STEP FORWARD - Shriver Center

By Margaret Stapleton, Senior Attorney

Lots of things about health insurance are ironic. Example: Getting health care (which prevents more serious trouble or restores health) can trigger difficulties staying insured due to premium adjustments upward and preexisting-condition exclusions if the patient needs to change insurance plans. 

But the biggest irony is that, in some states, it’s okay for insurers to look at information of questionable relevance (past medical treatment), but now nowhere in the United States is it okay to look at information of quite certain relevance (genetic test results).  Read the rest of this entry »

By Bill Wilen,  Director of Housing Litigation

Prior to 1996, federal housing law provided that every public housing unit that was demolished had to be replaced on a one-for-one basis with another public housing or equivalent unit.   In this manner, the nation’s inventory of public housing units would remain constant, and housing would remain available to meet the housing needs of the nation’s most vulnerable populations, such as the very-poor, the elderly and the disabled.  However, in 1996, this requirement was suspended and later repealed by Congress.  Read the rest of this entry »

By John Bouman, President

On Tuesday, Aug. 26 the U.S. Census Bureau released data about income levels, poverty rates, and health insurance from 2007. At first glance, the data look like good news. The nation’s poverty rate held steady at 12.5 percent, not statistically different from the 12.3 percent in 2006. Median household income increased. The number of people without health insurance decreased. However, digging deeper into the data shows we have work to do. Read the rest of this entry »

By Wendy Pollack, Director, Women’s Law & Policy Project

The combination of a weak economy and the inflation of food prices has taken its toll on all households, but low-income households have been particularly hard-hit. As the national unemployment rate rose to 5.7 percent in July, the number of people receiving food stamp benefits hit a record high of over 28 million. The Illinois unemployment rate in July stood at 7.3 percent. Recent flooding has only compounded the difficulties for residents of the affected Illinois counties. Illinois is experiencing record numbers of food stamp recipients as well. In April the number of people receiving food stamps was almost 1.3 million. Read the rest of this entry »

By Kate Walz, Senior Staff Attorney

On July 30 President Bush signed the Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008, H.R. 3221, passed by Congress in mid-July. But media coverage of the bill has largely focused on how it will help beleaguered homeowners facing foreclosure. As a low-income housing advocate, whose clients live almost exclusively in rental housing, I was pleasantly surprised to find items benefiting renters.

Read the rest of this entry »

By Richard P. Weishaupt, Guest Blogger 

What would a blog on ethics and legal aid discuss? While some might argue tongue in cheek that the terms are an oxymoron, most legal aid lawyers and other advocates are very concerned about being ethical in both the professional and the moral sense. This blog aims to be a practical guide to the Rules of Professional Responsibility and a forum for discussion of some of the more difficult problems that legal aid lawyers face. Too often the ethics training we experience as part of our continuing legal education requirements is geared to a practice that bears little resemblance to our day-to-day challenges. (This blog appears as a column in Clearinghouse Review: Journal of Poverty Law and Policy, published by the Shriver Center.) Read the rest of this entry »

By John Bouman, President

Nine years ago, Chicagoan Mark Emerson left his job with a large company that offered group health coverage to pursue the American dream and start his own business. He did not know that this would begin his ordeal of what he now calls “being charged back into the stone age” as a customer of the private health insurance market. Mark and his wife pay more in health care costs than they do on their mortgage payments and real estate taxes. Ironically, Mark and his wife are healthy people, but their health insurance costs still have escalated. Though he has reached the point where he can no longer afford his premiums, Mark is unwilling to drop coverage and face the potential nightmare of going without insurance. He feels stuck, and help is nowhere to be found. Read the rest of this entry »

By Sam Tuttle, Housing Staff Attorney

Increasingly, homeowners across the country are facing the loss of their homes not simply through foreclosure but because they cannot keep up with their property taxes. 

As in many states, Illinois homeowners who are delinquent in their taxes may lose possession of their homes to private parties who pay the homeowners’ delinquent taxes, rather than paying the market value. The private party, or tax purchaser, then takes ownership, irrespective of the years the homeowner may have been making payments on the home. Consequently, homeowners who owed less than $1,000 in unpaid taxes have lost their homes due to a tax delinquency, even though the equity in their homes was 30 or 40 times that.  Read the rest of this entry »

By Ilze Hirsh, Vice President of Communication Programs

The feasibility of loan modification, attacking foreclosure rescue fraud, report cards grading attorneys general, and the targeting of certain neighborhoods and language groups were just a few of the topics on the table during a Shriver Center-hosted conference call on the foreclosure crisis. On June 16, advocates from legal aid programs in more than half the states and from several national organizations described successes and frustrations and picked each other’s brains for new ideas during the call, which was convened by Clearinghouse Review legal editors. When the call was announced the response was immediate and overwhelming; in the end fewer than half of those who expressed interest could be accommodated. Read the rest of this entry »

By Margaret Stapleton, Senior Attorney

Backstory: In February, the Financial Times and then the New York Times reported on research showing that “poverty in early childhood poisons the brain” leading to lifelong impairments. Last month, the New York Times reported on the correlation between poverty and problems with education. Poverty causes families to move; thus their children change schools frequently. This disrupts not only their children’s education but also the education of all the other children in the school. This is bad news for all the children and for the schools struggling to meet federal No Child Left Behind expectations. Read the rest of this entry »