Columbus Dispatch...
New census formula shows more in poverty  
November  10, 2011 

Last year, “poverty” meant that a family of four made less than $22,113. 

But it should have been more like $24,343 for that family, the U.S. Census Bureau proposed yesterday in a new calculation that would add about 2.5 million more Americans to the total living in poverty. 

The “supplemental poverty measure” — which will not replace the official federal rate — also would shuffle the deck of who is considered to be in poverty. People older than 64 would see the largest leap in their poverty rate, while those under 18 would decline the most. 

The current benchmark takes into account how much cash people receive, including such things as Social Security payments and jobless benefits. But it leaves out how much they have to pay in taxes and ever-increasing health-care costs. It also doesn’t consider food stamps, the federal school-lunch programs and other forms of support. 

The main reasons 2.7 million older Americans would be added to the poverty rolls are because out-of-pocket medical expenses have been overlooked by the official rate, and those costs hit the elderly disproportionately. 

“People think Medicare is free,” said Kathy Keller, a spokeswoman for AARP Ohio. “Medicare is not free. You pay a premium, and Medicare pays part of your cost, not all of your cost.” 

AARP officials believe that the new formula is a more “real-world account” of calculating poverty, Keller said. The new measure subtracts out-of-pocket medical costs before determining whether you’re poor. 

Under the official poverty measure, 9 percent of those older than 64 are in poverty; under the supplemental calculation, that jumps to almost 16 percent. 

On the other end of the scale, the poverty rate for children would drop under the new formula, from 22.5 percent to 18.2 percent. That’s largely because children are the focus of many anti-poverty programs that provide noncash assistance that isn’t counted in the official formula. 

“It seems like this is a bright spot on an otherwise cloudy day,” said Renuka Mayadev, executive director of Children’s Defense Fund Ohio. “The reality is that there still remains a significant number of children who live in poverty.” 

Although the percentage of children in poverty would decline, those under 18 remain the largest age group under the new method. 

For many children, families and pregnant women, a lot rides on how the government calculates poverty — it determines whether they qualify for welfare, food stamps, Medicaid and child-care assistance, said Ben Johnson, a spokesman for the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services. 

“A change in the way we calculate eligibility for any of those programs would certainly change caseloads and would change the makeup of the people we’re serving,” Johnson said. 

But the department has not taken a position on whether the poverty calculation should change, Johnson said. 

“Of course we need a new measure,” said Phil Cole, executive director of the Ohio Association of Community Action Agencies, which puts out the annual report on the “State of Poverty in Ohio.” “We’ve always needed a new measure.” 

But Cole is suspicious of the motives behind the effort to get a new formula and cautioned that it could end up disqualifying people from the programs designed to help them. 

If the end result of any change is that more people qualify for programs, that doesn’t mean the funding will be there for all of them, said Roberta Garber, executive director of Community Research Partners, a Columbus data-research organization. 

“The reality is that programs are being cut,” Garber said. 

Read this and other articles at Columbus Dispatch