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The Odds Are Not In Favor Of Working Mothers

The Odds Are Not In Favor Of Working Mothers

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

Tara worked full-time and was already caring for a toddler when she had her second child. Like many American mothers, Tara was not granted maternity leave. Instead, she cobbled together vacation days to give herself a mere 20 days with her new baby following the birth. With money tight, “my family can’t afford the loss of even one paycheck,” she told the Atlantic last year.

In a country where 88 percent of women do not get a single hour of paid leave after giving birth to a child, Tara’s story represents the struggles of thousands of women. However, even when maternity leave is granted—as much as four months of paid leave in some cases—many women choose not to take it, for fear of hurting their careers and jeopardizing their standing.

In a study by Ohio State University, between 1994 and 2015, an average of 273,000 women took maternity leave each month in the United States. However, since 2004, this number has hardly increased, despite new state laws awarding leave to expectant mothers. California, New Jersey and Rhode Island now offer between four to six weeks of parental leave. According to Jay Zagorsky, a research scientist at Ohio State University’s Center for Human Resource Research, “it was surprising and troubling” that state laws had no impact on the national average of women taking maternity leave.

Unlike previous generations, women today are having children during the peak of their careers, when their earnings are critical to the financial well-being of their families.

 

Women comprise two-thirds of the low-wage workforce. According to a study by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 64 percent of mothers with children under six work. In 40 percent of households with children, women provide the primary financial support for the family.

When a family’s income is tight, it’s no wonder women feel the need to go back to work immediately after having a child, especially when new mothers who choose not to work face stigma. A study by University of Massachusetts sociologist Michelle Budig found that an average American woman’s earnings decrease by 4 percent with every child she has. On the contrary, the average American man’s earnings increase by 6 percent per child. Researchers have also discovered that fathers are often perceived as competent employees and are more likely to be hired than mothers.

Some companies are making an effort to offer proper time off to new moms. Starbucks offers new mothers six weeks of fully paid maternal leave. Facebook offers four months of fully paid time off after a woman has a child.

Whether due to financial obligations or other reasons, many women do not take time off because they do not want to hurt their careers. A study by iCIMS Women in the Workforce Report discovered that 45 percent of office professionals believe taking parental leave would limit their opportunities for a promotion. Women become increasingly concerned as they move up in their careers about the potential consequences of maternity leave.

Until the culture and the laws around maternity leave shift in favor of working mothers, women will continue to struggle balancing their careers and their children.

Anna Sanford is an editorial assistant at AlterNet’s office in Berkeley, CA.
This article was made possible by the readers and supporters of AlterNet.

Why The Opioid Flood Is So Hard To Stop

Why The Opioid Flood Is So Hard To Stop

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

Two thirteen year old boys, Grant Seaver and Ryan Ainsworth, were best friends growing up in Park City, Utah.  When their parents found each of them dead over a two-day period last fall, they had little idea of what might have killed them.  Upon searching their social media accounts, they found conversations with another local teenager and talk of “pink”—the alias for U-47700, an extremely powerful opioid, eight times stronger than morphine and responsible for tens of the thousands of deaths that have occurred in the national crisis.  Parents and relatives were shocked, for where could the boys could have contracted a drug so potent and dangerous?

Where do teenager’s get anything these days? On the internet.

U-47700 emerged last year as the latest drug in the growing epidemic.  One user described it as “non-overbearing rushes of comfort, warmth, and laziness” that made him want to “lay in a cozy spot and watch a movie.”

Over the last several years, as the opioids—beginning with heroin—took root in areas of cultural and economic decline like the rust belt, Chinese manufacturers have capitalized on the cravings of addicts by mass producing synthetic versions such as U-47700, fentanyl, carfentanil and other analogues.

Much attention of the opioid crisis has been focused on Mexican cartels and their complicated trafficking network.  “The single-biggest problem is heroin that pours across our southern borders, just pouring, and destroying” Donald Trump, said in the third presidential debate last fall.

While heroin via Mexican cartels is certainly a factor, the American president continues to be as misinformed as ever. Synthetic opioids present a much greater threat; they are responsible for almost double the number of deaths compared to heroin.

“Why wait for a field of poppies to grow and harvest if you can get your hands on the precursor chemicals and cook a batch of fentanyl in a lab?” Tim Reagan, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agent leading the Cincinnati office told Science Magazine.

