Benefits cliff – Whoopsie Piggle

A 2023 Harvest for Hunger ad featuring a photo of a young girl revealed more about those who created the ad than it did about people who are food insecure. In a column, I imagined how the advertising company decided to portray her and wrote: “The result is a hackneyed stereotype of the poor — a child whose hair is messy, a stand-in for dirty, which is just a short walk to laziness. Not far behind laziness is dishonesty. Charles Dickens couldn’t have done better.”

The pervasiveness of bias, if not outright bigotry, against poor people surfaced in a letter to the editor responding to my most recent column, in which I explained that I am factually and legally a member of America’s working poor. I described how our nation’s policies currently favor the richest 1% over everyone else, causing income inequality to explode in recent decades. Unlike much of the second half of the 20th century, today jobs that pay a living wage and offer comprehensive benefits packages, including health care and retirement, are hard to come by.

And I described the benefits cliff – when people who receive government assistance, in my family’s case Medicaid, can lose all benefits when they earn only a little more than 138% of the federal poverty level. My column concluded: “The problem isn’t the poor, working or not. The problem is our systems.”

The overwhelming response to that column was positive. Yet the point was lost on some who, rather than recognize America’s intentional and systemic imbalance in wages, health care, housing costs and more, would blame the poor – in this case me – for our status.

Marcia Schray’s letter to the editor dismissed my factual and legal status as a working poor American and called me disingenuous. Her letter repeated a number of widely held, but false, biases and stereotypes about the poor. Chief among them is the belief that if poor people have lives that are anything but coarse and miserable, they must be grifting. Or, as another reader pointed out, apparently I am “not poor enough” for Schray.

Schray claims to have long read my columns and gives my “travels, foreign and domestic, [and] summer long vacations” as examples of my not being factually and legally poor. Yet every time I’ve written about trips I’ve taken, I’ve pointed out that anyone can travel cheaply if willing to forgo things in order to save for travel and rough it when they go. I mostly travel by car to the homes of family and friends. I do not take summer-long vacations, but for years enrolled my children in municipal summer camps in Michigan where we stayed in a small camper in their grandparents’ driveway. I cannot teach in the summer as there are no teaching jobs then, but work all year long as a freelance proofreader and writer, which I can do remotely.

Schray then mentions my children’s father, whom I left years ago, is an attorney. Why? My best guess is Schray believes all attorneys live like those on the TV show “The White Lotus” with fabulous incomes and no concerns for mundane expenses like health care.

That’s simply fantasy.

Solo practitioners lack access to corporate benefits packages and pay a premium for health insurance with high deductibles and measly coverage.

Most poor Americans, Schray states, don’t own a home, let alone two or three. That’s likely true. I bought a house in Akron in 2003 for $112,500. In 2014, I was able to acquire on a lease-to-own contract the neighboring home that had a mortgage balance of $52,000. I’ve shared this information before because there are few places besides Akron where someone could purchase two homes for a total of $164,500.

I live in an inner-city neighborhood that is economically and ethnically diverse. My homes are over 100 years old and designed very differently than new homes. All of which is to say, many people aren’t willing to live in houses like mine in neighborhoods like mine, a choice I happily made for many reasons, including the fact that it allows me to live within my means.

As for my means, my adjusted gross income in 2024 was $19,414. I earned just over $25k in wages last year, but my AGI was $4,072 due to the expenses of my one rental home. Rather than making me rich, as Schray seems to believe, my one rental home allows me to invest in a safe asset, the income and expenses of which, over the course of several years, roughly break even.

Meanwhile, as a self-reported regular reader, Schray forgets the many times I’ve written about being a “Second-hand Rose” to quote a Streisand song. From my base-model car to most of my shoes and everything in between, including what I buy for my children, I purchase used, and at bargain prices.

