Hilfiker is particularly sensitive to the source of poverty in African-American inner-city ghettoes.
His recommendation for ending poverty, was one new program: universal health coverage, to which he argued convincingly, would save all of us as a nation on current health costs and yet could include the 43 million presently uninsured (Seven Stories Press).
He also suggested three other existing programs:
1) the earned income tax credit, shown by the economists as the most profitable program for bringing up families out of poverty;
2) Unemployment insurance, that could be expanded in order to distribute enough income to keep the unemployed at least at poverty level;
3) Supplemental Security Insurance for the disabled. As he noted,
As a physician, I sometimes struggled for years to get examiners at S.S.I. To understand that one or another of my patients was, indeed, disabled."
Furthermore, for Hilfiker, the fundamental grounds of American poverty were mostly structural:
Inadequate educational resources in inner cities;
Scarcity of jobs on which one can take care of a family;
Structure & workings of the criminal justice system; and,
Insufficient access to health care and child care;
distressing history of slavery, segregation and discrimination for African-Americans.
In addition, he tried to explain how morally impartial developments often had unintentional social consequences (Seven Stories Press). He further explained this point by illustrating with a trickier problem: the civil rights acts of the fifties and sixties, which eliminated legal segregation in education and housing that actually helped, make the ghettos worse, by easing a brain drain from the poor...
Many of the busts in the ghetto are drug-related, and Hilfiker notes that our society punishes petty drug offences far more severely than crimes committed by people who are wealthy. Meantime, the mandatory minimum sentence takes away the possibility of any plea bargaining; it takes away the judge's previous alternative of giving probation for a petty crime and hands the power to the prosecutor, who runs for office on
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