September 13, 2009

Folks without health insurance sing the blues

Dwight Lewis
Nashville Tennessean

I was at home the other night trying to pick out some soothing music to put on, but it seemed like every CD I picked up contained the blues.

Before I could find what I was looking for, some old Jerry Butler songs, I happened to pick up a CD by the late "king of the Delta blues singers," Robert Johnson. "Cross Road Blues," "Walkin' Blues" and "Me and The Devil Blues."

Yes, it made for a blues type of night. Listening to that was tough, but what was even tougher was seeing news reports earlier in the day on the U.S. Census Bureau's annual report of the economic well-being of American households for 2008.

The number of Americans without health insurance rose to 46.3 million last year as people began losing jobs and coverage in the current recession, the Associated Press reported. It added that the poverty rate hit 13.2 percent, an 11-year high.

The AP story said analysts cautioned that the numbers for 2008 could significantly understate today's reality because they do not capture the economic impact in the first half of 2009, when unemployment was steadily rising. It said the census asked people whether they had health coverage any time during 2008 and thus may not include those who lost jobs and their insurance after the financial meltdown last fall.

In another sign of both the recession and the long-term stagnation of middle-class wages, median family income in 2008 fell to $50,300 compared with $52,200 the year before, The New York Times reported in its story about the census report. This, the newspaper reported, wiped out income gains of the previous three years.

"This is the largest decline in the first year of a recession we've seen since the Census Bureau started collecting data after World War II," the Times quoted Harvard University economist Lawrence Katz as saying while discussing household incomes. "We've seen a lost decade for the typical American family."

Put Phoebe Snow's "Harpo's Blues" on and you'll hear such lyrics as:

"And I have to try to bear
"My life in pain
"I'd like to be a willow, a lover, a mountain,
"Or a soft refrain
"But I'd hate to be a grownup
"And have to try to bear
"My life in pain."

As you think about what a painful life must be like for the millions of people without health insurance these days and those without jobs, you might also listen to what Sheldon Danziger of the Population Studies Center at the University of Michigan told USA Today.

"Things will get worse before they get better," Danziger said. "2009 is going to be dreadful." He also predicted to the newspaper that income will drop at least 5 percent this year because of rising unemployment in the recession's second year.

As I saw the statistics and predictions, I couldn't help but once again think of one of the passages on poverty from Make Gentle The Life of This World: The Vision of Robert F. Kennedy (Hardcourt Brace, 1998), edited by one of his sons, Maxwell Taylor Kennedy.

"Action in adequate measure can wait no longer. There are children in the United States of America with bloated bellies and sores of disease on their bodies. They have cuts and bruises that will not heal correctly in a timely fashion, and chronically runny noses. There are children in the United States who eat so little that they fall asleep in school and do not learn. We must act, and we must act now."

Yes, America, we must act now. We can't continue to let so many of our citizens go without insurance and jobs. Whether you believe it or not, for an overwhelming majority, their condition is no fault of their own.

Dwight Lewis is editorial page editor for The Tennessean. His column appears Sundays and Thursdays. E-mail: dlewis@tennessean.com.