Welcome to The Poverty Trap, a Newsletter and Podcast About the Politics And Policy Choices That Create a Cycle of Economic, Racial and Environmental Inequality...and What We Can Do To Change It.
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The Poverty Trap’s most recent post laid out a slew of statistics about the impact of ending the enhanced premium subsidies on the Affordable Care Act insurance marketplace. These extra subsidies are what made health insurance actually “affordable” for millions of Americans. And now this help is gone.
Here’s what I (and other dedicated prognosticators) said would happen when millions went without health insurance:
When adults are sick and can’t receive medical treatment, they work less, maybe even get fired from their jobs, qualify for other types of government assistance, burden already overcrowded emergency rooms and contribute much less to the overall economy.
— And first up for our July reading round-up is what is actually happening right now as millions more people go without health insurance, reported in this New York Times article posted on July 30:
More and more uninsured patients are showing up in hospital emergency rooms and clinics, having lost their coverage under the Affordable Care Act. Executives running some of the biggest hospital systems, including large for-profit chains spanning many states, expressed concern over the unexpectedly sharp rise in uninsured patients and the costs associated with treating them…And many executives said that the hospitals were also reporting more unpaid medical bills and providing more in the way of charity care.
I’m struggling to understand why this rise in uninsured patients was seen by hospital executives as “unexpectedly sharp”. The ACA statistics are public and a massive loss of coverage was predicted last year. Where else will people go except an urgent care or hospital emergency room when they have no doctor and no money to pay for medical services?
— And then there is the increasing number of people losing their access to food stamps because of new work requirements, increased paperwork to prove employment hours and routine household information like the number of people living in a household (can you say letters from neighbors attesting to the number of people living in a residence?) Mr. Rogers and his neighbors would be appalled.
A New York Times article published July 20 discusses the impact of the major changes to the food stamp program (now known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), enacted through the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The changes now require proof of 80 hours a month work for 19-64 year olds to remain on or obtain food benefits, more paperwork to prove nearly every bit of information required on the application and large monetary penalties on states for error rates in awarding too little or too much benefits.
The article focuses on residents of Arizona struggling to keep alive without enough to eat, like a cancer survivor weighing 69 pounds who has to skip meals, a deaf woman and her hearing impaired children whose eldest daughter sells her plasma each week to buy food and a young mother who “fantasizes’ about stealing a grocery cart loaded with food. Both those seeking the benefits and officials call it “bureaucratic chaos”:
Alarmed at the caseload [of food stamp applicants] decline, Arizona rehired some staff and relaxed some paperwork demands, and the rolls grew modestly in May and June. Still, Michael Wisehart, who runs the Arizona Department of Economic Security, which administers SNAP, said, “It’s frankly sickening to me the number of individuals that continue to struggle with the added bureaucracy.”
— Adding insult to much injury, the manufacturing jobs President Trump promised would return while campaigning are in fact fleeing from the small towns in states like Ohio and heading to China. A Washington Post article published August 1 described the last day of operations in the Conn Selmer factory (whose parent company was Steinway) in Eastlake, Ohio, a town northeast of Cleveland.
The factory made some of the best brass musical instruments in the world, was in operation for over 61 years and in its heyday, employed 334 workers. On June 30, it closed its doors, laying off 150 remaining workers and transferring almost all of its production to a 21 million dollar manufacturing facility in Jiangsu province, China.
…there was something inside the plant that Hines [Rob Hines, the current union president] had not experienced elsewhere. In a word, it was pride.He saw it in his co-workers, who would stop and stare in appreciation at a finished French horn or sousaphone. He saw it in the schoolchildren who sometimes toured the factory, where instruments used in the Cleveland Orchestra and the Ohio State University Marching Band were made. “It’s truly amazing, what we do here,” Hines said.
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Join The Poverty Trap community and share your thoughts about this reading round-up in the Comment Section below. What do you make of emergency rooms across the country overwhelmed with uninsured patients, the cruelty of the added work requirements and paperwork burdens that are throwing hundreds of thousands of otherwise eligible people off food assistance, and the factory closings that leave people and their communities bereft?