With the China’s new role in supplying opioids to the United States, everyone from teenagers in Utah to celebrities like Prince can purchase the drugs off the Internet.  With over 59,000 people dying in 2016, overdosing on opioids has become the leading cause of death for people under 50 in the United States.  Last year, when the average US life expectancy dipped downward for the first time in decades, many health professionals blamed opioid abuse.

Chinese labs have been producing and selling drugs, as well as necessary manufacturing machinery for assembly line production, to individuals across the United States and Canada.  They have faced only minor difficulties evading government intervention because, while fentanyl has been classified as a schedule II drug for decades in the United States, China has enforced no regulation up until very recently.

At the end of 2015, China added 116 synthetic drugs to its list of controlled substances after pressure from DEA and their attempts to curb the growing opioid epidemic in the United States.  As of June 19, 2017 China has restricted 138 substances.

In a news conference, Justin Schoeman, a Beijing-based country attache for the Drug Enforcement Administration, said: “I can tell you that when China controls a substance, new psychoactive substances or fentanyl-classed substance, it has a huge impact on seizures and availability in the US.”

Although Schoeman’s words sound promising, preventing labs from continue to produce and distribute powerful opioids is not so simple.  Chinese chemists making the fentanyl and other drugs can manipulate the molecules very easily, synthesizing unregulated variants that evade government regulations.

When the U-47700 that killed Grant Seaver and Ryan Ainsworth was purchased last fall, it was legal in China.  The particular analogue did not become illegal until just last week.

Both American and Chinese law enforcements predict that a slightly different alternative that has yet to be made illegal will arise soon.  “My feeling is that it’s just like a race and I will never catch up with the criminals, Yu Haibin, a division director at the Ministry of Public Security’s Narcotics Control Bureau in China said.

By tweaking the molecules and evading regulations, manufactures can mass produce the drugs and sell them on the internet.

In an online conversation, Nathaniel Popper, a writer covering the opioid crisis for the New York Times, talked to BenzoChems, one of the most popular manufacturers in China.  BenzoChems, who has also postedvideos of his production, said that he routes packages through Hong Kong and then the United States Postal Service.

Benzo Chems originally sold his products using ordinary websites but, like many Chinese opioid manufacturers, he now sells through the dark web.

The dark web is like “the wild west, where everything is available in its complete lawlessness,” Jospeh Pinjuh, chief of the organized crime task force in the United State’s Attorney’s office in Cleveland, told the New York Times.

The dark web was originally developed by American intelligence for top-secret communication services, however, it has quickly grown into an online marketplace that almost anyone can access using special browsers.  Nefarious items are exchanged using virtual currencies like Bitcoin.  The most famous website on the dark web, the ‘Silk Road,’ was shut down in 2013 by the FBI, but since then a slew of other websites, even more sophisticated against government intervention, have popped up.

For example, the leading website on the dark web, AlphaBay, which appeared at the end of 2014 and attracted 14,000 new customers within its first 90 days, has more than 21,000 listings for opioids and more than 4,100 for fentanyl and other drugs.  Buyers can browse the listings like shopping for items in a catalogue.  Many of the comments and forums discuss the potency of the drugs and recount stories of blacking out and going to the emergency room.

The accessibility and prevalence of buying drugs through the dark web has made stemming the flow of illegal drugs into the United States even more difficult.

“We could give you a pretty good idea of the drug traffickers in town who can order kilos from Mexico — that’s a known commodity,” Pinjuh told the New York Times.  “What’s harder to track is the person ordering this from his grandmother’s basement.”

The United States Postal Service handles over 300 million inbound pieces of international mail per year, nearly half of all packages entering the United States.  While private mail carriers like United Parcel Service and Federal Express require advanced tracking procedures, only 40 to 50 percent of the countries using the the United States States Postal Service provide that type of data.  Officers in Customs and Border Patrol (CBP), an agency in the Department of Homeland Security, must manually sort through large bins, holding a tremendous volume of packages, in order to retrieve potentially suspicious items.  It is a “daunting task for CBP,” Robert Perez, executive assistant commisioner of the agency, testified in a hearing of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations in May.

Not only daunting, when it come to bringing dangerous substances into the country, the process is ineffective.  Teenage boys like Grant Seaver and Ryan Ainsworth face about as much difficulty purchasing drugs of unknown potential off the internet as they do buying a pair of shoes of Amazon.

