From the Opposing Viewpoint, Healthcare Issue, states, "Americans are forced to go without health insurance entirely. This problem is exacerbated by the rising costs of care. Rising costs are the main reason why hundreds of thousands of companies have stopped offering health coverage for their workers. Also, due to the sluggish economy, many people have lost their jobs in recent years. This means that those who are unemployed often have no health care.
Fertility is one of the main issues discussed when talking about the demography of the United States. The U.S. economy plays a rather large role in the rising and falling patterns of the country’s fertility rate. In many past occurrences of economic hardship in the country fertility levels had decreased. One of the main reasons for that being in times of financial struggle, men and women are less likely to want to have children. Being able to support a family is already a difficult task but when people are getting laid off from jobs, unemployment rates are increasing, and the economy is struggling many people can barely afford to buy necessities for themselves never mind for an entire family.
People are deemed poor if their incomes are insufficient to obtain the basic necessitates for themselves or their families. The most common and stereotypic explanation of poverty is the poor cause their own poverty because in America anything is possible if you want it. This “blame the poor” point of view is does not apply to all poverty stricken, a big misperception is that the poor do not work. Not only are most poor people able and more than willing to work hard and they do so when given the chance. The fact is nearly half of the poor populations of working age do work even if it is minimal and millions of them work full-time.
Imagine a world where you are working overtime, seven days a week, yet your kids are starving. You can’t get the education you need because you don’t have the time and money to afford it, and you can’t change jobs because this is the only one you can get. Unfortunately, this is the reality for millions of Americans living today. The federal minimum wage is too low to help families, and actually mathematically speaking, too low to survive on. The quality of life for minimum wage families is terribly low, and that is unacceptable.
Those who are already poor try hard to provide for their families with the money they make from their jobs. Many of them lack education so it is hard to have well-paying jobs. “Poverty is the state for the majority of the world’s people and nations. Why is this? Is it enough to blame poor people for their own predicament?” (“Causes of Poverty” 5) Therefore, corruption is one cause of poverty.
It is common misconception that those families who live in poverty so not work enough to provide for their families. Those more unfortunate people who work for low wages are often blamed for not being more conservative in their spending habits. It is also assumed that these people do not work long enough hours. These viewpoints are often false for many working poor families. This can be seen by the fact that the average low income family has a work effort of around twenty-five hundred hours or the equivalent of one and one-quarter forty hour a week jobs .
Health Insurance is one of the nations top problems, the cost is rising for premiums, and many businesses just cannot afford it. As Americans many of us have the luxury of health insurance, but far too many of us have to go without it. This is something that always seems to brought up at congressional debates, but little is done about it. “In 2013 there were 41 million people reported with out health insurance coverage, this is too many considering those people probably were sick at some point through out the year, and they couldn’t afford treatment.” We need to find someway to make sure that every citizen of the United States is able to have affordable healthcare for themselves, and their families. Most people rely on their employers to provide them with health insurance, but with many health care is not available through the employers.
The living wage is more and more being called a movement because the current federal minimum wage laws does not provide enough money for an individual that works a full time job to be able to support a family. Making them feel like they should not have to raise a family in poverty. Across the United States there are efforts to provide what is called living wages for workers which began with requiring all employers to pay at least the minimum wage to its workers that is equal to the living wage for the area (City/State) they are working in. The current minimum wage is set, depending on where you are living it can be up to several dollars short of what should be the living wage. The living wage movement is very active in full force forward
Close to 60% of children in the united states, who are living in a single mother family are impoverished. However, only 11% of two parent families are in poverty. This is very important because there are close to approximately 10,000,000 single mother families in the united states, and if 60% of those are in poverty, then close to 6,000,000 families are in poverty in the U.S. because they have a single mother. This is an issue because that is a lot of people living in poverty. If women don't get paid enough because of their lower paying jobs and the wage gap, then it is almost impossible to raise children while being a single mother.
According to Judith Feder, Dean of Policy Studies at Georgetown University, “Since most people leaving welfare find themselves in low-paying jobs without coverage, loss of public coverage leaves them without health coverage altogether” (Feder 29). Moreover, many corporations, pressured by global competition to hold down labor costs, are increasingly asking their employees to share a greater portion of the escalating cost of health insurance premiums, if employers offer benefits at all. In fact, a study by the Commonwealth Fund reports that more than one-quarter of workers in companies with over 500 employees do not receive employer-based coverage, and that one in every three full-time workers with incomes below $35,000 is uninsured (Commonwealth 1). Low-wage workers are therefore caught in an untenable situation. They do not qualify for Medicaid and cannot afford to buy hea... ... middle of paper ... ..."The State of Health Care."