Childless Adults Deserve Aid Aswell

          The biggest obstacle to health insurance remains the refusal of 26 (mostly Republican-led) states to expand their Medicaid programs called for under the health reform law. As a result, up to eight million people will get no help at all because they earn too little to buy coverage on the new insurance exchanges and too much to qualify for Medicaid in states that won’t expand their programs. Many of the excluded are poor children and their parents. Most, however, are childless adults, generally defined as those age 19 to 64 without dependent children. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, at least four million childless adults living near or below the poverty line will be denied. Of those, 60 percent are men. They are part of a population of 26 million impoverished adults in the United States, of whom 16 million are childless. Traditionally government anti-poverty programs have largely ignored childless adults under the rationale that only children, their parents, older Americans and the disabled are deserving of help. The sheer number of childless adults in poverty defies that notion, as does compassion and economic necessity; an economy cannot thrive with a significant share of the working-age population stuck in poverty in all honesty. That is why one of health reform’s greatest goals is to extend Medicaid to all low-income childless adults with the federal government paying all of the costs for three years and at least 90 percent after that. The refusal of many states to go along undermines that important step forward sadly.

          The system fails to meet the needs of the poor and childless in other ways, including food stamps. Food stamps benefit the unemployed childless adults, to three months out of every three years. An exception lets unemployed childless workers receive food stamps if they are enrolled in a job-training program, but many people cannot get into job training because federal money for such programs is extremely limited. The rules that govern food stamps should be based on evidence of need, not on arbitrary judgments about who is needy based on family assumption. Looming cutbacks to state and federal unemployment benefits will also harm many childless low-income adults because many who lose their jobs end up unemployed for a long time. In today’s high-unemployment, low-wage and deeply unequal economy, childless adults are not immune to severe hardship and should not be disqualified from help to have the basic necessities to live.