• Rural Haiti struggles to absorb displaced, By Deborah Sontag, March 16, 2010, New York Times: “Before the earthquake that changed everything, Chlotilde Pelteau and her husband lived a supremely urban existence. A cosmetics vendor and a mechanic, they both enjoyed a steady clientele and a hectic daily routine, serenaded by the beeping cars and general hubbub of Port-au-Prince. Now, as roosters crow and goats bleat, Ms. Pelteau, 29, toils by day on a craggy hillside in the isolated hamlet of Nan Roc (In the Rocks), which she had abandoned at 14 for a life of greater opportunity. At night, she, her husband and their two children sleep cheek-to-jowl with a dozen relatives in the small mud house where she grew up. ‘With everything destroyed, what could I do but come back?’ said Ms. Pelteau, wearing a floral skirt as she poked corn seeds deep into arid soil unlikely to yield enough food to sustain her rail-thin parents, much less those who fled the shattered capital city to rejoin them…”
• Haitians who fled capital strain impoverished towns in countryside, By William Booth, March 15, 2010, Washington Post: “The earthquake that struck Haiti’s capital city has also jarred the impoverished countryside, sending 600,000 people into the provinces — where locals are now overwhelmed with the task of feeding and sheltering desperate newcomers. Haitian and international aid officials describe the migration as one of the largest and most wrenching in the hemisphere, as internally displaced people stream out of Port-au-Prince and head to struggling provincial towns in the aftermath of the earthquake like civilians fleeing war zones in places such as Rwanda, Kosovo and the Swat Valley in Pakistan. ‘They are everywhere. They are in the town, and they are sleeping in the fields,’ said Gerald Joseph, mayor of Lascahobas, a farming and trading town about three hours north of the capital. ‘Our schools are beyond full now. Our hospital is full. All our houses are full of people. We don’t have an empty house. Where four people were sleeping before, there are now 14…’”

The obesity-hunger paradox, By Sam Dolnick, March 12, 2010, New York Times: “When most people think of hunger in America, the images that leap to mind are of ragged toddlers in Appalachia or rail-thin children in dingy apartments reaching for empty bottles of milk. Once, maybe. But a recent survey found that the most severe hunger-related problems in the nation are in the South Bronx, long one of the country’s capitals of obesity. Experts say these are not parallel problems persisting in side-by-side neighborhoods, but plagues often seen in the same households, even the same person: the hungriest people in America today, statistically speaking, may well be not sickly skinny, but excessively fat. Call it the Bronx Paradox. ‘Hunger and obesity are often flip sides to the same malnutrition coin,’ said Joel Berg, executive director of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger. ‘Hunger is certainly almost an exclusive symptom of poverty. And extra obesity is one of the symptoms of poverty.’ The Bronx has the city’s highest rate of obesity, with residents facing an estimated 85 percent higher risk of being obese than people in Manhattan, according to Andrew G. Rundle, an epidemiologist at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University…”

Broken fixes: Inspectors find shoddy work in weatherization program, By Doug Caruso, March 14, 2010, Columbus Dispatch: “When low-income Ohioans receive help to improve their insulation and furnace, the quality of the work - including the potential for deadly mistakes - appears to depend on where they live. State records show that 12 of the 58 nonprofit agencies in Ohio’s Home Weatherization Assistance Program passed all of their state inspections in the past three years. That includes two of the agencies that serve Franklin County: the Mid-Ohio Regional Planning Commission and Ground Level Solutions. But 20 other agencies failed more than half of their state inspections, and five of those failed all of them. And that’s just among the houses that were inspected. Federal rules call for examining the work in one of every 20 houses. Overall, nearly 40 percent of the houses that state inspectors checked failed…”

In hard times, lured into trade school and debt, By Peter S. Goodman, March 13, 2010, New York Times: “One fast-growing American industry has become a conspicuous beneficiary of the recession: for-profit colleges and trade schools. At institutions that train students for careers in areas like health care, computers and food service, enrollments are soaring as people anxious about weak job prospects borrow aggressively to pay tuition that can exceed $30,000 a year. But the profits have come at substantial taxpayer expense while often delivering dubious benefits to students, according to academics and advocates for greater oversight of financial aid. Critics say many schools exaggerate the value of their degree programs, selling young people on dreams of middle-class wages while setting them up for default on untenable debts, low-wage work and a struggle to avoid poverty. And the schools are harvesting growing federal student aid dollars, including Pell grants awarded to low-income students…”

