It's not all bad, continued

In these dark days, I try to remind myself as frequently as possible that it's not all bad all the time here. So here's the latest example: there are very, very, very few uninsured kids in WV. This took a lot of hard work by a lot of people from former Senator Jay Rockefeller on down to some very good friends of mine from the late 1990s down to today.

Congratulations, all. Victory lap!

Child poverty

There are plenty of downers in West Virginia's political landscape. But one encouraging thing is a growing campaign to combat child poverty in the Mountain State. The effort is spearheaded by the WV Healthy Kids and Families Coalition but includes dozens of partners, some of whom agree on very little else besides the idea that child poverty is bad.

I guess that's a start.

Here's an op-ed on some of the issues and the campaign from my friend the Rev. Matthew Watts.

Nobody planned it this way, but through fortuitous timing, Roman Catholic Bishop Michael Bransfield released a pastoral letter on child poverty titled Setting Children Free: Loosening the Bonds of Poverty in West Virginia just as the campaign is ramping up.

It's too soon to tell how much impact this  campaign over the coming months and years will have but a huge one would be nice.

SPEAKING OF CHILDHOOD, there's a lot of evidence that negative experiences in that period can have lifelong impacts. One such study is the Adverse Childhood Experiences study, which has an interesting story of its own. To find out more, check out this three part story here, here, and here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

A children's paradox

Image by William Blake.

I attended an event yesterday at which Geoffrey Canada of the Harlem Children's Zone spoke, along with WV Senator Jay Rockefeller and WV First Lady Gayle Manchin. Canada is a dynamic and entertaining speaker and he said something I wish I'd have written down exactly. Since I misplaced my pen, a not altogether infrequent event, I'll have to paraphrase.

The topic of the gathering was investing in children and it was noted that rhetoric about children (most speakers seem to be in favor of them) seldom matches action. He noted that when advocating that resources be put into early childhood education and development, people are often told that while this or that measure may be a good idea, there isn't any money available to do it.

He said, much better than I'm about to, that while we're often not willing to put more resources into quality education for children, as a society we seem to be more than willing to pay any price to cover the cost of not educating them. He noted that one seldom hears of a judge saying to a young person in trouble that while he'd like to lock him up for a really long time, there are no resources to do it.

More Okinawa pictures to come tomorrow.

THE POLITICS OF EDUCATION are starting to get interesting in El Cabrero's beloved state of West Virginia.

YOU MUST SEE this New Yorker cartoon.

IS MARRIAGE GOOD FOR YOUR HEALTH? The conventional wisdom is yes, but it kind of looks like the quality of the marriage is the main thing. In the interests of marital harmony, I will forgo the opportunity to make a snide remark.

MINER'S MEMORIAL. WV Governor Joe Manchin announced a memorial service for the 29 miners killed in the Massey disaster to be held in Beckley this Sunday. At last word, President Obama and Vice President Biden plan to attend.

NOT EXACTLY NEWSWORTHY. Rush Limbaugh tried to blame Massey's Upper Big Branch mine disaster on the United Mine Workers union. The fact that it was a non-union mine may limit the utility of this assertion, although true believers will no doubt keep the faith.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Support these troops

Fall view from the ridge.

Yesterday was Veteran's Day. No doubt many speeches were given extolling veterans for their service, which is only right. I wonder though if many of them dealt with problems such as this:

A research team at Harvard Medical School estimates 2,266 U.S. military veterans under the age of 65 died last year because they lacked health insurance and thus had reduced access to care. That figure is more than 14 times the number of deaths (155) suffered by U.S. troops in Afghanistan in 2008, and more than twice as many as have died (911 as of Oct. 31) since the war began in 2001...

The Harvard group analyzed data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s March 2009 Current Population Survey, which surveyed Americans about their insurance coverage and veteran status, and found that 1,461,615 veterans between the ages of 18 and 64 were uninsured in 2008. Veterans were only classified as uninsured if they neither had health insurance nor received ongoing care at Veterans Health Administration (VA) hospitals or clinics.

Typically, veterans in this situation, like millions of other Americans, are too poor to buy private insurance and too "rich" to qualify for public programs such as Medicaid. One good thing about proposed health care reform in Congress is a massive expansion of the Medicaid program and subsidies to help people buy insurance, although that would still leave some people out.

COLLATERAL DAMAGE. Here's more on the scarring effects of the recession on children.

STATE AID. This paper by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities calls on Congress to extend fiscal aid to states to avert major cuts in jobs and services.

SHINY HAPPY PEOPLE but not so much in El Cabrero's beloved state of West Virginia, according to a study that ranks several states using different criteria.

WORLD POVERTY. According to the United Nations, 2.7 billion people around the world survive on less than two dollars a day, while one billion live on less than a dollar a day. Here's more from Democracy Now.

FREEDOM OF SPEECH, DEPENDING ON WHAT YOU SAY. Here's a Gazette op-ed about how thuggery is suppressing free speech in coal controversies.

URGENT WOOD-EATING DEEP SEA CRAB UPDATE here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

POVERTY AND HEALTH (OR THE LACK THEREOF)

Comment: Inequality, demonstrated here by two crawdads, can cause serious public health problems.

This is the second post in a series about poverty, inequality, and public health.If this is your first visit, please scroll down to yesterday's post.

