Tag: low-income
Why Americans Suddenly Stopped Hanging Out
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In its earliest decades, the United States was celebrated for its citizens’ extroversion. Americans weren’t just setting out to build new churches and new cities. Their associations were, as Alexis de Tocqueville wrote, “of a thousand different types … religious, moral, serious, futile, very general and very limited, immensely large and very minute.” Americans seemed adept at forming
Trump Is Coming for Obamacare Again
Donald Trump’s renewed pledge on social media and in campaign rallies to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act has put him on a collision course with a widening circle of Republican constituencies directly benefiting from the law.
In 2017, when Trump and congressional Republicans tried and failed to repeal the ACA, also known as Obamacare, they faced the core contradiction that many of the law’s principal beneficiaries were people and institutions that favored the GOP. That list included lower-middle-income
It’s the Best Time in History to Have a Migraine
Here is a straightforward, clinical description of a migraine: intense throbbing headache, nausea, vomiting, and sensitivity to light and noise, lasting for hours or days.
And here is a fuller, more honest picture: an intense, throbbing sense of annoyance as the pain around my eye blooms. Wondering what the trigger was this time. Popping my beloved Excedrin—a combination of acetaminophen, aspirin, and caffeine—and hoping it has a chance to percolate in my system before I start vomiting. There’s the drawing
Saving Local News Could Also Save Taxpayers Money
Zak Podmore did not bring down a corrupt mayor. He did not discover secret torture sites or expose abuses by a powerful religious institution. But there was something about this one article he wrote as a reporter for The Salt Lake Tribune in 2019 that changed my conception of the value of local news.
Podmore, then a staff journalist for the Tribune and a corps member of Report for America, a nonprofit I co-founded, published a story revealing that
Millions of People Are Losing Health Care Because of Paperwork
Across America right now, parents face a possible nightmare: taking a sick child to the doctor, only to be told at the front desk that their health insurance is no longer valid. The reason is that millions of low-income American families have lost Medicaid benefits because they have to jump through an unexpected administrative hoop, resulting in a slow-burning crisis.
The problem stems from the ending of a pandemic-era rule requiring states to maintain continuous Medicaid coverage for everyone on
Why Congress Doesn’t Work – The Atlantic
Control of the House of Representatives could teeter precariously for years as each party consolidates its dominance over mirror-image demographic strongholds.
That’s the clearest conclusion of a new analysis of the demographic and economic characteristics of all 435 congressional districts, conducted by the Equity Research Institute at the University of Southern California in conjunction with The Atlantic.
Based on census data, the analysis finds that Democrats now hold a commanding edge over the GOP in seats where the share
America is too depressed about COVID vaccines
The world has just seen the largest vaccination campaign in history. At least 13 billion COVID shots have been administered—more injections, by a sweeping margin, than there are human beings on the Earth. In the U.S. alone, millions of lives have been saved by a rollout of extraordinary scope. More than three-fifths of the population elected to receive the medicine even before it got its full approval from the FDA.
Yet the legacy of this achievement appears to be
Pandemic Parenting’s Crisis of Inequality
At the start of the 2020 lockdown, we had a 3-year-old who needed near-constant supervision. My third grader, in public school, generally had about an hour’s worth of unchallenging remote lessons a day. We were grateful that our downstairs tenant, who lives alone and is a freelancer, agreed to share a bubble with us and provide 20 hours a week of child care in exchange for a break on rent.
My husband has a challenging job and makes more
This Fall Will Be a Vaccination Reboot
In one sense, this is how it was always supposed to go: When viruses evolve, vaccines should follow, and sometimes try to leap ahead. The COVID-19 shots that the U.S. has used to inoculate hundreds of millions of people are simply so new that they’ve never had to undergo a metamorphosis; up until now, their original-recipe ingredients have stood up to SARS-CoV-2 well enough. But the virus they fight has changed quite radically, and this fall, the vaccines will finally,
Where Are All the COVID-Booster Incentives?
Unfortunately, Omicron is far from done with us. More than 700,000 Americans are testing positive for COVID-19 every day, COVID hospitalizations in the United States are at a record high, and the variant is so contagious that an encounter with it can be postponed for only so long. The single best thing people can do to protect themselves is, yes, get vaccinated. And that includes booster shots.
The immunity boost of that third shot is something of a game changer: