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4 - Evacuation and Arrival in Austin
- Ronald J. Angel, University of Texas, Austin, Holly Bell, University of Texas, Austin, Julie Beausoleil, University of Texas, Austin, Laura Lein
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- Community Lost
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- 19 March 2012, pp 80-99
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Summary
In October 1998, Hurricane Mitch, a category five storm, killed more than eleven thousand people and left millions homeless in Honduras, Nicaragua, Guatemala, and El Salvador. Twelve years later in January 2010, a magnitude seven earthquake struck Haiti ten miles west of Port-au-Prince, causing thousands of deaths and leaving millions more homeless. These were but two of numerous natural and man-made disasters that have cost the lives and livelihoods of millions of people all over the world in the recent past. Despite their differences, though, disasters share one common feature: they cause the greatest suffering among those who have the fewest possibilities of escape and the fewest resources with which to recover. It may not be surprising that this is the case in the developing world or in an impoverished nation such as Haiti, but as we showed in the last chapter, it was also true in New Orleans. In Louisiana, the suffering of those who were most affected cannot be attributed solely to nature’s wrath; it was an almost inevitable result of governmental policies that placed the victims in harm’s way, that left them with few avenues of escape, and that undermined an adequate governmental and civil society response to the longer-term crisis.
Economic crises, like disasters, also take their greatest toll on those with the fewest resources, whose vulnerability is largely determined by governmental policies. In the wake of the debt crises that racked Latin America in the 1980s, lending institutions, including the International Monetary Fund and governments in rich lending nations, forced drastic macroeconomic adjustment policies on the affected nations. In addition to market and currency reforms, these included sharp cuts in public spending and social services (Brown & Hunter, 1999; Thorp, 1998). The result was the loss of the minimal safety net upon which the most disadvantaged citizens relied. Although serious fiscal austerity and retrenchment may be unavoidable economic realities when dealing with major economic crises, as in the case of disasters, the pain is never borne equally by everyone; the rich never make the same proportionate sacrifice as the poor. As in Latin America, the serious underfunding of public programs that has occurred in the United States in recent years has inevitably had its greatest impact on those most dependent on public programs.
Frontmatter
- Ronald J. Angel, University of Texas, Austin, Holly Bell, University of Texas, Austin, Julie Beausoleil, University of Texas, Austin, Laura Lein
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1 - After the Storm
- Ronald J. Angel, University of Texas, Austin, Holly Bell, University of Texas, Austin, Julie Beausoleil, University of Texas, Austin, Laura Lein
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CASE STUDY: JUSTINE BETTS, A TALE OF TWO CITIES
Justine Betts, a thirty-nine-year-old African American female, remembered her life in New Orleans, where she was born and had been raised, as “beautiful.” The shared routines of daily life, the familiar places, and her family and neighbors were central to her fond memories of the old city. During our first interview, she bordered on the romantic as she characterized life in New Orleans by saying that. “…you get up in the morning, the birds are singing, the sun is out. Your husband [is] going to work; you going to work; your son going to school. [You] come home from work, sit on your porch with your neighbors, laughing, talking. It was just like a big family.” Yet despite her optimism and the positive attitude she conveyed in our initial interview, it was clear that life in the old city had not always been easy or beautiful. One suspects that Justine’s memories of New Orleans had been made fonder by the contrast to an unfamiliar and sometimes foreign-seeming city and the hardships that she encountered there.
In New Orleans, both Justine and her husband worked at the same restaurant. For many years, the couple had lived in the same rental house close to Justine’s family. The support system and the routines that structured Justine’s life became particularly important when tragedy struck. About three months before Hurricane Katrina, Justine lost her son. The unexpected loss thrust her into a severe depression. Her family was vital in bringing her out of her despair. During our initial interview, Justine reported that just before Katrina struck, she had begun to enjoy life again. Unfortunately, more difficult times and more tragedy were in store.
