Demos Vice President of Policy and Programs Tamara Draut testifies before the United States Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pension regarding higher education costs and student debt.
Cindy Zeldin works for Demos, a nonprofit research and advocacy group. She says even the insured are not immune from this growing trend.
"The direction of health insurance is towards greater individual risk, greater out-of-pocket expenses and those expenses are going right on to credit cards," she says.
Demos Vice President of Policy and Programs Tamara Draut testifies before the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs regarding the growth of credit card debt and credit industry practices.
The report, released last week, was jointly compiled by Demos, a public policy group in New York, and the Access Project, which is affiliated with a health policy institute at Brandeis University and is trying to broaden the availability of health care in the U.S.
According to the report, called "Borrowing to Stay Healthy," about 29 percent of low- and middle-income families with credit card debt reported using their credit cards to pay medical expenses - in most cases for major medical problems.
Overall, borrowers also need to be honest with themselves before tapping their home equity, especially if the reason for the cash-out isn't a one-time cost, said Jennifer Wheary, a senior fellow at Demos.
"In the short-term, they will feel a sense of relief," she said, referring to those who use the cash to catch up with such things as credit-card payments or medical expenses.
What specific changes must nonprofit groups make to meet the demands of this new era? What are the risks of ignoring these trends? Do all nonprofit leaders need to become technophiles?
Senior Fellow Algernon Austin and Jared Bernstein discuss how the "bad culture" arguments about African-Americans are misguided at best and destructive at worst. By creating an erroneous causal link between "bad culture" and black poverty, the "Cosby consensus" prevents the country from recognizing success and building on it to create the economic opportunities that are missing for too many African-Americans.
Among the new voting requirements recently contested in courts are state-issued photo IDs and tight restrictions on voting registration drives. Proponents of such requirements tend to be conservative white Republicans who argue that tighter rules are essential for preventing voter fraud. However, critics say such laws will unfairly impact the poor, the elderly, the disabled, and college-age students, all of whom tend to vote more for the Democrats.
A public policy group is warning that voters - especially among minorities - may face attempts at intimidation and suppression in an effort to sway the election.
A study released Friday by the National Voting Rights Institute and Demos points to several incidents during the 2004 election and warns that voters nationwide may face similar problems on Tuesday.
"We think it's a serious problem," said Brenda Wright, managing attorney at the National Voting Rights Institute, who co-authored the report.
The language contained in some credit card agreements is written at a 27th-grade level, according to a new report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office. And many cardholder agreements today contain language requiring a minimum of a 15th-grade education, the equivalent of three years of college.
Yet with only about half of U.S. adults reading above an eighth-grade level, the report said, credit card disclosures may be meaningless to millions of Americans.
Apart from our Republican-dominated federal government, no single entity boasts more lawsuits against it than Wal-Mart. Class action suits in motion at the moment read like a pamphlet from the nascent worker's rights movements of the early 20th century. They include: gender discrimination, racial discrimination, unpaid wages, exploitation of undocumented workers, pressure to work overtime or off the clock, and denied lunch breaks. And those are just the class action suits.
Cindy Zeldin, Federal Affairs Coordinator for the Economic Opportunity Program, writes that mega-retailer's abandonment of traditional health insurance in favor of high-deductible health insurance takes the benefits squeeze to a whole new level: it puts a dagger through the heart of the very concept of insurance.
Gen Y is the first generation to really bear the weight of college expenses through loans instead of grants and other financial aid. This, combined with credit card debt, is leaving cash-strapped college grads in bleak financial situations ... often ending in bankruptcy.
Americans in their 20s - those broadly defined as ‘Generation Y' - are supposed to be more concerned about weighty issues like world affairs, local politics, and the environment than their ‘Gen X' predecessors. But they've also distinguished themselves another way: They're the most leveraged generation in American history, and they have, for the most part, the cost of their college education to thank for that distinction.