HEALTH CARE - Virginia

"What Virginia's poorest citizens want from health care reform" PBS NewsHour 7/11/2017

and they are NOT going to get from Trumpcare.

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  As Republicans on Capitol Hill try to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, we visit patients and health care providers at a free clinic in rural southwest Virginia -- a region that strongly supported President Trump, in a state that did not expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act -- to listen to the extreme health care challenges they face and what they think should be done.

"Deep in coal country, West Virginia patients speak out about GOP health bill" PBS NewsHour 7/11/2017

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  As Republicans on Capitol Hill try to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, we visit patients and health care providers at a health center in Mingo County, West Virginia -- a region that strongly supported President Trump, in a state that has been ravaged by the opioid epidemic -- to listen to the health care challenges they face and how the expansion of Medicaid has benefited them.

AT THE MOVIES - "Moonlight"

"In 1980s Miami, the triple crisis of growing up black, gay, and poor" PBS NewsHour 11/4/2016

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  Based on a true story, the new movie “Moonlight” follows Chiron, a boy growing up black, gay and poor in 1980s Miami.  The film documents Chiron's identity struggle in three acts, featuring a different actor for each.  It's a landscape director Barry Jenkins knows well -- he grew up in the same neighborhood around that time.  Jeffrey Brown speaks with Jenkins and screenwriter Tarell Alvin McCraney.

Editor's Note:  In our segment, Tarell Alvin McCraney was misidentified as the screenwriter.  McCraney created the story.  Barry Jenkins wrote the screenplay in addition to directing the film.

JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour):  A new movie opening this weekend is being widely hailed for its nuanced storytelling about sexual identity, race and upbringing.

Jeffrey Brown spoke with the filmmakers of “Moonlight.”

JEFFREY BROWN (NewsHour):  It's a life we don't often see portrayed in commercial films, a coming-of-age tale of love and anguish, a movie that's garnered critical acclaim for the story it tells and the beauty and power of its telling.

In “Moonlight,” we watch Chiron growing up in the Liberty City neighborhood of Miami as the crack epidemic is taking hold in the 1980s.  He is young, poor, black, and coming to terms with being gay, quietly and painfully wrestling with these identities.

The story is based on the life of Tarell Alvin McCraney, who first wrote it as a play and then the screenplay for the new film.

TARELL ALVIN MCCRANEY, Playwright, “Moonlight”:  It's a story that I still feel like I have to tell, but also that I have to explore and to understand.

I mean, it's a story rooted in events in my own life that I'm trying to make sense of and make sense of the world out of.  And I think, for me, I always am interested in trying to get a group of people to have the same conversation.

BARRY JENKINS, Director, “Moonlight”:  So, Tarell and I grew up blocks from one another.

NEWSHOUR BOOKSHELF - "White Trash"

"The origin of ‘white trash,' and why class is still an issue in the U.S." PBS NewsHour 8/16/2016

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  In “White Trash,” Nancy Isenberg delves into the history of class in America, starting with British colonization.  At that time, America was seen as a wasteland -- a place to discard the idle poor.  The agrarian communities they subsequently formed often remained poor due to a phenomenon Isenberg calls “horizontal mobility.”  Jeffrey Brown speaks with the author about how we can evolve past class.

JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour):  Now, a look at the history of poor white Americans.

That's the focus of the latest addition to the “NewsHour” Bookshelf.

Here's Jeffrey Brown.

JEFFREY BROWN (NewsHour):  “This book tells many stories.  Arguably, the most important is the one we as a people have trouble embracing, the pervasiveness of a class hierarchy in the United States.”

That line comes from a new book with the provocative title “White Trash,” which makes a provocative argument that, from the nation's earliest history to now, ideals such as opportunity and upward mobility haven't characterized the lives of many Americans.

Author Nancy Isenberg is a professor of history at Louisiana State University.

And welcome to you.

NANCY ISENBERG, Author, “White Trash”:  The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America”:  Well, thanks for having me.

