A new poll by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, NPR and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health shows 38% of U.S. Households report facing serious financial problems in the past few months, amid the rise of the Delta variant.
Robert Wood Johnson Foundation President and CEO, Dr. Richard E. Besser, said there’s disparity within these statistics, with a disproportionate number of families of color falling behind financially.
“When you look at low income households, Black and Latino households were suffering financially unable to pay the rent, unable to pay the mortgage, unable to pay the medical bills. Black and Latino families were experiencing those kids of challenges at twice the rate of White households,” he said.
Along with Black and Latino families, the study found households with annual incomes below $50,000 were hit the hardest.
Besser credits the disproportionate number of families of color being negatively impacted to structural racism.
When you think about systemic or structural racism, it’s systems or structures that create barriers for some and opportunity for others, and it doesn’t take individual behavior to be racist for those systems to themselves be examples of structural racism. We live in an extremely segregated nation, and with that segregation you have entire communities that are shut off for opportunity — differences to the quality of schools or the jobs that are available, and a lot of that breaks down along race. When you look at America at who was able to work from home successfully during the pandemic and who was more likely to be at a job, often a low-paying job that required people to be in person disproportionately it was people of color…with that came a lot of difference in terms of the impact of the pandemic in people’s health as well as the impact on people’s pocket book. — Besser said.
In the study, 67% of people reported receiving financial government assistance in the past few months. With increased aid, poverty rates declined in 2020, with a projection to fall further in 2021. However, Besser says this is temporary support. The foundation is pushing for something more permanent.
"One of the things that we’d like to see and that’s critically important is an expansion in the number of people that have health insurance. We are the only wealthy nation that doesn’t guarantee that every single citizen has high quality affordable health care, but the government could do that," Besser said.