Index
- Ronald J. Angel, University of Texas, Austin, Holly Bell, University of Texas, Austin, Julie Beausoleil, University of Texas, Austin, Laura Lein
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- 19 March 2012, pp 235-241
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Community Lost
- The State, Civil Society, and Displaced Survivors of Hurricane Katrina
- Ronald J. Angel, Holly Bell, Julie Beausoleil, Laura Lein
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- 19 March 2012
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Neither government programs nor massive charitable efforts responded adequately to the human crisis that was Hurricane Katrina. In this study, the authors use extensive interviews with Katrina evacuees and reports from service providers to identify what helped or hindered the reestablishment of the lives of hurricane survivors who relocated to Austin, Texas. Drawing on social capital and social network theory, the authors assess the complementary, and often conflicting, roles of FEMA, other governmental agencies and a range of non-governmental organizations in addressing survivors' short- and longer-term needs. While these organizations came together to assist with immediate emergency needs, even collectively they could not deal with survivors' long-term needs for employment, affordable housing and personal records necessary to rebuild lives. Community Lost provides empirical evidence that civil society organizations cannot substitute for an efficient and benevolent state, which is necessary for society to function.
Introduction
- Ronald J. Angel, University of Texas, Austin, Holly Bell, University of Texas, Austin, Julie Beausoleil, University of Texas, Austin, Laura Lein
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HURRICANE KATRINA AND THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF DISASTER
After living through one of the largest storms of the century, on the morning of August 29, 2005, the residents of New Orleans, Louisiana, appeared to be safe. Within hours, though, the seriousness of the situation became clear as the storm surge breached the levee system that protected the city and submerged large areas, including many low-lying and low-income neighborhoods. More than a million individuals were forced from their homes, many never to return. Many lost family members, and many more lost their homes, their possessions, and all ties to their old neighborhoods and communities. The human tragedy that unfolded in the media riveted the nation’s attention. In response to the massive suffering, communities in Texas and elsewhere responded generously. By September 4, more than 250,000 hurricane victims had evacuated to Texas (Embry, 2005). Houston provided shelter and emergency services to approximately 150,000 evacuees (Berger, 2006). Other large cities, including San Antonio, Dallas, and Fort Worth, hosted additional thousands. During the weekend of September 2, the Austin Convention Center opened its doors to between five thousand and seven thousand evacuees, and many others were sheltered elsewhere in the city (Humphrey & Fitzsimmons, 2005; Wynn, 2006). Many of these survivors of the storm began a long diaspora during which they attempted to rebuild their lives in the new city. In this book, we tell the story of those victims of the storm who remained in Austin for long periods and their attempts to return to normal and build new lives in a new and strange city.
As their stories reveal, the challenges they faced were daunting. Most of those who did not return had lived in low-income communities in New Orleans, and many had not owned their homes. Between 2005 and 2007, half of the population of New Orleans consisted of renters (U.S. Census Bureau, 2005–7). For renters and owners alike, though, the storm destroyed the very basis of their daily security. Disasters exacerbate problems of housing affordability because they reduce the inhabitable housing stock (Comerio, 1998). Estimates suggest that more than 140,000 housing units were damaged or destroyed in New Orleans, including more than 73 percent of all low-rent units (National Low-Income Housing Coalition, 2005).
Acknowledgments
- Ronald J. Angel, University of Texas, Austin, Holly Bell, University of Texas, Austin, Julie Beausoleil, University of Texas, Austin, Laura Lein
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- 19 March 2012, pp vii-viii
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5 - The Limited Transportability of Social Capital
- Ronald J. Angel, University of Texas, Austin, Holly Bell, University of Texas, Austin, Julie Beausoleil, University of Texas, Austin, Laura Lein
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- Community Lost
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- 19 March 2012, pp 100-122
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Summary
Companionship and intimate human contact are basic human needs even for the affluent. For those with little wealth and low incomes, the strong bonding ties and mutual support of family and local social networks are vital for survival (Edin & Lein, 1997; Stack, 1974). The affluent may have the option of isolating themselves since their material well-being is secure. The poor do not have that luxury. As we have seen in previous chapters, even among those survivors who told us about the serious problems that beset their old New Orleans neighborhoods, their stories also conveyed a sense of familiarity and community and, in many cases, social and material support. As important as weak ties are for information gathering, they are no substitute for the emotional and material security that only strong ties can provide. In this chapter, we address the question of how local or place-bound such ties are. Although weak ties do not depend on place, strong ties that are based on more intimate interactions and more frequent contact appear to be less transportable from one place to another.
