Poverty Kills
Can Poverty Kill A Child?
On December 15, 2002, a child died in our family. The child, only 15 months old died in an auto accident on a road winding through a poor part of town that has claimed several other lives and should have been fixed long ago. In the 48 hours following the accident that killed the baby, there were two non-fatal accidents on exactly the same corner.
The child was my step-grandson, the son of my wife’s son, so I took the seven hour drive with Jeanie and my step-daughter, Raven, to meet in these times of grief with a side of the family I knew very little about. The family turned out to be a close knit one made up of relatives and friends. The one outstanding characteristic was that they are all poor. The cost of living in the area is quite high and even though several members of the family work, they do not have enough money. To compensate for this, the family sticks together and mostly lives together using their talents and contacts to do for other family members what they are unable to do for themselves. But I digress.
When we arrived, the baby had been pronounced dead and the mother was still in a coma with critical injuries. In addition, the police department, in their own politically motivated wisdom, prepared charges against the mother of the child- felony child endangerment and manslaughter. They had uncovered the fact that the mom had taken off from work to pick up the baby at the daycare to take him to the doctor to examine a cut on his head he got while playing at the center. Maybe she had been driving a bit too fast. They also saw that the tires were bald. Perhaps this contributed to the accident in which case the mom would have to go to prison while her remaining child would go to foster care.
The family as a group discussed how to bury the child, pay for the mother’s medical bills, feed each other during this time of grief and possibly pay for a lawyer to defend the mother. The family was extremely bitter about this last part. They felt that even if she had been at fault, hadn’t the woman been punished enough? Would anyone benefit by the state stepping in and putting her in prison? It was during this discussion that it hit me: poverty kills.
The mother worked full time and paid her taxes and childcare. She did not have enough money for a better car. Her rent payment on the small trailer she and her kids live in was two months overdue. She did not have enough money for new tires. Her insurance had been canceled due to missed payments. If the child had not been on MediCal, there would have been no doctor to have taken the child to. The baby’s father was not employed or living with the mother and the children. The mother had a cleaning job that paid minimum wage or perhaps a bit above. She could not afford many of the things that some of us take for granted.
According to government statistics, there are 35.5 million people in the United States living at or below the poverty level. That means they make less than $18,810 a year for a family of four. About 45 million Americans have no health insurance. These figures probably do not include the homeless which are estimated by the National Coalition for the Homeless as 3.5 million. There are certainly too many homeless and they are very difficult to count with any accuracy. The point is that in a country with the most wealth in the world there are far too many homeless and too many people living on the edge. The cost of vital services has gone up so high that if there is a disaster in any of these families; they will be unable to afford to pay for essential services and goods to help them through the emergency.
That is not all. A good part of life is being able to prevent accidents and disasters before they start. How many of us are driving on bald tires because we have to drive to get to work or to buy groceries and don’t have the money? How many of us didn’t get our furnace checked this year when we know it is old and could be dangerous but we just don’t have the money? How many of us cannot afford good nutritious food so we buy what is cheap and filling and take the risk of disease from improper nutrition? How many of us are not covered under any health plan at all and as a result cannot pay for the health checkups that could discover something wrong with us and save our lives? How many of us are wearing shoes with no tread on the bottom that could cause us to fall and be hurt or even killed because that pair of new shoes is just too expensive? How many ways can a person be hurt or die just because they cannot afford to buy the goods or services that would keep them safe?
Yes, poverty can kill. About 1% of us have done so well they can now buy a small country or a couple dozen elected officials. These people have been enriched by the economy while we have millions of us who are working and cannot afford all the necessary things we need to keep our families safe. How close are you to this last group? You are closer than you think. If you are just under the median income, all you need is one disaster and you will be financially strapped for a long time. A second disaster close behind the first would put the family’s ability to keep themselves off the streets in peril. Imagine having to pay funeral expenses for your child. Most of us do not have insurance for this and would have to take out a loan. What if your spouse is suddenly seriously ill needing expensive tests and treatments? How will you pay for it if you are one of the uninsured? You have car insurance, but do you have uninsured driver’s insurance? What would happen if your car was totaled by someone who was uninsured? Could you pay the resulting medical bills and replace your car out of your pocket?
In the case of my grandson, poverty contributed but did not kill. What killed him was the lack of public funding to fix a road that had already taken several other lives. His mother drove around a corner and the car hydroplaned across water standing on the road. She was not speeding. Even if her tires had good tread, the accident would still have happened. Mercifully, the police investigation saw it much the same way. Of course they would have had a tough time convicting someone of having contributed to killing their baby in an accident when there were two more accidents on the same corner within 48 hours. The dangerous road, to this day has not been fixed.
What is the point of this essay? The point is that we have done a lot to help some of us become very wealthy and join the top three percent of people in this country who own 80% of this country’s wealth. We have not done so well with those less fortunate. We have accused them of being lazy, mentally unstable, drug abusers and so on. I am sure some of this is true, but for a growing number this characterization is obscene. We have a responsibility as a society to take care of the least of us first if for no other reason than that poverty is lethal.
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