"Preventing Poverty"

[applegrove]

Preventing Poverty

http://www.wilsonquarterly.com/in-essence/preventing-poverty?utm_source=June+2013+Newsletter&utm_campaign=June13News&utm_medium=email

"SNIP.............................


New policies need to be preventive—focused on stemming the flow of people into the ranks of the newly poor, argues Anirudh Krishna, a public policy professor at Duke, in Current History. He and several colleagues surveyed more than 35,000 households in Uganda, Kenya, Peru, India, and the United States over a nine-year period (2001–10). Poverty, they found, is sticky. Sixty percent of those who had fallen into poverty 15 or more years before they were surveyed were still poor.

Krishna and his colleagues isolated one reason: the cost of medical care. In the Indian state of Gujarat, 88 percent of the households that slipped into poverty attributed their plight to health care costs. A Peruvian man told of losing his wife to uterine cancer: “I was obliged to sell my animals, cows, oxen, and donkeys, and I also went into debt in order to care for her, and later, to bury her.” It’s not just the developing world: Medical expenses are to blame for more than half of all personal bankruptcies in the United States.

Those who have made only “marginal escapes” from poverty are especially worth targeting. The near poor—maids and pushcart vendors, for example—may have a steady income, but it depends on showing up to work every day. Up to one-fifth of family income can be lost during a major illness. Living on $1.27 a day suddenly becomes living on barely more than a dollar a day.

Affordable and accessible health care is key to future poverty reduction, Krishna argues. Japan, an early postwar adopter of universal health care, has just a two percent poverty rate. Sweden and other robust welfare states yield similar lessons.

.............................SNIP"

[okaawhatever]

1. K & R

[prairierose]

2. and another kick...