JEFFREY BROWN:  I think what hit me most is the idea that the poor have not only been accepted, but expected, that it's a part of our national DNA.  That's the argument you're making?

NANCY ISENBERG:  Well, I think one of the things we forget is that, for half of our history, we were an agrarian nation.

So, white trash really comes out of notions of rural poverty.  And it goes all the way back to British ideas, because, in the colonial period and well throughout the 19th century, the mark of being a successful American was being a property owner.

And what we have forgotten is that large numbers of Americans didn't own property.  For example, in Thomas Jefferson's Virginia at the time of the revolution, 40 percent of white men were landless.

JEFFREY BROWN:  So, when you refer to white trash, I just want to be clear.  And the idea of white trash, literally, the term was used, the terms like waste.  Who do you mean?

NANCY ISENBERG:  Yes, the word white trash, at least as far as we have been able to discover, first appeared in newspaper print in the 1820s.

But it has a much older meaning, because, if we go back to some of the leading promoters of British colonization, when they imagined what were they going to do with the new world.  The new world, first of all, was imagined as a wilderness, what they called a wasteland.

And it was the perfect place for literally dumping the idle poor.  And these were referred to as waste people.

GETTING THE DEGREE - Innovative Program for Poor Students

"Innovative program helps even the playing field for poor students — and boost graduation rates" PBS NewsHour 6/28/2016

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  For Georgia State’s Tyler Mulvenna, a $900 grant from an innovative retention program let him live on campus, work less and do what he came to do: study.  The school, worried about abysmal graduation rates for poor students found, a full course load, commuting and holding a job was just too much for many.  The NewsHour's April Brown takes a look at the program praised by President Barack Obama.

ANGELICA SANCHEZ, Student:  Georgia State is definitely a school that I fell in love with even before I came to college.

APRIL BROWN (NewsHour):  When Angelica Sanchez was a high school senior, she knew she was going to college, but she wasn’t sure she’d ever be able to get to Georgia State.

ANGELICA SANCHEZ:  My parents didn’t go to college, but my brother, my sister and I — we are first generation students.

APRIL BROWN:  Apart from finding the funding, Sanchez, like many other first generation college-goers, needed help navigating the new world of higher education.

ANGELICA SANCHEZ:  I was actually really worried, just because my parents are very traditional, so they don’t — and they don’t really know what college is.

APRIL BROWN:  About 10 years ago, the university realized it had a persistent achievement gap.  Many of its low-income, minority and first generation students were graduating less often and dropping out more frequently than their white counterparts.  That’s when the school started aggressively using data to find solutions.

TIM RENICK, Vice Provost:  Our overall graduation rates hovered around 30 percent, far too low.

APRIL BROWN:  Tim Renick is Vice Provost at Georgia State.

TIM RENICK:  We knew we had to change, we knew we had to serve students better, but we also knew that we didn’t have a lot of resources.  What we did have is the data.

APRIL BROWN:  They had a lot of data, and began analyzing it to figure out what was tripping up students.

TIM RENICK:  We went back, we looked at over two-and-a-half million Georgia State grades, 140,000 student records.  And what we found in the data were about 800 different things, 800 things that, in a statistically significant way, correlated to students flunking out or dropping out of Georgia State.

APRIL BROWN:  Those 800 things, from whether students register for the right classes to their grades, are monitored for every student by academic advisers like Tony Davis.

How do we know that they’re on track?

TONY DAVIS, Academic Advisor:  So, what’s happened is the department — so the nursing department in this case — has identified several key courses as marker courses, so they need to be taken within a certain time frame, and they’re looking for a minimum grade.

CLOSING THE GAP - Life Expectancy

"How geography changes life expectancy for America’s poorest" PBS NewsHour 4/11/2016

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  America's poorest citizens have shorter lifespans than wealthier Americans, and new research finds that gap is growing.  But the study also found that the poor who live in affluent and highly educated cities live longer than those who live in other areas.  Judy Woodruff learns more from Raj Chetty of Stanford University.

JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour):  Now, the connections between income, geography, and life expectancy.