Senator Rob Portman of Ohio, a state hugely affected by the opioid crisis—666 people overdosed in Cayahoga County alone last year—has been pushing legislation to require tracking data on all packages entering the country.  The Synthetics Trafficking & Overdose Prevention (STOP) Act, which has bipartisan support from Republicans like Marco Rubio and democrats such as Elizabeth Warren, would give CPB the ability to use detection tools and identify suspect packages while the shipments are inroute.

However, there are numerous downsides to the act.  Mandating the post office to use advanced tracking technology would also inflict enormous costs—$1.2 to $4.8 billion over ten years according to Robert Clintron, vice president of the postal service.  Gregory Thome, director of the State Department’s Office of Specialized and Technical Agencies said that global postal system is “simply not able to” adapt electronic shipping data systems.

Given the impracticality of the legislation, it is unlikely that the post office will start using advanced tracking technology anytime soon.  Chinese chemists will continue to develop new variants of fentanyl to get around regulations.  And opioids will continue to stream into the US.

Anna Sanford is an editorial assistant at AlterNet’s office in Berkeley, CA.

This article was made possible by the readers and supporters of AlterNet.

Decline In Recycling Centers Devastating Homeless

Decline In Recycling Centers Devastating Homeless

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

In 1948, Samuel Brannan ran through the streets of San Francisco, shouting “Gold! Gold from the American River!” To this day, California has maintained an almost-magical allure: the Golden State, a place where wealth seeps from the earth and lingers in the air, a promised land of economic prosperity. And so over the last two centuries, when times are tough, emigres have flocked to the fields of yellow poppies in search of gold hidden in the soil or jobs as fruit pickers and reprieve from the horrors of the Dust Bowl. But like the Rush of the 1840s and the rumors of economic mobility during Great Depression, California’s latest guarantee to those in need—earning money collecting recyclables—is falling short.

In 1986, California lawmakers passed Assembly Bill 2020, known as the Bottle Bill, to encourage recycling and reduce litter by offering monetary redemption values on beverage containers. Up until recently, the bill has been wildly successful. The state has become a leader of environmental policy with Californians redeeming over 85% of all containers within the Bottle Bill guidelines, an amount that equals 5 billion units annually and consists of 20% of all beverage recyclables in the entire country. And as an added positive, thousands of California’s homeless have earned a steady income by collecting cans, glass, and plastic bottles and exchanging them for cash.

“This is how I eat,” a 52-year-old named Johnson told KQED News outside of Our Planet, a recycling center in San Francisco. “It gets us lunch, cigarettes, coffee, cat food; the basic necessities. It’s better than nothing.”

The sun has not yet risen over the hills, but the pavement outside of Our Planet is already crowded with collectors. Clutching garbage bags and leaning on shopping carts heaped with cans, glass, and plastic bottles, the collectors will patiently wait until 7:30 when the center opens and they can trade their findings for what they need—the money that will allow them to survive.

Johnson’s partner, Jackie, explains that he often heads out to collect materials at 11pm and returns in the morning. Most homeless people who collect do so at night, scouring event venues and sorting through blue bins before heading to recycling centers at daybreak, carrying somewhere between 3 to 10 bins of recyclables. Ors Csaszar, the owner of Our Planet, estimates that an average person waiting in line earns anywhere from $15 to $35 per day. Other studies have shown that people living in homeless encampments in nearby Fremont, Oakland, and Union City can earn as much as $50 to $100 per day.

The lives of many homeless are entirely dependent on the operation of recycling centers. However, over the last two and half years, more than 20% of these centers have closed in California. In January 2016, a single company announced it would be closing a grand total of 191 centers. With fewer locations to buyback goods, total redemption payback throughout the state has decreased by $3 million per month.

In 2016, following the shutdown of Alliance Recycling Center, right across the bay in Oakland, 400 homeless and marginally housed people lost their only source of income. For years, Alliance was essential to the city, serving as a rare form of economy and organization for those who mostly live without it. Food Not Bombs and church groups often provided bagged lunches to frequenters of Alliance. Richard, an East Oakland resident, told the East Bay Express that there “ain’t no other recycling place like this one. It’s like a community.”

