Nevada Safety Net Has Holes For Mitt Romney To Fix
Nevada Safety Net Has Holes For Mitt Romney To Fix
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/02/mitt-romney_n_1250094.html
Republican presidential candidate, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, arrives for a campaign stop in Las Vegas Feb. 1.
Republican presidential candidate candidate Mitt Romney said Wednesday that he is "not concerned about the very poor" because government programs already help them.
"We have a safety net there. If it needs a repair, I'll fix it," Romney said. "We have food stamps, we have Medicaid, we have housing vouchers, we have programs to help the poor."
The safety net might need some repair, particularly in the very state where the former Massachusetts governor is hoping to maintain momentum after a decisive victory in Tuesday's Republican primary election in Florida. Nevada, which picks its candidate in caucuses on Saturday, has the highest foreclosure and unemployment rates of any state, and some of its safety net programs catch poor people at a lower rate than they do elsewhere.
Nationwide, Medicaid covers only a quarter of non-elderly adults with annual incomes below 139 percent of the poverty line, the threshold for Medicaid eligibility. (The poverty line is an annual income of $22,314 for a family of four.) In Nevada, Medicaid covers just 12 percent of non-elderly adults in that income range, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit health policy think tank. More than half of those go uninsured, compared with 44 percent, or 21.5 million people, for the broader U.S.