It’s a sobering fact that the poorest citizens have shorter life spans than wealthier Americans.  But new research published finds that the gap in life expectancy is growing.  Since 2000, the wealthiest 5 percent of Americans can now expect to live an additional three years.  For the very poorest, there’s been almost no change.

And yet research also found that the poorest who live in affluent and highly educated cities live longer than other poor Americans.

Raj Chetty is the co-author, and he’s an economist at Stanford University.

Raj Chetty, welcome to the program.

Why is this gap in life spans getting longer for so many people?

RAJ CHETTY, Stanford University:  Well, Judy, what we’re seeing is that there is a really dramatic increase in life spans for the very highest-income Americans throughout the country.

What’s interesting is that, for the low-income Americans, say in the bottom 20 percent, we find that the story is very heterogeneous across places.  There are some places like Birmingham, Alabama, where the poor are gaining just as much in life expectancy as the rich, but there are other places like Tampa, Florida, where the poor actually losing in terms of life expectancy, where they live shorter lives today than they did in 2000, at the beginning of this millennium.

And so in terms of understanding why we’re seeing this increasing gap, I think the story is not just one at the national level.  It’s one that is going to force us to look at the local level to understand why the trend looks so positive in Birmingham, yet so negative in other places like Tampa.

JUDY WOODRUFF:  And are there clues now as to why that is?

RAJ CHETTY:  The places with the highest levels of life expectancy for the poor tend to have better health behaviors, perhaps not surprisingly.  These are places with lower levels of obesity, higher rates of exercise, lower levels of smoking.

They also tend to be cities like New York and San Francisco, more affluent, highly educated, high-cost-of-living cities, where the poor seem to be doing better.  Now, we don’t know exactly why.  One potential hypothesis is that these types of cities invest a lot in public health.  They’re often the first cities to enact things like smoking bans or bans on trans fats, which could end up improving the health of not just the rich, but also the poor.

But that remains to be explored further.

EASTERN KENTUCKY - Cancer Epidemic

"Why cancer is so hard to fight in rural Kentucky" PBS NewsHour 3/25/2016

NOTE:  I made a correction in the first paragraph of transcript, shown below, where the transcript mistakenly stated "Judy Woodruff" for the paragraph.

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  Cancer is epidemic in eastern Kentucky, a result of medical illiteracy, limited access to care, unhealthy lifestyles and poverty.  In fact, life expectancy in the region is five years shorter than the rest of the nation.  But state health officials are aiming to change that with comprehensive prevention and education initiatives.  Special correspondent Jackie Judd reports.

JACKIE JUDD (NewsHour):  There are a few certainties in Sam Wilson's hardscrabble life, bluegrass that sustains him, and cancer that he expects will kill him.

SAM WILSON, Cancer Sufferer:  I was laid up with cancer and didn't know it, in my bladder, kidney, prostate, some in my bowels and colon.

JACKIE JUDD:  In Eastern Kentucky, Appalachia, cancer is epidemic, and has been for decades.  The highest-in-the-nation rates are fueled by a toxic combination of poverty, medical illiteracy, limited access to care, lifestyle choices like smoking, and a fatalism that says knowing you have cancer won't save you.

SAM WILSON:  My whole family, they just won't go to the doctor anymore.  My mother died of cancer and she wouldn't go.  Two of my sisters died with cancer.  But they went to the doctor, but they still passed away.

JACKIE JUDD:  Irene, did you try to convince him to go to the doctor when he wasn't feeling well?

WOMAN:  He finally told me after a few years, and he said, it's so painful, something has to be done.

JACKIE JUDD:  After a few years?  Years?

WOMAN:  Yes, he's very lucky, yes.

JACKIE JUDD:  Not months or weeks, years?

WOMAN:  No.  No.  What, about four years maybe?

JACKIE JUDD:  Kentucky public health officials are trying to change that storyline, to get people screened, so disease is discovered before it is too late to treat.