In the months following, the closure left many people displaced. Mike, who spent 19 years bringing recyclables to Alliance, told the Street Spirit that he plans to “go someplace else” because the other centers in area, all much smaller than Alliance, will not be able to handle an influx of traffic. To many, the closing of the center was a sure sign of the creeping force of gentrification.

The closing of recycling centers like Alliance has twofold significance. In addition to uprooting the homeless, the decline is indicative the decreasing value of the American recycling system as a whole. From as early as pre-school, Americans are taught the importance of recycling, its beneficial impact, and the potential environmental catastrophe that would occur without it. Recycling continues to be a popular topic of conversation among politicians and celebrities, pandering to the needs of supporters who want a relatively easy way to feel as though they are making a positive impact.

The California Department of Resources Recycling and Recovery (known as CalRecycle) reported that recycling throughout the state has dropped below 80% for the first time in nine years, a decline that is occurring throughout the country.

Despite the national obsession with recycling in both policy and public discussion, a variety of economic factors makes recycling difficult to maintain. The low cost of oil is incentivizing manufacturers to simply make new products rather than use recycled goods. Furthermore, a lot of American recycled materials have previously been shipped overseas. However, in 2013, China put restrictions on imported waste, limiting the demand for American recyclables. New developments in technology are also reducing the need for raw materials because packaging producers can make cans and bottles thinner than ever before.

Although long heralded as one solution to environmental degradation, recycling may not have as much of an impact as one might think. As John Tierney wrote in the New York Times, “the recycling movement is floundering, and its survival depends on continual subsidies, sermons and policing.” He explains that, in reality, recycling actually poses little positive environmental impact compared to other waste management processes. While he concedes that recycling offers benefits in reducing greenhouse gases, he clarifies that “once you exclude paper products and metals, the total annual savings in the United States from recycling everything else in municipal trash—plastics, glass, food, yard trimmings, textiles, rubber, leather—is only two-tenths of 1 percent of America’s carbon footprint.”

Additionally, while recycling seems as simple as separating certain materials from the trash and hauling a blue bin out to the curb once a week, the system is often misused. People think that their broken Christmas lights can be recycled come January. And when their rubber garden hose pops a leak in spring, they think that they can recycle that too. Or they might just be lazy. Nevertheless, contaminated recycling is causing its value to decrease rapidly. When recycling programs were first implemented 30 years ago, the value of the recovered materials was intended to make up for the cost of the sorting, shipping and processing. But because of the increase of recycled materials being tainted with food waste and mixed-in non-recyclable materials—even a broken glass bottle can ruin everything in an entire bin—the whole system is declining in value.

A study by Rob Taylor of the State Recycling Program in the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality reported that the average market value of a ton of mixed recycled materials fell from $180 in 2011 to just over $100 over the following six years. That loss of about $80 per ton of recycled materials—a year’s worth of plastic bottles alone accounts for 300,000 tons—can no longer be used to keep open recycling centers.

So what is to be done? With the limited success of recycling, how can consumers make an environmentally conscious decision when dispelling their waste?

Thomas C. Kinnaman, an economist at Bucknell University, has proposed subsidizing the recycling of some metals, and imposing a $15 tax per ton of trash. With that system, the tax would take care of the environmental costs and recycling overall would decrease immensely.

Mark Murray, executive director at Californians Against Waste and an advocate of recycling, has other ideas about how the problem might be fixed. However, he similarly calls for subsidies on recycling. By offering subsidies to recycling centers, they would be able to cover their costs and continue to give money to the homeless in exchange for recyclable goods. The only question is, would giving value to the recycling of only some metals, as suggested in Kinnaman’s plan, be enough to help the homeless?

Until California and states across the nation implement legislation and policy changes to keep recycling centers in business, it is unclear how the homeless will make do under the failing system.

Anna Sanford is an editorial assistant at AlterNet’s office in Berkeley, CA.

This article was made possible by the readers and supporters of AlterNet.

Millennials Are Saving The Planet, One Kale Salad At A Time

Millennials Are Saving The Planet, One Kale Salad At A Time

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

 

It’s been three years since Beyonce made kale sexy, and vegetables are still growing in popularity. The Huffington Post declared that consumers under the age of 40 are eating 52 percent more vegetables than those of the same age a decade ago. Meanwhile, casual-dining restaurant chains, such as Applebee’s, are losing traction. Following sales slumps and closures, Sally Smith, the CEO of Buffalo Wild Wings, wrote a letter to shareholders saying that millennial consumers are to blame.