The differences between the experiences of survivors who evacuated before the storm and those who evacuated after illustrate how varying levels of social capital influenced survivors’ long-term outcomes. Those who evacuated on their own before the storm were in the minority in our sample and, as we shall see, consisted mostly of a group with higher levels of human and social capital than those who were evacuated after the storm. Much of the difference between these groups had to do with their ability to rebuild a sense of community in their new neighborhoods. Among the most important factors that affected that ability was access to adequate housing. Those with more human, social, and material capital had more success finding adequate housing than those with fewer of these resources. We will begin our discussion of rebuilding “community”; then we discuss housing policy in the United States. Before proceeding, let us examine aspects of community and the nature of the strong and weak ties that structure human interactions and define community.
9 - The State, Civil Society, and the Limitations of Social Capital
- Ronald J. Angel, University of Texas, Austin, Holly Bell, University of Texas, Austin, Julie Beausoleil, University of Texas, Austin, Laura Lein
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- 19 March 2012, pp 192-210
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In this book, we have focused on the response by federal and state agencies to the human crisis that resulted from Hurricane Katrina, as well as the role of civil society organizations in dealing with the short- and longer-term needs of individuals and families who were displaced by the storm. We are interested, though, in more than just this one disaster or even the role of civil society in responding to short-term crises. Rather, we focused on this particular event and the diaspora that it brought about for the survivors in order to address the question of whether local levels of government and especially civil society organizations can address the short-term and the longer-term structural vulnerabilities of marginalized groups. The question was motivated by the popular desire to shrink the federal government that has informed public policy in recent years. Our investigation revealed multiple legal, bureaucratic, logistic, and human barriers to a rapid and effective response to the crisis, and in particular it revealed deep-seated barriers to the longer-term return of certain individuals and groups to any semblance of self-sufficiency and stable community life. Civil society organizations, including secular nongovernmental and faith-based organizations, were active in multiple ways even before FEMA arrived in Austin, but their impact and effectiveness varied greatly depending on their structure, funding, staffing, and the tasks they addressed.
We end by asking what contributed to the mixed results and what might be done to make civil society organizations more central and effective contributors to the mission of crisis intervention, as well as the longer-term project of poverty alleviation and minority group empowerment. We also discuss factors that create or undermine social capital, a term that we have used to refer to the capacity of communities to act collectively to improve their members’ life chances and well-being. Our focus in the previous chapters was not on the recovery and rehabilitation efforts in New Orleans. Rather, it was on those hurricane victims who evacuated to Austin, Texas, and who remained for some time. It became clear early in the study that some of the survivors whom we interviewed would never return to New Orleans and that they had, in effect, permanently relocated to Texas. A few of the survivors we interviewed were middle-class and possessed high levels of human and social capital.
8 - Health Care and the Limitations of Civil Society
- Ronald J. Angel, University of Texas, Austin, Holly Bell, University of Texas, Austin, Julie Beausoleil, University of Texas, Austin, Laura Lein
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CASE STUDY: FALLING THROUGH THE CRACKS
Just before the storm, John Washington, a fifty-five-year-old HIV-positive African American male, had moved into a subsidized apartment in a complex for elderly and handicapped individuals in New Orleans. Getting the new apartment was a major achievement and, John hoped, the end of his homelessness. Before moving into his new apartment John had been living at a shelter. It was there that he received assistance in applying to the housing voucher program that finally enabled him to get his own place. Prior to that, he had at times been homeless and often slept in the streets. Just before Katrina struck, he had also begun receiving social security disability payments. Unfortunately, John’s newly independent living arrangements were short-lived.