GREED FILES - Cashing-In on the Poor

"Fighting the debt trap of triple-digit interest rate payday loans" PBS NewsHour 1/6/2016

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  Payday loans are supposed to be a short-term quick fix for those who can't get traditional credit.  But the loans are rarely actually short-term, and borrowers frequently need to take out a second loan to pay off the first.  Special correspondent Andrew Schmertz reports from South Dakota, where some are trying to cap triple-digit interest rates that many struggle to pay.

"Left behind by banks, poor Americans pay more to borrow" PBS NewsHour 1/6/2016

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  It’s expensive to be poor.  Unable to maintain a minimum balance or provide the necessary ID to open a bank account, many low-income Americans rely on fringe financial services like check cashing stores and payday lenders, which charge interest rates that can reach the triple digits.  Hari Sreenivasan learns more from Mehrsa Baradaran, author of "How the Other Half Banks."

THE AMERICAN DREAM - And Economic Reality

COMMENT:  What do you expect when our nation is effectively run by 1% of its citizens?

"Is economic reality wiping out the American dream?" PBS NewsHour 12/11/2014

Excerpt

JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour):  By many measures, the U.S. economy seems to have picked up steam this year.  And the most recent jobs report saw the best results since January 2012.

But many Americans say they are still doubtful about economic opportunity and the ability to move up the ladder.  In fact, a new poll by The New York Times found the public is more pessimistic than it was right after the financial collapse.  Just 64 percent of those surveyed said they still believed it was possible to become wealthy if they started out poor.

That’s a pronounced drop from 2009 and the lowest level in two decades.  The poll also sampled opinions with some surprising answers on a range of economic issues.

Andrew Ross Sorkin, a columnist for The New York Times and editor at large of its DealBook section, joins us now.  He also co-hosts Squawk Box on CNBC.

Welcome back to the NewsHour.

You know, we have been seeing, I guess, coming off the midterm elections that Americans don’t feel good about the economy, despite the statistics that say otherwise. But this poll that The Times has done suggests a much deeper, long-term kind of pessimism.

How do you explain it?

ANDREW ROSS SORKIN, The New York Times:  Well, you know, we wanted to try to look at this concept of the American dream, this concept of mobility, of starting poor and really becoming rich.

We also asked people what they thought rich meant, and I would tell you we thought some of those answers were quite surprising.  You don’t need to be a millionaire in this country to be considered rich.  About 25 percent, 26 percent of the respondents said, if you can make $100,000 or $200,000, that was very wealthy in this country.

But we wanted to look into that mobility issue, and so many people repeatedly said they didn’t think that mobility existed in the same way that they thought it might have existed before.  And, frankly, what was most surprising about it was that people thought that they had a better shot even three years ago, after the financial crisis.

And I think that it’s really a demonstration of the tale of two countries, if you will, when it comes to the economy that we have seen over the past years, which really goes to this larger issue of inequality.

HEALTH CARE - 26 States Rejecting Medicaid Expansion Put Poor at Risk

"Millions of Poor Are Left Uncovered by Health Law" by SABRINA TAVERNISE and ROBERT GEBELOFF, New York Times 10/2/2013

Excerpt

A sweeping national effort to extend health coverage to millions of Americans will leave out two-thirds of the poor blacks and single mothers and more than half of the low-wage workers who do not have insurance, the very kinds of people that the program was intended to help, according to an analysis of census data by The New York Times.

Because they live in states largely controlled by Republicans that have declined to participate in a vast expansion of Medicaid, the medical insurance program for the poor, they are among the eight million Americans who are impoverished, uninsured and ineligible for help.  The federal government will pay for the expansion through 2016 and no less than 90 percent of costs in later years.

Those excluded will be stranded without insurance, stuck between people with slightly higher incomes who will qualify for federal subsidies on the new health exchanges that went live this week, and those who are poor enough to qualify for Medicaid in its current form, which has income ceilings as low as $11 a day in some states.

People shopping for insurance on the health exchanges are already discovering this bitter twist.

“How can somebody in poverty not be eligible for subsidies?” an unemployed health care worker in Virginia asked through tears.  The woman, who identified herself only as Robin L. because she does not want potential employers to know she is down on her luck, thought she had run into a computer problem when she went online Tuesday and learned she would not qualify.

