In public life, you get the chance to talk to lots of people. And if you listen carefully, certain themes repeat themselves.
During conversations at the Annie Malone May Day Parade, the same topics just kept coming up in conversation. There are many priorities, but those that kept surfacing were access to entrepreneurial opportunities and jobs, the need for more access to high-quality and affordable housing, and healthcare that you can keep even if you change jobs.
In reflecting on those conversations it occurred to me that those are all tied to a single integrated notion – a need for stepping stones to opportunity.
Many of our current safety net programs that help people in transitional times of their lives like Medicaid, food stamps, housing, and unemployment are designed with a cliff – a point beyond which a recipient falls off completely when the eligibility requirements are exceeded – even by the slightest margin.
For example, a family may rely on Medicaid to insure a child with a pre-existing condition. That’s often true because the parent’s employer doesn’t cover families. Meanwhile, that parent is at constant risk of losing Medicaid coverage for a child if they would get even a 25 cent per hour raise. That has the effect of locking the working parent into a certain workplace and missing the chance to advance in their work.
This contributes to a cycle of poverty that the system itself helps create due principally to the artificial cliffs that discourage advancement by the very individuals the program was designed to serve. The net effect is to cause a cliff – a fall from support instead of stair steps out of poverty.
The Affordable Care Act addresses this very phenomenon. Health care reform provides for the development of private, market-based health care exchanges where individuals and small businesses can buy-in to health care coverage according to their ability to pay and on a sliding scale, in other words, no cliff. This, of course, is a positive step in the design of social supports that helps people out of poverty instead of trapping them in never-ending cycles.
Many of our other programs, like housing, food assistance, unemployment might do well to adopt a similar model of gradual and measured steps from assistance to self-sufficiency. Doing it through health care reform is surely a good model!
Judy Baker is a Democratic candidate for Lieutenant Governor.
