Healthcare Policies & the Poor

I believe health-care is a major problem in the United States given the following statistics from our lecture…

1. More than 50 million people do not have health insurance
2. 10 percent of children do not have health insurance
3. Hispanics have the highest rate of uninsured children
4. Nearly 30 percent of American have governmental health insurance
5. Elderly are the most likely to have health insurance
6. Higher health insurance costs compared to other countries
7. One of the lowest life expectancy among 30 industrialized nations
8. High infant mortality rate

I do not understand why the United States has such a high infant mortality rate compared to other industrialized countries. It does not make sense. The United States prides itself on medical advancements yet we can not even make sure that everyone has the same chance of reaching those advancements. With Elderly being the most likely to have health insurance, due some part because of Medicare, I believe we should invest more into the babies and children of the United States. Having healthier children will yield healthier adults with substantially less medical problems in the future. With less medical costs in the future, the government would pay substantially less towards medically caring for its’ elderly. Health insurance should be a guarantee for all children. I want the government to think of health insurance as a long term investment.



Social Security

Honestly, I think Social Security is one of the best programs that the government has created. However, there main problem is that it is expected to run out by 2041. This is because of several factors. 1. More people were born during the baby boomer years and thus social security needs to be provided to more people. 2. People are living on average 12 years longer than people born during the beginning of the twentieth century, and 3. The amount of workers has declined. I believe the government needs to take some necessary actions in order to insure that other generations have access to social security, the way previous generations had. Obviously, one problem is that there are not enough people working. If more people were working this would not only help out the social security fund, but it will also help with the poverty threshold as well. We need to get more people to be productive in the community. I think we should start programs in social which gives a better understanding of particular government programs and how they affect us, individually, in the long run. Knowing is power. If people know the depth of social security, they would be more likely to contribute to society because they see it would benefit everyone. Not everyone really knows where their taxes are really going to and it is time that they learn.


Housing & Community Development
I think it is ironic how the government created public housing to help revitalize the neighborhood and to expand affordable housing and economic opportunities, but in actuality public housing has created the complete opposite of its original intentions, creating impoverished conditions for the majority of people who take it up. In addition, public housing has placed a high majority of low-income African Americans in a centralized location within the city. Though the government thought that this was a good idea at first, once whites began to move to the suburbs, taking their property taxes with them, this has left the community to be only funded by the federal government.

Race & Immigration
I did not realize that 12% of the United States population is made up of immigrants, while 37% of the Georgia population are immigrants.

In our class notes, the arguments against immigration are  is that immigrants drive down wages and takes jobs away from other low income Americans. However, I greatly disagree with these arguments. I do not think that immigrants drive down wages. I say this because I believe the American people should trust in the government to set a minimum wage which would be livable for all individuals working within the United States. Also, I do not think that immigrants take jobs away from other Americans because they work the jobs that the majority of Americans do not want to work in the first place. Immigrants come to the United States ready and desiring to work, any and everything. There work ethic is considerably higher than many other Americans that would be working the jobs that they are supposedly taking.