At 55, she has high blood pressure, and she had been waiting for the law to take effect so she could get coverage.  Before she lost her job and her house and had to move in with her brother in Virginia, she lived in Maryland, a state that is expanding Medicaid.  “Would I go back there?” she asked.  “It might involve me living in my car.  I don’t know.  I might consider it.”

The 26 states that have rejected the Medicaid expansion are home to about half of the country’s population, but about 68 percent of poor, uninsured blacks and single mothers.  About 60 percent of the country’s uninsured working poor are in those states.  Among those excluded are about 435,000 cashiers, 341,000 cooks and 253,000 nurses’ aides.

“The irony is that these states that are rejecting Medicaid expansion — many of them Southern — are the very places where the concentration of poverty and lack of health insurance are the most acute,” said Dr. H. Jack Geiger, a founder of the community health center model.  “It is their populations that have the highest burden of illness and costs to the entire health care system.”

The disproportionate impact on poor blacks introduces the prickly issue of race into the already politically charged atmosphere around the health care law.  Race was rarely, if ever, mentioned in the state-level debates about the Medicaid expansion.  But the issue courses just below the surface, civil rights leaders say, pointing to the pattern of exclusion.

Every state in the Deep South, with the exception of Arkansas, has rejected the expansion.  Opponents of the expansion say they are against it on exclusively economic grounds, and that the demographics of the South — with its large share of poor blacks — make it easy to say race is an issue when it is not.

INDIA - National IDs to Greatly Improve Serving the Poor?

"India Organizes One of Largest Citizen Registration Drives Ever to Issue IDs" PBS Newshour 2/25/2013

Excerpt

JUDY WOODRUFF (Newshour):  .....to one of the largest registration drives of all time.  It's taking place in India, where authorities are mounting an effort to give every resident an official biometric identification card and number.

Special correspondent Fred de Sam Lazaro filed this story as part of our Agents for Change series.

FRED DE SAM LAZARO (Newshour):  Across India, in community centers and schools like this one in New Delhi, people line up for hours.  Patience, like application forms they seek, is often in short supply.  It seems like a big deal over a rather mundane prize: a new government-issued I.D.  But the man behind it all calls this the largest social inclusion project in history.

NANDAN NILEKANI, Retired Software Billionaire:  We still have a large number of residents of India who don't have a birth certificate or any other form of official I.D.  And in the old days, when they lived their entire life in a single village, it maybe didn't matter, but now, with the highly mobile and aspirational society, you need some kind of an I.D.

EGYPT - The Forgotten in the Political Dispute

"In Cairo Crisis, the Poor Find Dashed Hopes" by KAREEM FAHIM, New York Times 12/13/2012

Excerpt

A faded poster of Hosni Mubarak hangs on a wall in a crumbling neighborhood here, reminding residents of an empty pledge to find jobs for young people. Down the street, a campaign banner for his successor, Mohamed Morsi, hangs across the road, a reminder of more recent promises unkept.

In the neighborhood, called Boulaq, so long neglected that houses regularly collapse, there was little expectation that Mr. Mubarak would provide. But Mr. Morsi’s disregard has been much harder to take.

“We had high hopes in God, that things would improve,” Fathi Hussein said as he built a desk of dark wood for one of his clients, who are dwindling. “I elected a president to be good for the country. I did not elect him to impose his opinions on me.”

Away from the protests and violence that have marked the painful struggle over Egypt’s identity in the run-up to a referendum on Saturday on a constitution, residents of Boulaq have their own reasons to be consumed with the crisis. The chants of the protesters, for bread and freedom, resonate in Boulaq’s alleyways. In many of its industrial workshops, passed from struggling fathers to penniless sons, disappointment with the president, his Muslim Brotherhood supporters as well as the leaders of the opposition grows daily.

There is a sense in Boulaq that the raging arguments would be better resolved in places like this, where most Egyptians live, carrying the burdens of poverty with no help from an indifferent state, and where the revolution’s promise of dignity is long overdue.