The residents of the apartment complex were old and disabled and thus most suffered greatly as a result of the storm and its aftermath. According to John one resident died during the storm. Because of his illness, John also had a difficult time. He had recently been hospitalized and had been taking medications for several HIV-related health problems. The storm disrupted his medication regimen, and when he was evacuated, he left without his medicines. As he told us, “…I was on…[inaudible] and Bactrim ’cause I have pneumonia…and some other kind of medicine, but I can’t think of the name of it….I don’t know the…name of the medicine.” We interviewed John only once within a few days of his arrival at the Austin Convention Center, where he should have immediately been placed in contact with HIV services. We do not know why he was not. Perhaps he did not inform the Red Cross or others of his condition. In any case, he was not taking his regular medications and was confused about how to get help. He told us that he “…[didn’t] know how to get [my medicines] ’cause I [came] with [only] the clothes on my back…the only way I [knew] how to get [my medicines]…is if I call…[the medical center in New Orleans]….I don’t know if they reopened or not.”
Bibliography
- Ronald J. Angel, University of Texas, Austin, Holly Bell, University of Texas, Austin, Julie Beausoleil, University of Texas, Austin, Laura Lein
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- 19 March 2012, pp 211-234
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6 - Civil Society, NGOs, and the Grassroots Response
- Ronald J. Angel, University of Texas, Austin, Holly Bell, University of Texas, Austin, Julie Beausoleil, University of Texas, Austin, Laura Lein
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- 19 March 2012, pp 123-149
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CASE STUDY: A FAITH-BASED ORGANIZATION
The Eastside Community Support Association (ECSA), a local faith-based, nonprofit organization located in a small office behind a church in a low-income section of East Austin, illustrates the potential positive role of voluntary efforts in dealing with crises. It also reveals the limitations faced by small-scale organizations in dealing with large-scale and complex social problems. The organization was run by Pastor Gerald Jackson, a dedicated middle-aged African American who believed that the church had a special mission to minister to the poor. ECSA had been in existence for a few years before Hurricane Katrina struck, and the association administered a number of programs, including a breakfast program, HIV testing, and a children’s summer camp. Given its history of ministry to an impoverished African American community, responding to the needs of the mostly African American Hurricane Katrina victims was an irresistible moral imperative.
The storm and the arrival of survivors in Austin evoked an outpouring of sympathy, and a large number of church members volunteered to help. Somewhere between fifty and one hundred church members provided assistance at the Convention Center and solicited donations of money and goods to provide to survivors. Some of the volunteers were from another church in a more affluent section of the city. Given the large number of donations that were made, the organization was forced to move its operation out of the small church office into a larger facility. ECSA provided assistance with transportation, food, and access to medical care and helped survivors who had FEMA housing vouchers contact local landlords. The organization raised nearly $50,000 to provide gift cards to survivors. During the first few weeks, ECSA helped over six hundred families.
3 - Life before the Storm
- Ronald J. Angel, University of Texas, Austin, Holly Bell, University of Texas, Austin, Julie Beausoleil, University of Texas, Austin, Laura Lein
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Before the storm most Americans knew New Orleans for Mardi Gras, the French Quarter, Bourbon Street, and the Jazz Festival. For tourists, the Big Easy offered a unique atmosphere of escape; it was a party town where visitors ate, drank, and listened to sultry music into the wee hours. The city was famous for its unique mix of French and African cultures, its gumbo and beignets, and its art and southern culture. For visitors, New Orleans offered diversions that they could enjoy for a limited time before returning home, but for those who called the city’s low-income neighborhoods home, New Orleans was a very different place. It evoked little of the mystery and charm that attracted outsiders. For the victims of Hurricane Katrina, the neighborhoods in which they lived consisted of familiar communities in which the residents had often lived for generations, but it would be a mistake to romanticize these communities. As our participants recounted to us, these neighborhoods were beset by problems of poverty, crime, poor housing, and inferior schools. Yet these areas were the familiar physical and social locations in which people were born, lived their lives, and died. The poverty and disorganization that characterized the poorest wards of the city required strong bonds of family, friends, and neighbors for basic survival. The loss of these communities and the strong social and family ties that characterized them represented a major loss. Rebuilding those communities and social ties, or even approximating them, in a new and unfamiliar city proved to be an extremely challenging task. As we show in this and later chapters, the attempt was frequently unsuccessful. Despite the assistance of many governmental and nongovernmental agencies and organizations, many individuals and families remained marginalized.
