiment.  Just as much energy could go into forcing all businesses to pay a living wage to its employees.

Session 7 Update

It is clear that poverty is the end result of several factors.  Some of the factors appear accidental.  Others are apparently more deliberate.  This session lets us know that my original definition of poverty is appropriate.  It is installed by the leading class of people most responsible for the economy of the nation.  The people that determine the wages of the countries workers contribute to the stratification of the poverty matrix.  While some of the same elite make ignorant generalizations that the poor’s situations are caused by their inability to conform or unwillingness to achieve, that is generally debunked through research.  An overwhelming amount of people that fall below the absolute poverty line are from full-time working, single parent, female head of households.  These women struggle with childcare as an inordinate expense, as discovered in our budget exercise, poor educational opportunities, reduced job opportunities and above all, unequal wages of their male counterparts.

Specifically in households where Single African American females are the only income earner, low or no child support, environmental impacts such as crime and poor transportation also perpetuate the disease of poverty. 

I believe that in addition to programs that need implementing to reduce dependency of social programs, there should be an aggressive mentoring program where families that successfully escape poverty can showcase their stories and help assist other affected by the same.

Session 6 UPDATE

It is clear that poverty is the end result of several factors.  Some of the factors appear accidental.  Others are apparently more deliberate.  This session lets us know that my original definition of poverty is appropriate.  It is installed by the leading class of people most responsible for the economy of the nation.  The people that determine the wages of the countries workers contribute to the stratification of the poverty matrix.  While some of the same elite make ignorant generalizations that the poor’s situations are caused by their inability to conform or unwillingness to achieve, that is generally debunked through research.  An overwhelming amount of people that fall below the absolute poverty line are from full-time working, single parent, female head of households.  These women struggle with childcare as an inordinate expense, as discovered in our budget exercise, poor educational opportunities, reduced job opportunities and above all, unequal wages of their male counterparts.

Specifically in households where Single African American females are the only income earner, low or no child support, environmental impacts such as crime and poor transportation also perpetuate the disease of poverty. 

I believe that in addition to programs that need implementing to reduce dependency of social programs, there should be an aggressive mentoring program where families that successfully escape poverty can showcase their stories and help assist other affected by the same.

Session 5 UPDATE

The posted readings for class session 5 are amazing and enlightnening about globalization.

At the beginning of the course, I was admittedly ignorant about the effect of poverty around the world.  My most frequent reminder that poverty abroad was unfathomable and exponentially worse than I could imagine was the reminders from my grandmother to finish my food because there were starving children in Africa.  I also saw Sally Struthers parading her cause on the infomercials of late night television.  Being the American Cynic that I prided myself to be, I assumed that the latter was a sensationalized description of one small part of the world in a place so far away that I could comfortably focus on more local issues if any at all.

Session five discusses globalization, the far reaching impact of poverty and the goals set up to reduce poverty in the year 2015.  My comfortable lifestyle permits me to be apathetic to the needs away from our shores to date.  This education removes the blissful ignorance that I had previously about the global effects of poverty.  I could not have even imagined a village devoid of whole generations wiped out by the AIDS pandemic.  Neither could I have imagined that Malaria is such a wide scaled killer in a modern society.  I realized that it was only foolishness to think that our strong, seemingly civilized society could passively stand by, despite advances in modern medicine, and act as a witness to something as passé as Malaria.  This is a disease that is otherwise easily treatable and preventable in other parts of the world.  For very few cents on the dollar, providing people with Mosquito netting and inexpensive treatment could be a very easy answer.  Drinking water doesn’t seem to be unattainable for the worst of our poverty stricken homeless population in the United States but it remains a commodity in the poverty stricken parts of the planet.  It too seems that our reactions to some of the past disasters have been remarkable and worthy of recognition.  The world gave enough money to aid in relief during the most recent Indian Ocean Tsunamis to show that the average citizen around the world’s richest countries care enough.  However, the care and relief cannot be so instant that we haphazardly ignore long term relief.  A long term investment into infrastructure will have the most bang for our buck as we combine monetary charity and scientific consideration to our donations.  Science can help the regions agriculture come up with sustainable improvements of the soil, irrigation, livestock, eco-systems, etc so that those impoverished lands can become self sufficient. 

Self reliance is one of the first steps to developing and continuingly building a local economy.  That local economy can help provide a means to providing adequate medical care, localized education, electricity and locally grown food to name a few. 

I am now left with a more accountable view of the world’s poverty situation and the government’s, private sector’s and individual’s responsibilities to respond to it.