Budget cuts could hit low-income NJ residents, By Geoff Mulvihill (AP), March 15, 2010, Philadelphia Inquirer: “New Jersey’s days as a place where the government is unusually generous to the needy may be numbered as a new governor pushes wide-ranging spending cuts to solve a deep budget crisis. Gov. Chris Christie is set to unveil his first spending plan Tuesday after months of preaching shared sacrifice. From what he’s done so far, it’s clear that applies to lower-income people, too, in a state that’s among the most generous in the nation when it comes to unemployment benefits and taxpayer-funded health care for the working poor. Already, he has cut the state’s mass-transit subsidy and stopped enrolling some lower-income adults in a subsidized health insurance program. He’s also proposed reducing weekly unemployment checks and, even before he was sworn in, hinted that food banks could see their state aid cut and told hospitals their reimbursements for treating the indigent will be cut in June…”

• With Medicaid cuts, doctors and patients drop out, By Kevin Sack, March 15, 2010, New York Times: “Carol Y. Vliet’s cancer returned with a fury last summer, the tumors metastasizing to her brain, liver, kidneys and throat. As she began a punishing regimen of chemotherapy and radiation, Mrs. Vliet found a measure of comfort in her monthly appointments with her primary care physician, Dr. Saed J. Sahouri, who had been monitoring her health for nearly two years. She was devastated, therefore, when Dr. Sahouri informed her a few months later that he could no longer see her because, like a growing number of doctors, he had stopped taking patients with Medicaid. Dr. Sahouri said that his reimbursements from Medicaid were so low - often no more than $25 per office visit - that he was losing money every time a patient walked in his exam room. The final insult, he said, came when Michigan cut those payments by 8 percent last year to help close a gaping budget shortfall…”
• Medicaid puts Missouri governor in a bind, By Virginia Young, March 15, 2010, St. Louis Post-Dispatch: “‘Don’t cut care,’ pleaded the sign held by a group of people whose wheelchairs lined a Capitol hearing room. It looked like 2005, when then-Gov. Matt Blunt and the Republican-controlled Legislature cut 100,000 people from Medicaid, the government’s health care program for the poor. But this protest was held last month. The target: Gov. Jay Nixon. Yes, Nixon, the Democrat who promised to expand Medicaid, is seeking $120 million in health care cuts to buoy the sagging state budget. And in a role reversal that illustrates the political quagmire that Medicaid poses for Nixon, it’s the Republican Legislature that is balking…”
• Cuts might be avoided with Medicaid bailout funds, Associated Press, March 16, 2010, Augusta Chronicle: “South Carolina lawmakers on Monday approved plans that would avoid all cuts in health and medical programs by using federal Medicaid bailout cash. With a 96-6 vote, the House approved a measure that uses $173.6 million in federal Medicaid money to eliminate planned reductions for the Department of Disabilities and Special Needs, prescription drugs and other programs. But if the federal money — which has yet to win final approval in Washington — doesn’t materialize, the spending reductions would take effect, said House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dan Cooper, R-Piedmont…”

Sometimes, good legal help is the best medicine, By Anna Gorman, March 12, 2010, Los Angeles Times: “Maria Perez’s fever had climbed to 103, her body ached and she had trouble breathing. After being told in the emergency room that she had pneumonia, Perez went to a clinic in South Los Angeles for a follow-up appointment. The doctor asked Perez about her housing situation. Her apartment had cockroaches and mice, Perez said, and rain came through a broken window and filled the walls with mold. The doctor wrote prescriptions to treat the pneumonia and an asthma flare-up and then did something that he hoped would prevent her from getting even sicker: He sent her down the hall to talk to a lawyer. The attorney, Dennis Hsieh, contacted both the landlord and the Los Angeles Housing Department. The living conditions improved, and so did Perez’s health…”

About 1 in 4 in California lack health insurance, a UCLA study finds, By Duke Helfand, March 16, 2010, Los Angeles Times: “Nearly 1 in 4 Californians under age 65 had no health insurance last year, according to a new report, as soaring unemployment propelled vast numbers of once-covered workers into the ranks of the uninsured. The state’s uninsured population jumped to 8.2 million in 2009, up from 6.4 million in 2007, marking the highest number over the last decade, investigators from UCLA’s Center for Health Policy Research said. People who were uninsured for part or all of 2009 accounted for 24.3% of California’s population under age 65 — a dramatic increase from 2007 driven largely by Californians who lost employer-sponsored health insurance, particularly over the last year…”

Jobless benefits put Wisconsin in hole, By Jason Stein, March 15, 2010, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: “The state’s struggling insurance fund for jobless workers has already borrowed $1.2 billion from the federal government to pay record claims, but the Legislature won’t try to stanch the bleeding until next year at the earliest, officials said. Cutting benefits to the unemployed now or raising taxes that are already on the increase would threaten the state’s battered economy, labor and business leaders agree. But delaying repairs to the state’s unemployment reserve fund could lead to more borrowing and higher interest payments to the federal government to repay the debt later. Like 31 other states around the country, Wisconsin has had to borrow money from the federal government to help it keep making payments to some 250,000 out-of-work state residents…”