Contents
- Ronald J. Angel, University of Texas, Austin, Holly Bell, University of Texas, Austin, Julie Beausoleil, University of Texas, Austin, Laura Lein
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7 - Housing, Employment, and Identification
- Ronald J. Angel, University of Texas, Austin, Holly Bell, University of Texas, Austin, Julie Beausoleil, University of Texas, Austin, Laura Lein
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- 19 March 2012, pp 150-171
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Summary
In Chapter 5, we examined the role of the state in providing affordable housing and disaster services and traced the devolution of federal housing policy that has occurred over the past forty years. We also reviewed the history of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). In addition, we discussed the differential impact of those programs and policies on two loosely defined groups of survivors: those who evacuated before the storm, most of whom had transferrable resources and social capital; and those who were forcibly evacuated after the storm. This much larger group was largely impoverished and brought limited social capital with them. We examined the very different barriers that these two groups faced in obtaining FEMA housing assistance in Austin. In that chapter, we also highlighted the importance of identification in obtaining assistance and the serious disadvantage that lost identification documents created.
In this chapter, we turn to the role of civil society in addressing survivors’ basic needs. We return to a discussion of housing policy and its impact on low-resource versus higher-resource survivors and to the critical role of identification in accessing services of all kinds. Housing, identification, and employment proved to be interconnected in survivors’ efforts to reestablish themselves in a new city. Low-income survivors encountered a number of structural barriers to recovery, and as we show, local civil society organizations were limited in their ability to deal with problems that had their roots in long-standing social disadvantage. We examine the role of social capital in terms of networks of mutual support that many low-income survivors relied on in New Orleans that were disrupted during the evacuation.
2 - An Emerging Methodology for a Crisis Situation
- Ronald J. Angel, University of Texas, Austin, Holly Bell, University of Texas, Austin, Julie Beausoleil, University of Texas, Austin, Laura Lein
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- 19 March 2012, pp 34-54
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CASE STUDIES: TWO FAMILIES
Ted Johnson, an African American male, and his wife are both physical therapists who left New Orleans in their own car before Hurricane Katrina struck. The couple has two boys, and eventually the family relocated permanently in Austin. The decision to relocate was not a spur-of-the-moment one, nor was it made without qualms. The couple’s disillusionment with New Orleans had been growing for some time. The storm was the catalyst that forced the choice because it made evacuation necessary and it began a series of events that ultimately resulted in their decision not to return.
The Johnsons’ story is not typical of survivors in our sample and illustrates the importance of high levels of social and human capital in determining a successful relocation. As we will see, those families that were able to evacuate themselves had in general more material and social resources and were more successful in reestablishing their lives in Austin or in resuming their lives in New Orleans. The second case we present is of a family with far fewer resources and less human, material, or social capital that could not evacuate on their own. The capacity of individuals and families in similar situations to reestablish their lives, which were often precarious to begin with, was very limited and the outcome much less favorable.
7 - The Nonexistent Safety Net for Parents
- Ronald J. Angel, University of Texas, Austin, Laura Lein, University of Texas, Austin, Jane Henrici, University of Memphis
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- Poor Families in America's Health Care Crisis
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- 25 July 2009
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- 29 May 2006, pp 158-185
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For the parents in our study, one of the greatest threats to their children's health insurance coverage came as a result of their leaving the welfare rolls and going to work. As we have heard in the previous chapters, those parents who somehow managed to earn enough money to move the family above the poverty line ran the risk of losing Medicaid even for their younger children. The extension of Medicaid coverage to children in families with incomes well above the poverty line and the introduction of the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) represent responses by Congress to a clearly irrational aspect of public health policy that penalized work and that left many working poor families without any source of health care coverage for their children. Unfortunately, even though Congress has partially addressed the problem that working poor families face in providing care to their children, it has done little to address the problem of the lack of coverage for their parents (Davidoff et al. 2004; Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured 2003).
Because of the lack of complete and comprehensive family coverage, many of the families in our study faced the harsh reality that some family members, very frequently the adults, had no health care coverage. As we have noted throughout, those families with incomes too high to qualify for Medicaid or SCHIP are at high risk of incomplete family coverage (Hanson 2001; Institute of Medicine 2002b).
