poverty
pgleick | March 7, 2017In late February 2017, the Pontifical Academy of Sciences hosted a workshop on the human right to water organized by the Cátedra del Diálogo y la Cultura del Encuentro of Argentina with several other organizations. With many colleagues from science, law, human rights, history, and religion, this workshop offered the opportunity to debate and discuss how to integrate the human right to water with public policies in water and sanitation management globally and regionally. Two days of intense discussion culminated in a declaration by Pope Francis and a formal statement (below) signed by the Pope…
kkrisberg | January 24, 2017Can I afford the water that comes out of my tap? It’s not a question that Americans typically ask themselves. However, a new study finds that in the next few years, many more of us might be asking that very question as we open our utility bills and realize that we’re merely accustomed to affordable water — we don’t have a guaranteed right to it.
While a good amount of research on water affordability has been conducted in the developing world, the issue has received much less attention in developed nations such as the United States. Elizabeth Mack, an assistant professor in the Michigan State…
lborkowski | December 28, 2016The Pump Handle is on a holiday break. The following, which was originally published on July 8, is one of our favorite posts from 2016.
by Kim Krisberg
In 2005, the World Health Assembly adopted a revised version of its International Health Regulations, a legally binding treaty among 196 nations to boost global health security and strengthen the world’s capacity to confront serious disease threats such as Ebola and SARS. A decade later, just one-third of countries have the ability to respond to a public health emergency. That’s why Rebecca Katz thinks it’s time to get creative.
“How can we…
lborkowski | December 27, 2016The Pump Handle is on a holiday break. The following, which was originally published on August 29, is one of our favorite posts from 2016.
by Liz Borkowski, MPH
Two decades ago, President Bill Clinton signed the “Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act” (PRWORA) and heralded the end of “welfare as we know it.” The law lived up to that promise, but the outcomes for families who depend on it have been problematic. "If the goal of welfare reform was to get rid of welfare, we succeeded," the University of Wisconsin’s Timothy Smeeding told Vox’s Dylan Matthews. "If the goal…
lborkowski | August 29, 2016Two decades ago, President Bill Clinton signed the “Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act” (PRWORA) and heralded the end of “welfare as we know it.” The law lived up to that promise, but the outcomes for families who depend on it have been problematic. "If the goal of welfare reform was to get rid of welfare, we succeeded," the University of Wisconsin’s Timothy Smeeding told Vox’s Dylan Matthews. "If the goal was to get rid of poverty, we failed."
(A bit of background: PRWORA replaced the old Aid to Families with Dependent Children, or AFDC, with Temporary…
kkrisberg | July 8, 2016In 2005, the World Health Assembly adopted a revised version of its International Health Regulations, a legally binding treaty among 196 nations to boost global health security and strengthen the world’s capacity to confront serious disease threats such as Ebola and SARS. A decade later, just one-third of countries have the ability to respond to a public health emergency. That’s why Rebecca Katz thinks it’s time to get creative.
“How can we think creatively about incentives for countries to build the required public health capacity under international treaty obligations,” Katz, an associate…
kkrisberg | June 30, 2016Low wages certainly impact a person’s health, from where people live to what they eat to how often they can visit a doctor. And low and stagnant wages certainly contribute to poverty, which is a known risk factor for poor health and premature mortality. But should low wages be considered an occupational health hazard?
Health economist J. Paul Leigh thinks that they should. In an article published in May in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine (JOEM), Leigh, a professor of health economics at the University of California-Davis, and Roberto De Vogli, a global health professor…
kkrisberg | June 24, 2016A couple months ago, we reported on a study that found raising the minimum wage to $15 could have prevented thousands of premature deaths in New York City alone. Now comes more science on the life-saving benefits of higher wages — this one found that just a modest increase in the minimum wage could have saved the lives of hundreds of babies. It’s yet another reminder that the movement for a living wage is also a movement toward a healthier nation for all.
Published last week in the American Journal of Public Health, the study examined the impact of state-based minimum wage laws on the rate of…
kkrisberg | May 17, 2016Hardly a day goes by lately without another story on companies like Uber and their model of classifying workers as independent contractors while treating them more like traditional employees and sidestepping traditional employer responsibilities. It’s a model that has serious implications for workers’ rights and wages. However, there’s another form of employment that may be even more damaging to hard-fought labor standards: subcontracting.
In March, the University of California-Berkely Labor Center released “Race to the Bottom: How Low-Road Subcontracting Affects Working Conditions in…
kkrisberg | May 5, 2016Just in time for Mother’s Day comes more good news from the Affordable Care Act: the rate of uninsured moms caring for kids younger than 19 has dropped to its lowest rate in nearly 20 years.
According to a new analysis from the Urban Institute released this month, the rate of uninsured moms fell 3.8 percentage points between 2013 and 2014 — that’s a decline about three times as large as any of the previous year-to-year changes observed since 1997. In sheer numbers, that means about 1.6 million moms gained health insurance. To give you even more perspective, consider that uninsurance rates…
kkrisberg | April 20, 2016Just a few weeks ago, legislators in New York reached a deal to raise the minimum wage to $15. And while that’s certainly a big boost for incomes, it could also turn out to be a literal lifesaver.
