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AN URBAN INSTITUTE STUDY CONSIDERED the case of a hypothetical Pennsylvania woman with two children who received $4,836 in AFDC, $2,701 in food stamps and $3,000 in Medicaid benefits, for a total of $10,537 in cash and benefits. If she took a full-time job at minimum wage, her family would gain $9,516 in earnings before taxes and lose Medicaid, AFDC and one-third of her food stamps. Moreover, she would have to find and pay for day care. Welfare recipients who take part in job-training and education programs are eligible for subsidized care; for the working poor, day care can consume half their take-home pay.
"They send these AFDC people back to school. How come we don't do that for the working poor?" asks Eloise Anderson, an African American who grew up in a poor neighborhood in Toledo, Ohio, and now heads the California Department of Social Services. "They made the same bad decisions, except the working poor usually live with their decisions; they go to work, they say, 'Hey, I blew it, but I'm working.'"
Heather Beck, 23, earns $1,200 a month at a machine shop in Spokane, Washington. She is the only employee left following layoffs last month. Heather handles everything from typing and filing to the actual machine work. Her rent and day-care costs alone total $1,000. Last month, she reports with great pain and embarrassment, she had to borrow $200 to pay her landlord. "It just about killed me to do it,'' recalls Beck. "I don't even know how I'm going to repay it."
She is on a 200-person waiting list for subsidized day care for her two children and has found little sympathy from other agencies. "They said if I wasn't living on $500 a month, they weren't going to do anything for me, and that's for a family of three!" says Beck. "My ultimate frustration that day was that their message was that it would just be easier to give up and go on welfare." Beck bristles at talk of getting people off the dole and into the work force. "The people that are really working and trying to succeed are the ones who get the least amount of help," she says.
As President Clinton likes to note, two-thirds of the nearly 40 million Americans with no health insurance live in families with full-time workers. A single illness or injury will plunge a family into crisis. Often health-care concerns override all others in determining whether someone stays on welfare or goes to work. Being poor means making choices: the phone bill or the gas bill? Cough medicine or snow boots? In hard times, health insurance is a luxury; you can't eat peace of mind. So when Briana Harris, 17, fractured her leg sliding into home in a softball game last month, her parents' pain was as real as hers. "We're going to be faced with incredible hospital costs," says Denise O'Brien, a 45-year-old mother of three. "We gave up our insurance last December. When income is low, health care is too expensive."