5 - Work and Health Insurance: A Tenuous Tie for the Working Poor
- Ronald J. Angel, University of Texas, Austin, Laura Lein, University of Texas, Austin, Jane Henrici, University of Memphis
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- Poor Families in America's Health Care Crisis
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- 25 July 2009
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- 29 May 2006, pp 101-128
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Despite the fact that most of the mothers on welfare we interviewed expressed a desire to work and to support themselves and their families, the reality of work in the low-wage service sector made self-sufficiency almost impossible. Many mothers in our study found that employment increased the difficulties they faced in maintaining a stable home life, and it frequently meant the loss of Medicaid. The objective of any rational welfare policy is to encourage work and to promote economic self-sufficiency and family stability. However, as we learned, in combination with the insecurities of low-wage work, the bureaucratic structures and rules that govern public support programs are often irrational and undermine the objectives they are intended to promote. In reality, few of our respondents were better off working than on welfare, yet most attempted to find employment whenever and wherever they could. Of course, as a result of welfare reform, they were required to do so, but most clearly would have preferred self-sufficiency over welfare dependency. The case of one young African American mother of four children illustrates many aspects of the work-related difficulties our respondents faced.
Sarah
Sarah, who we introduced in Chapter 2, had four children that ranged in age from three months to eight years. We conducted our initial interview in the family's small apartment, which was located in “The Courts,” an old housing project close to downtown San Antonio.
2 - The Health Care Welfare State in America
- Ronald J. Angel, University of Texas, Austin, Laura Lein, University of Texas, Austin, Jane Henrici, University of Memphis
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- Poor Families in America's Health Care Crisis
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- 25 July 2009
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- 29 May 2006, pp 33-52
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Sarah, an African American mother of four young children, about whom we will learn more later, did not have medical insurance for herself and had to deal with frequent lapses in her children's coverage. All four children had serious medical problems, and Sarah faced an ongoing struggle to get them the care they needed as well as deal with her own health problems. Three of the children had asthma; the fourth child was born three months prematurely and suffered from lingering respiratory problems. Sarah's work hours and the wages she earned as a staff member at a health care facility varied from week to week, and the children's eligibility for Medicaid changed along with her income. When she was working, Sarah could not afford to take the time off for the recertification visits that were required to maintain each child's Medicaid. In order to take the children to the doctor, Sarah had to take even more time off from work, which she could hardly afford. She was not paid for the hours she took off and, like many other marginal workers, she risked getting fired if she was absent too often.
Sarah's experiences in obtaining health care for her children were typical of those of the low-income mothers we interviewed and illustrate the ways in which the instability of household health insurance relates directly to instability in work, child care, transportation, and a parent's own health problems.
1 - The Unrealized Hope of Welfare Reform: Implications for Health Care
- Ronald J. Angel, University of Texas, Austin, Laura Lein, University of Texas, Austin, Jane Henrici, University of Memphis
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- Poor Families in America's Health Care Crisis
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- 25 July 2009
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- 29 May 2006, pp 1-32
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Cecilia, a young biracial (African American and Hispanic) mother of two, identified herself as African American. She was introduced to us by another of our San Antonio respondents. We conducted a number of interviews with her over the course of a year and a half, during which her second child, a daughter named Annika, was born. When we met Cecilia, she was living with Annika's father. Her older child, a two-year-old boy named Kevin, was from a previous relationship. Cecilia's own childhood had been chaotic. Her father had thirteen children with various women, but Cecilia only knew two of her siblings and was not particularly close to either of them. One lived in another state and although Cecilia had talked to her on the phone, they had never met in person. Cecilia lived near her mother, but they were not close and Cecilia received little help from her. She described her mother as “remote” and unwilling to provide child care or other assistance to the family.
Cecilia's grandmother also lived nearby, and Cecilia's relationship with her was much warmer than her relationship with her mother. Her grandmother provided what support she could, and Cecilia greatly appreciated the help. When we met Cecilia, she was estranged from Kevin's father and would not allow him to have any contact with the boy. She felt that the father no longer had any right to see his son because he had stopped paying child support.