Published this month in the American Journal of Public Health, a new study found that if $15 had been New York City’s minimum wage from 2008 to 2012, 2,800 to 5,500 premature deaths could have been averted, with the bulk of such avoided deaths occurring in low-income communities. To conduct the study, researchers used U.S. Census data to calculate how the proportion of low-income residents in each…
kkrisberg | April 12, 2016At Reveal, Christina Jewett investigates the gaping holes in California’s workers’ compensation system that make it so vulnerable to fraud and leave workers in the dark about the bogus care being charged in their names. She begins the article comparing the workers’ comp system to Medicare:
When Medicare makes rules, it has a strong incentive to encourage doctors, pharmacists and others to follow them: money.
The purse strings are not held nearly as tightly in California’s workers’ compensation system, in which a division of power creates the first major hurdle.
Lawmakers make rules. The state…
kkrisberg | March 25, 2016Here’s what states get when they expand Medicaid: more savings, more revenue, more jobs, more access to care for their communities.
That’s the conclusion from a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation issue brief released this month that compared the differences between states that chose to expand Medicaid eligibility under the Affordable Care Act and those that opted out. Under the health reform law, the federal government will pay the entire cost of expanding state Medicaid programs up to 138 percent of the federal poverty level through 2016, phasing down to 90 percent by 2020. It’s a pretty good…
kkrisberg | March 11, 2016Poverty and poor health often go hand-in-hand. However, the effects of poverty may be especially profound for children, who are moving through critical developmental and educational phases in their young lives. Knowing that this social determinant of health can lead to a lifelong struggle with poor health and disease, the American Academy of Pediatrics is now calling on pediatricians to screen their young patients for poverty.
Connecting low-income patients with social services and assistance is not necessarily new for many health care providers, but the fact that the nation’s leading…
kkrisberg | March 4, 2016During the years that community health researcher Jill Johnston lived and worked in San Antonio, Texas was experiencing an explosion of fracking. She and the community partners she worked with on environmental health issues had a strong hunch that most of the fracking wastewater wells were being located near communities of color. So, they decided to dig a little deeper and quantify the pattern.
The results of that effort were published this month in the American Journal of Public Health. It turns out that Johnston and her colleagues were right — the study found that fracking wastewater…
kkrisberg | February 19, 2016In the last few years, the residents of Flint, Michigan, and its surrounding suburbs lost five grocery stores. Today, within the city limits, there's just one large chain grocery store, about 10 small and often-pricier groceries, and 150 liquor stores, convenience stores and gas stations. People who have a car often travel out to the suburbs for more variety and better prices. Much of Flint is a food desert — a place where accessing healthy, affordable food is a very real challenge.
But thankfully, a recent study in Flint found that simply relocating an area farmers market is making a…
kkrisberg | February 5, 2016For public health workers, it’s no surprise that social, economic and political conditions shape the distribution and burden of disease. They’ve always known that it takes much more than medicine to keep people healthy. Still, when public health scientist Kristina Talbert-Slagle decided to study the impact of social and public health spending on HIV/AIDS, she wasn’t sure what she’d uncover.
“We thought that maybe there would be a connection, but we didn’t really know what to expect,” said Talbert-Slagle, a senior scientific officer at the Yale Global Health Leadership Institute and a lecturer…
kkrisberg | December 9, 2015As world leaders are gathered in Paris to discuss international efforts to combat climate change, Michelle Chen writes that workers in the Global South will “need to build livelihoods that can mitigate ecological crisis — and leap ahead of the dominant fossil-fuel based economies, which historically have both controlled and stifled their development.” Reporting for The Nation, Chen starts her article with a report from the New Delhi-based Just Jobs Network, which notes that climate-driven migration has the potential to drive down wages and working conditions in urban areas. Chen writes:
But…
kkrisberg | November 24, 2015Maquiladora workers (manufacturing workers) in Ciudad Juárez, just across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas, are at the center of a growing worker rebellion in border factories, which employ more than 69,000 people, are nearly all foreign-owned, and pay some of the lowest wages along the border, reports David Bacon in The Nation. In fact, manufacturing workers in Juárez typically make 18 percent less than the average manufacturing worker in one of Mexico’s border cities. Bacon reports:
Ali Lopez, a single mother at the planton outside the ADC CommScope factory, describes grinding poverty. “…
kkrisberg | November 20, 2015It’s not surprising that food insecurity has a negative health and academic impact on young children — numerous studies have come to that conclusion. However, a new study has begun to dig a little deeper into the topic, zeroing in on the lingering aftermath of the Great Recession, when food insecurity and child poverty reached record levels, and examining the particular effects of transitioning from not worrying about having enough food to living in a household with limited or uncertain access to food.
Published this month in Health Affairs, the study looked at transitions in food security…