Poverty in Washington State | Meeting basic Needs

Search

Meeting Basic Needs

More Information

At some point every family or person experiences crisis: an illness, the loss of a job, or a sudden change in financial situation. These days, the tough times are made worse by skyrocketing health care costs and the rising cost of living. For people with lower incomes these crises are devastating and they seriously compromise a person’s ability to meet their most basic needs for food, housing, transportation and health care.

Poverty Action is working to protect income support programs that are at risk of being cut, and advocate for improvements in programs that are insufficiently meeting the needs of the growing population and demands of people in need. We believe that maintaining the necessary revenue to pay for state services should not rely on taxes which are an unfair burden on people with lower incomes, and so support progressive tax reform including a state income tax.

Our campaign to support basic needs in Washington focuses on strengthening social supports and protecting programs that help meet basic needs:

Income Support for Parents with lower incomes:

Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) helps parents and their dependant children who have incomes so low they are not able to meet their basic needs. People who qualify for TANF are required to engage in immediate job search upon entering the program and are given a small cash grant to help them cover monthly costs. Although the cost of living has increased significantly over the last ten years, the TANF cash grant has not been adjusted since 1993 and remains at a maximum grant for a family of three of only $546 a month. This is despite the fact that between 1993 and 2003 the cost of living increased by 20%. In 2004 the TANF grant for a family of three is 41.9% of the Federal Poverty Line.

Poverty Action is working to ensure that Washington takes steps to keep TANF grant levels in line with the cost of living. Increasing the grant by 2% would be a modest cost of living adjustment and raise the grant to $557 for a family of three.

Child Care while parents work:

Through Working Connections Child Care low income families in Washington are able to receive a modest subsidy to help pay for child care. However, funding for this program is greatly threatened by welfare budget shortfalls and the failure of the federal government to adequately meet the child care need. Additionally, many parents must pay costly co-pays with the subsidy and must decide between paying for child care and meeting other basic needs. Others have been forced to quit their jobs to care for their children when the co-pays became unaffordable and they lose the child care option.

Poverty Action fights to protect funding for the Working Connections Child Care program and puts pressure on the state to lower co-pays for working poor parents.

Health Care for everyone:

Over half a million people in Washington don’t have health insurance and the ranks of the uninsured are rising, particularly among children. Many working adults cannot afford to pay the rising cost of insuring themselves, much less their kids. According to a recent Kaiser survey, between 2002 and 2003 the cost of private health premiums rose 13.9% and the cost that individual employees kicked into their own insurance went up by 53%.

Children without health coverage are less healthy than insured kids because their parents are more likely to postpone needed health care and allow prescriptions to go unfilled because they cannot afford the cost. Just this year Washington state passed legislation making a commitment to cover all children in Washington by 2011. Poverty Action is mobilizing support for policies to achieve this important goal.

As a result of a lack of coverage, by the end of 2004 the Washington health care system paid $400 million to health care providers for people who don’t have health insurance. The costs of uncompensated care are eventually passed on to everyone else through higher health care costs and taxes. Yet over 80% of those who don’t have health care are working. While their employers are often making big profits in Washington, employers often don’t provide health insurance for their workers. Instead they rely on state programs like Medicaid and the Basic Health Plan (BHP) to cover their workers.

It is time for Washington’s big employers to pay their fair share of health care for their employees. Poverty Action supports the Health Care Responsibility Act which would require employers with more than 50 workers on the payroll working for more than 86 hours a month to provide health care for their employees or pay a fee to the state. If collected, the fees would go toward paying for health care for those employees on the state’s Basic Health Plan (BHP.)

Income support for people unable to work:

Nearly 9,000 people with very low incomes in Washington rely on General Assistance – Unemployable (GAU) because they are temporarily unable to work due to a mental illness or physical disability. To help them meet their basic needs, they receive a meager $339 a month. Most use this money to pay for shelters or to contribute to subsidized housing. Without the help, many would become homeless. However caseloads for GAU are increasing and this program has continually been vulnerable to budget cuts.

Poverty Action is fighting to protect this vital assistance program and insure that grant levels come more into line with the rising cost of living.