September 2007 No. 37Table of ContentsThe Web – a media for your UW? More Hoosiers struggling to get by |
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The destruction brought by the Katrina-Rita hurricanes on Gulf coast states cost insurance companies $66+ Billion, 3 times their outlays due to 9/11 attacks, the industry calculates. In fact, tropical storm payouts topped the list of U.S. catastrophes for the past two decades—almost half of all losses and twice as much as tornadoes, experts estimated for Fortune magazine.
President Bush again visited New Orleans, fulcrum of the 2005 double-hurricane tidal wave that killed 1,600 and displaced thousands more. $1+ Billion was donated for relief and rebuilding efforts, reports the Foundation Center.
And while politicians argue about why the toll was so high and what to do to avoid it again, the gifts and commitments of 850 institutional donors were matched over the past two years by the thousands of volunteers who arrived with hammers and shovels to help their countrymen get back on their feet, in their homes and shops, and on with their lives. The federal Corporation for National & Community Service calculated the time of these 1.1 million volunteers who came to the aid of their Gulf Coast neighbors to be worth $263 Million in itself. The costs of those who housed and helped the people who had to flee for their lives has not been—and perhaps ought not be—counted.
133 million Americans visited Yahoo in June, 2007, says ComScore, a Web measurement company. No, it was 108 million, says Nielsen//NetRatings. Who’s right? Business—that spends $20 Billion/year on online advertising—wants to know, and so should United Ways. But “it’s a really rough science,” the CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau told Fortune.
Count clicks on a page or unique visitors? And, are all Web pages created equal? Some have videos, news articles, and links to other Web sites. It’s a quagmire. Better ask your media professionals to help out in designing your strategies.
While the curious will spend time trying to figure out just how much the Helmsley fortune ended up when Leona died—$4 Billion or $8 Billion or something in-between, and put most into a family charitable trust, including $12 Million for the care of her dog—the real news was that 37,500 Hoosiers dropped a notch on the economic totem pole and ended up in poverty. Of course, that’s the federal poverty line (FPL) that hasn’t changed its formula much since the 1960s and is half of what it really takes to make ends meet.
The highest poverty rate in the USA was for Brownsville, TX, at 40.6%, and Bloomington, Gary, and Muncie, IN, all had rates over 30%. The share of IN’s population now living below the FPL is 12.7%, up from 12.2%, and 36% of these 778,000 Hoosiers are kids.
The cost of this poverty to the state is at least $100 Million/year in lost productivity, health care, and crime—and this amount does not include billions more “spent on public welfare, food stamps and housing programs, or private assistance provided by groups such as churches, shelters, food banks and hospitals,” the Urban Institute told The Indianapolis Star.
While the national poverty rate fell somewhat to 12.3%, mid-point household income increased slightly. What’s going on? Economists say it’s because individual earnings dropped for both men and women, but more members of each household worked. So, the combined income of multi-tasking and multi-employed households edged up. For details on what it costs to get by in your county, look at the Alliance4Advancement Self-Sufficiency Calculator at www.region4workforceboard.org/
calculator/selfsuffcalc.cfm.
Housing. Just what is a sub-prime mortgage? A lower-than-prime rate mortgage? Not quite! It’s a borrower with a less-than-perfect credit report—“sub-prime”—who’s missed or made late payments on other debts—who must pay a higher interest rate to get a mortgage in the first place. People on the economic bubble are feeling the effects of lagging pay-check growth and mounting debts.
In 2005, 26% of new Hoosier mortgages were subprime loans, reports Fortune magazine that reports “home-loan default rates across the country…have nearly tripled since 2006.” By 2008, adjustable-rate loans kick up to bigger rates, pushing up payments and defaults “even higher.”
The sub-prime mortgage crisis has made the stock market jittery and made comparisons to previous “panics” fodder for cocktail party banter and living room worries. In the first quarter of 2007, some 5,660 Indpls-area homes were in foreclosure.
Healthcare. What is the fastest growing group of people without health insurance? “Those in households making $75,000 or more,” reported the US Census Bureau. It is not “the poor and the downtrodden any more. They have always had a tough time. This is moving into the middle class,” said the head of the National Coalition on Health Care.
For the 6th straight year, the number of Americans without health insurance increased, now at 47 million. “The overall increase was fueled by a decline in the share of workers covered by employer-provided health insurance,” the Census Bureau said. Even 18% more of households with $75,000+ income are uninsured.
A recent Robert Wood Johnson Foundation poll found 86% of Americans support reauthorizing the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (S-CHIP)—93% of Democrats, 86% of Independents, and 77% of Republicans. The American Medical Association supports increased funding for S-CHIP. Both chambers of Congress passed bills to renew S-CHIP and must now agree on a funding plan to send the President who said he will veto the final bill if the appropriation is too much.
There currently is no federal cap on the income level states can use for S-CHIP eligibility. President Bush took executive action to make it almost impossible for states to use S-CHIP to expand coverage for the uninsured, as in Indiana, which is one of 14 states that have acted to move eligibility to 300% FPL. Bush said that rises in states’ income-eligibility levels threaten to have even more people drop their private insurance.
Obesity. Indiana now ranks 9th in the USA for the portion of its population that is severely overweight. Mississippi has the highest percentage of adult obesity at 30.6%, and Colorado has the lowest at 17.6%. IN has 26.8%. Experts estimate that obesity costs the nation $100+ Billion a year in preventable health-care costs. Schools are working to offer healthier and less-fattening food choices for students and to increase physical exercise in their curricula. That’s certainly something that United Ways are working to support.
Random stats. ViewpoINt.com found:
In spite of radically improved media, the number of we Americans that follow new stories “very closely” remained less than one-third over the past 20 years, reports the Pew Center for the People and the Press, with above-average attention given to war and terrorism (41%), bad weather (40%), man-made disasters (39%), natural disasters (39%), and money (35%).
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