(Press-News.org) Raising a child is not cheap. Now try raising one on a fixed income and long past the age one associates with parenthood: 65 years and older.
More than 300,000 grandparents in California have primary responsibility for their grandchildren, and of this group, almost 65,000 are over the age of 65. More than 20,000 care for their grandkids without any extended family assistance at home.
A new study from the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research and the Insight Center for Community Economic Development shows that these families —older adults raising grandchildren alone — may be among the most vulnerable residents in California, due to the state's high cost of living and low levels of public assistance.
"California's high cost of living turns the loving act of caring for a grandchild into a desperate financial risk," said the UCLA center's D. Imelda Padilla-Frausto, lead author of the study. "And older grandparents, many on fixed incomes and with limited mobility, are often the least able to advocate for, and access, public assistance."
The brief's new calculations — based on the true cost of living in every California county — show that nearly half of custodial grandparents who are 65 and over in California do not have enough income to cover the most basic needs of the grandchildren placed in their care. Yet public programs that might provide benefits that could help grandparents cope, such as the state foster-care program, are often difficult to access or off-limits altogether for family caregivers.
"There is a hypocrisy built into how assistance is allocated to children and their caregivers in California," said Susan E. Smith, director of the California Elder Economic Security Initiative at the Insight Center. "We preach the importance of keeping families together yet deny grandparents essential assistance because they are 'family.' This is an injustice that policymakers could easily address by making more benefits available, and accessible, to grandparents."
Many older adults in California are ineligible for public programs like Medi-Cal, housing subsidies and food benefits because they have incomes that are above, often just slightly, the federal poverty level (FPL), which is the official federal definition of poverty. Yet this definition — $18,530 for a family of three and $14,710 for a family of two in 2011 — is considered by many experts to be inadequate, largely because it does not take into account variations in the cost of living from state to state and county to county.
Grandparents whose incomes leave them above the FPL but below the income needed to cover their basic needs may struggle in a high-cost county such as Los Angeles or San Francisco. The costs involved in caring for a grandchild (or two) far exceed the FPL in every California county. For example, in 2011, an older couple with one grandchild who lived in a two-bedroom rental needed an income as high as $49,942 if they lived in Santa Cruz County and as low as $32,965 if they lived in Kern, the "lowest-cost" county. (See county breakdown below.)
Among the study's recommendations, the authors suggest raising the eligibility criteria for certain public programs to 200 percent of the FPL; extending state foster-care benefits to kinship caregivers; and limiting the frequency of cumbersome and bureaucratic benefit renewals (since most older adults live on fixed incomes and thus do not experience income fluctuations that require regular documenting).
The data on the costs of raising a grandchild are part of a larger release of 2011 Elder Index data on the true cost of living for older Californians. See all Elder Index 2011 data here.
Updated every two years by the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research, in partnership with the Insight Center for Community Economic Development, the Elder Index quantifies the cost of basic necessities like food, clothing and shelter for each county of California and is part of a national movement to improve the way poverty is measured in the U.S. The methodology for the basic amounts was developed by the Gerontology Center at the University of Massachusetts–Boston and Wider Opportunities for Women in Washington, D.C.
INFORMATION:
Learn more about how the Elder Index is calculated.
See county-by-county information on the Elder Index and on the Elder Index for Grandparents Raising Grandchildren.
Read the policy brief: "The High Cost of Caring: Grandparents Raising Grandchildren."
The Insight Center for Community Economic Development is a 44-year-old national research, legal and consulting organization dedicated to building economic health in vulnerable communities.
The UCLA Center for Health Policy Research is one of the nation's leading health policy research centers and the premier source of health-related information on Californians.
For more news, visit the UCLA Newsroom and follow us on Twitter.
END
Washington, DC – One of the largest clinical trials done in infants with congenital (present at birth) heart diseases, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, shows that the increasingly common practice of using the drug clopidogrel (Plavix®) to reduce shunt-related blood flow issues is not effective in the dose studied.
"Once again, pediatric-specific research shows that newborns and infants are not little adults," said David Wessel, MD, Chief Medical Officer, Children's National Medical Center, and lead author on the international study published in the June ...
