Research Roundup

One reason child poverty persists in the United States, as this EPI Snapshot highlights, is that our country does relatively little through spending and tax programs to ease poverty compared to all other developed nations.  Check out the rather dramatic graph comparing efforts between nations.

With the new requirement that Medicaid recipients present an ID to receive benefits, the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities has found that 3 to 5 million legal citizens are at risk of losing health coverage because they don't own a passport or birth certificate required under the law. They include a state-by-state breakdown of Medicaid coverage in each state that are effected by the change.

According to a new report by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, the nation has made some improvement in providing health insurance in the last few years, with 14.2 percent without coverage in 2005 compared to 15.4 percent in 1997, largely due to greater coverage of children. Still, 41.2 million people still lack health coverage and, coverage in different states ranges from 6 percent without health insurance in Massachusetts to over 24 percent lacking health insurance in Texas.