This series was inspired by a recent scholarly article in The American Journal of Preventative Medicine by Steven H. Woolf (MD, MPH), Robert E. Johnson (Ph.D.), and J. Jack Geiger (MD, MS) titled "The Rising Prevalence of Severe Poverty in America: A Growing Threat to Public Health."

Yesterday's post looked at growing severe poverty from an economic and social standpoint, while today's will deal with health consequences, many of which are obvious and serious:

The public health implications of increasing poverty are profound, given how strongly social class is linked with premature mortality, disease, and mental illness. The poor have greater exposure to risk factors, such as those caused by homelessness, substandard housing, and environmental pollutants. They experience greater rates of smoking, physical inactivity, and obesity, in part because impoverished neighborhoods are not conducive to healthy lifestyles (e.g., having built environments for walking and supermarkets that offer healthy food choices); these communities are also targets for the promotion of cigarettes, alcoholic beverages, and fast foods.

(Note: footnotes were removed from quoted passages for easier reading.)

Poor people who work generally don't have jobs that offer insurance and can't afford to buy it themselves. This may cause people to do without care or postpone seeking it until the situation worsens. Further, the cost of uncompensated care shifts costs to other health care consumers.

Education is another factor related to poverty that can lead to adverse health consequences. The authors note that the inadequate education that usually goes along with poverty makes it harder for people to have the information to make good health decisions and to get the kinds of jobs that provide access to health care.

Not surprisingly, the effects of severe poverty are hardest on children:

Children are especially vulnerable to harm from severe poverty because of its influences on perinatal outcomes, growth, nutrition, parenting, safety, development, emotional health, access to health care, adolescent pregnancy, cognition, and educational success. Children exposed to severe poverty are at greater risk of experiencing unemployment, learning disabilities, mental illness, physical disease, substance abuse, and crime as adults. They are also more likely to remain in poverty as adults,104 thereby perpetuating the cycle for their children. According to one report, only 6% of children who grow up in the lowest quintile of income attain the highest income quintile as adults (compared to 42% of those who grow up in the highest income quintile).

The authors conclude that government policies in recent years has been

to promote vibrant commerce as a vehicle for job creation and to reduce outlays for social services to finance tax cuts and other incentives to “grow the economy.” The findings reported here suggest that this policy has improved incomes for only a small proportion of the population—primarily the most affluent class—while poverty rates at the other end of the spectrum have increased. Millions of Americans, over-represented by children and minorities, have entered conditions of extreme poverty. After 2000, Americans subsisting under these conditions grew as a class more than any other segment of the population. Potential solutions to poverty are formidable and politically difficult, but the first step is to recognize the problem, which to date has received little exposure, and its implications for public health and society. Policymakers should consider our data in judging whether policies enacted in recent years have helped or hindered the public.

El Cabrero's unauthorized translation: we're on the wrong road and we need to change directions.

BIG NEWS! Caliente damn! DSL has arrived at Goat Rope Farm! This means big changes for this blog, including more than one post per day as things arise, video clips, and maybe even podcasting (once I figure out what, exactly, podcasting is)...unless I get lost in youtubeland.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

A RIFF ON MARRIAGE, FOLLOWED BY A REAL BUT NEGLECTED FAMILY ISSUE

Caption: These guys would do OK.

We interrupt Goat Rope's ordinary social commentary to pass on this truly random news item.

It has to do with the politics of marriage.

(St. Paul famously said that "it is better to marry than to burn." But then, he was single.)

Anyhow, check this out:

OLYMPIA, Wash. - An initiative filed by proponents of same-sex marriage would require heterosexual couples to have kids within three years or else have their marriage annulled.

Initiative 957 was filed by the Washington Defense of Marriage Alliance. That group was formed last summer after the state Supreme Court upheld Washington's ban on same-sex marriage.

Under the initiative, marriage would be limited to men and women who are able to have children. Couples would be required to prove they can have children in order to get a marriage license, and if they did not have children within three years, their marriage would be subject to annulment.

Evidently, some people got tired of hearing that marriage is for procreation only and decided to call that bluff.

“For many years, social conservatives have claimed that marriage exists solely for the purpose of procreation ... The time has come for these conservatives to be dosed with their own medicine," said WA-DOMA organizer Gregory Gadow in a printed statement. “If same-sex couples should be barred from marriage because they can not have children together, it follows that all couples who cannot or will not have children together should equally be barred from marriage."

Holy jujitsu, Batman! As the saying goes, turnabout is fair play.

NOW FOR A REAL FAMILY VALUE THE "FAMILY VALUES" CREW DOESN'T CARE ABOUT. A recent study of child well being by UNICEF found that the US and Great Britian trailed other advanced democracies:

The far-reaching analysis by UNICEF didn’t measure just family income, but also focused on meaningful factors such as whether kids live in two-parent homes, whether they eat dinner together as a family, whether they’re bullied or have fights at school, whether they’re obese, whether they dabble with drugs and sex, whether they’re vaccinated against diseases, whether they’re delinquent, and many other indicators.

Holland and Scandinavia scored at the top among 21 affluent nations — while the United States ranked 20th and Britain 21st. A top UNICEF researcher said the poor showing of the bottom pair stems partly from their worse income inequality and worse government programs such as day care and medical insurance.

“What they have in common are very high levels of inequality, very high levels of child poverty, which is also associated with inequality, and ... poorly developed services to families with children,” British professor Jonathan Bradshaw said.

Isn't it ironic that the legions that rise up in defense of so-called "family values" as a rule don't care about things like this?

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED