Jeffery A. Lowell, M.D.
champions organ donation awareness
|
Jeffery A. Lowell, M.D. champions organ donation awareness |
|
|
|
|
|
|
||||||
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
 |
|
Welfare use more common than many think
By Jessica N. Roberts Many Americans believe that welfare use happens to someone else, to people outside of mainstream society. But a study published in a recent issue of Social Work casts considerable doubt on that notion, finding that nearly two-thirds of all Americans between 20 and 65 will at some point turn to a public assistance program. "Although public-assistance users are routinely vilified and portrayed as members of marginalized groups, in fact, most Americans will encounter the welfare system at some point during their adult years," said Mark R. Rank, Ph.D., professor in the George Warren Brown School of Social Work and first author of the study. "Contrary to much of the popular rhetoric, the use of the United States social safety net is widespread and common." The study also looked at the length of welfare use, and its results go against the current perception that those on welfare will languish in assistance pro-grams for five or more years at a time. In fact, the study indicates that "the use of welfare across the adult years tends to occur over fairly short intervals of time." "While 65 percent of the population will encounter at least one year of welfare use, only 16 percent of the population will use public assistance for five consecutive years," said Rank, who co-authored the study with Thomas A. Hirschl, a professor at Cornell University. After Americans use an assistance program for the first time, however, they are likely to do so again. According to the study, of the 65 percent of people using a welfare program, 90 percent will do so more than once, making the total number of years that welfare is used across the life cycle sizeable. The findings in this study reveal that, "Although the U.S. welfare state may be minimalist in terms of the scope and the level of benefits it offers to impoverished people, it is far from minimalist in the extent to which it is eventually relied on by the general population." The study is based on a unique analysis of a series of life tables constructed from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID). The PSID is a nationally representative longitudinal sample of households and families interviewed annually since 1968. Welfare in the United States consists of in-kind programs such as food stamps and Medicaid, or cash programs such as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families or Supplemental Security Income. |
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