Bias is generally based upon assumptions that fall apart when met with facts. The poor are no more lazy, slovenly or mendacious than the rich. Nor are the poor Dickensian caricatures. As I wrote before, most people are doing all that they can to take care of their families as best they know how, but federal policy changes beginning in the 1980s have left the majority of Americans behind, even as the rich prosper. No wonder we have to find creative ways to live that are not coarse and miserable, something those who would shame us might consider.

This was first published in the Akron Beacon Journal on Sunday, March 1, 2026.

Who are America’s working poor? The official definition is those Americans who spend at least 27 weeks a year in the labor force and yet have incomes below the federal poverty line.

I am one of those Americans.

I work all year as a freelance writer and about 35 weeks as an educator. And yet my adjusted gross income remains well below the federal poverty line, making my family eligible for Medicaid. I came of age during the Reagan Revolution when Republicans promised cutting regulations and taxes would increase corporate profits that would trickle down to the middle and lower classes.

That’s not what happened. As historian Heather Cox Richardson recently reported, “A February 2025 report from RAND, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization…found that if the system in place before 1975 had stayed in place, the bottom 90% of Americans would have had almost $80 trillion more in 2023 than they did.”

Put another way, in reporting by the Washington Post, “Between 1930 and 1980, only the bottom 90% saw their incomes rise. After 1980, only the top 1% saw their incomes rise.” At the same time that wages for the working and middle classes stagnated, costs for basic living expenses, particularly housing and education (still one of the best ways to increase lifetime income) have exploded. But perhaps more than any other expense, nothing in the U.S. has increased like health care. In 1980, the nation spent $247 billion on health care. By 2024 it had jumped to $5.3 trillion.

The cost of insurance, deductibles, co-pays and treatment is so great that, should a family’s income move slightly over the poverty line and lose eligibility for Medicaid, something referred to as the “benefits cliff,” it can be economically devastating. While my two underage children and I are healthy in the general sense, because my daughter was born with Down syndrome, cataracts in both eyes and hypothyroidism, she has high medical needs. She had four eye surgeries her first year and weekly physical, occupational and speech therapies her first three years.

Each of her first 10 years, she went under general anesthesia for various procedures. We’ve long referred to ourselves as “frequent flyers” at Akron Children’s Hospital. Committed to doing all I could to set my daughter up for maximal success given her diagnoses, I could not work a traditional job after her birth. Instead, for 10 years, I proofread legal documents, a job I could do most anywhere, including waiting rooms. Even with that income, which was essential, our family remained well below the federal poverty line.

When my daughter’s appointments became less frequent, I transitioned back to teaching, yet my income continues to place us below the poverty line. I could not have met all my daughter’s needs without Medicaid. I have three college degrees and a resume full of experience, but because wages have remained stagnant while health care costs have skyrocketed, most full-time jobs would mean falling off the benefits cliff: we’d lose Medicaid for expensive health insurance with far less coverage that would result in a net reduction of my household income, and far less comprehensive medical care.

In an interview in 2024, Republican Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy said he believes Medicaid and Medicare were mistakes and that Medicaid recipients should be required to work. But like so many statements coming from today’s Republicans, Ramaswamy’s is a fiction meant to mislead voters.

According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, in 2024, 64% of “Medicaid covered adults (age 19-64) who do not receive benefits from Supplemental Security Income (SSI) or Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) and are not also covered by Medicare” worked either full time (44%) or part time (20%). Those who didn’t work were caregivers, ill or disabled, attending school, retired or unable to find work.

The victim-blaming trope that the poor are poor because they’re lazy is something I’ve heard often but not observed.

It’s a myth.

I’ve worked for years in schools where most students’ households were below the federal poverty level. I’ve lived for decades in a neighborhood that is economically diverse. I’ve witnessed no more reticence to work in poor communities than I have in rich ones. Most people are doing all that they can to take care of their families as best they know how.

America spends far more on health care than any other nation. And yet we are less healthy and have lower life expectancies than any other rich country. The problem isn’t the poor, working or not. The problem is our systems.

This column was first published in the Akron Beacon Journal on Sunday, February 15, 2026.