Picture two light beams intersecting one another in space. When the beams touch one another, does the light bend? Reflect? Combine into a single beam?
The answer, of course, is the light beams do nothing; they simply continue on their path. That is because in most media — including air, water, and vacuums — particles of quantized light beams called photons do not interact.
But in certain crystalline materials and with a powerful enough laser, it is possible to make photons interact with one another and take on a special set of characteristics. Known as nonlinear optical ...
Mealybugs only eat plant sap, but sap doesn't contain all the essential amino acids the insects need to survive. Luckily, the bugs have a symbiotic relationship with two species of bacteria – one living inside the other in a situation unique to known biology – to manufacture the nutrients sap doesn't provide.
The net result: The bacteria get a comfy mealybug home, and the bugs get the nutrition they need to live.
University of Montana microbiologist John McCutcheon describes such mutually beneficial relationships used to solve life's little problems as "almost hilariously ...
Scientists have discovered the survival secret to a genetic mutation that stokes leukemia cells, solving an evolutionary riddle and paving the way to a highly targeted therapy for leukemia. In a paper published today in Cell, researchers at NYU Langone Medical Center describe how a mutated protein, called Fbxw7, behaves differently when expressed in cancer cells versus healthy cells. "Fbxw7 is essential for making blood cells, so the big mystery is why a mutation on a gene so important for survival would persist," says lead author Iannis Aifantis, PhD, chair of pathology ...
San Francisco, CA. (June 20, 2013) – Residents in anesthesiology training programs have high rates of burnout and depression, reports a survey study in the July issue of Anesthesia & Analgesia, official journal of the International Anesthesia Research Society (IARS).
The findings raise concerns that, "In addition to effects on the health of anesthesiology trainees, burnout and depression may also affect patient care and safety," write Dr Gildasio S. de Oliveira, Jr, and colleagues of Northwestern University, Chicago.
Burnout and Depression Are Common in Anesthesia Trainees…
The ...
San Francisco, CA. (June 20, 2013) – Retention of guidewires used to place central venous catheters (CVCs) is a complication that is considered always preventable—but nevertheless still happens, according to a report in the July issue of Anesthesia & Analgesia, official journal of the International Anesthesia Research Society (IARS).
Dr Andrea Vannucci and colleagues report their hospital's experience of four patients with retained guidewires, and analyze risk factors for these rare, preventable medical errors. A pair of accompanying editorials support the need for more ...
WASHINGTON —More than three-quarters (81.8 percent) of unscheduled admissions to the hospital now come through the emergency department, which is a sharp increase from the previous decade when only 64.5 percent of unscheduled admissions came through the ER. A study, published early online this week in the journal Medical Care, re-confirms recent findings by the RAND Corporation highlighting the growing role emergency physicians play in health care beyond the emergency department ("Changes in the Source of Unscheduled Hospitalizations in the United States").
"Although ...
VIDEO:
This time-lapse movie shows a solar eruption that happened on June 7, 2011. At lower right, material blasts outward from the sun and then splashes down again, creating dramatic flashes...
Click here for more information.
On June 7, 2011, our Sun erupted, blasting tons of hot plasma into space. Some of that plasma splashed back down onto the Sun's surface, sparking bright flashes of ultraviolet light. This dramatic event may provide new insights into how young stars ...
Since the discovery of the Van Allen radiation belts in in the Earth's upper atmosphere in 1958, space scientists have believed that these belts consisted of two doughnut-shaped rings of highly charged particles — an inner ring of high-energy electrons and energetic positive ions, and an outer ring of high-energy electrons.
However, in February of this year, a team of scientists reported in the journal Science the surprising discovery of a previously unknown third radiation ring. This narrow ring had briefly circled the Earth between the inner and outer rings in September ...
A team of researchers from Texas and Colorado has identified a variety of factors that influence the likelihood of E. coli contamination of spinach on farms prior to harvest. Their research is published in the July 2013 issue of the journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology.
"Microbial contamination of produce seems strongly influenced by the time since the last irrigation, the workers' personal hygiene and the field's use prior to planting of produce," says first author Sangshin Park of Texas A&M University, College Station. "These factors, together with the role ...