Long considered the technology-obsessed, self-indulgent narcissists of the 21st century, millennials are positioned to inherit significant purchasing power over the next several years. About 80 million Americans are millennials, and they spend approximately $600 billion annually, according to the consulting firm Accenture. Over the next three years, as more people graduate from college and enter the workforce, millennial spending is predicted to more than double. By 2020, millennials will spend $1.4 trillion annually and represent 30 percent of total retail sales.

So will that money be spent on useless, individualistic gadgets, as some in the older generation fear? Maybe not.

A study by Omnicom Group’s Cone Communications revealed that millennials are more likely than any other demographic to engage in corporate social responsibility. Seventy percent of millennials will pay more for a product that supports a cause they care about, and 60% will take a paycut to work for an environmentally and socially responsible company.

The strength of the millennial dollar is evident in the way today’s young adults eat—with an eye on the health of the environment.

From 2006 to 2014, the number of farmer’s markets increased by 180 percent, according to NRP. Over the last three years, the farmer’s market boom has plateaued, but that is because consumers have shifted the entire food economy to become more environmentally conscious. Form 2007 to 2012, the number of food hubs, organizations that connect farmers to businesses, increased by 288 percent. Organic food is now available in almost every supermarket and retailers say it continues to grow in popularity. The Organic Trade Association reported that organic sales increase every year, totalling $47 billion in 2016. Millennials, who spend 14 times more money on food than an average middle-class family, have spearheaded local, organic and environmental awareness.

Eve Turow-Paul, author of A Taste of Generation Yum: How the Millennial Generation’s Love for Organic Fare, Celebrity Chefs and Microbrews Will Make or Break the Future of Food, spent years conducting interviews and performing research about food trends of the last decade. In an interview with the Atlantic, she underlines the radical shifts that are happening in the food industry:

“Look around today and you’re seeing amazing things happening with Chipotle, with Kraft mac and cheese saying they’re going to take the yellow dye out. There is huge progress being made and it’s largely because the industry is seeing that Millennials are not going to be spending their money on processed foods.”

Turow explains that the newfound interest in food is rooted in a cultural shift of the millennial generation. As technology natives growing up in a rapidly changing and economically uncertain world, young adults crave understanding, simplicity and control over their environment. The push for food transparency—the wish to know where one’s food comes from—is one of the many modes in which millennials find stability. To many millennials, “you are what you eat” is a mantra of identity.

Food identity is perpetuated across social media. A study by YPuse found that 63% of young people ages 13 to 32 said they post food pictures on social media, with 57% of them posting information about the food they are eating at the time. Instagram has 200 million photos with food tags. While food pictures, as well as many other millennial food obsessions, are used as social currency (many argue they are simply another form of millennial narcissism), they are evidence of cultural values that can have positive impact for all.

Hydroponic gardens, specialty foods, food blogs, cooking shows, veganism, restaurant trends, food memoirs, and recipe apps are becoming pinnacles of millennial culture. Perhaps some are gimmicky and others even unnecessary, but these trends are worth paying attention to when they start to replace the corporate chains and mass food distributors that are destroying agricultural resources. In a world on the brink of environmental catastrophe, some millennials may already have the answer in the bag—a locally and organically sourced, handwoven, reusable tote bag at that.

Anna Sanford is an editorial assistant at AlterNet’s office in Berkeley, CA.

 

This article was made possible by the readers and supporters of AlterNet.

“Mountain-Dew Mouth” Symbolizes Dental Care Debacle

“Mountain-Dew Mouth” Symbolizes Dental Care Debacle

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

Mountain Dew, the carbonated fluorescent-green soda that Willy the Hillbilly declared “will tickle your innards” in a 1966 commercial, has long been a staple of Appalachia. It was officially developed in Knoxville, Tennessee, in the mid-1900s, but it has ties to the wheat and rye distilled by Irish immigrants who settled in the region as coal miners during the previous century. Today, coal has left Appalachia, as have a host of other industries that brought economic opportunity. Mountain Dew, however, remains culturally significant. Sarah Baird, a writer who grew up in Eastern Kentucky, recently wrote about the importance of the drink to her sense of identity, saying, “It’s not just a beverage—it’s a portable sense of home.”

In a region long undergoing a cultural and economic crisis, Appalachia’s thirst for Mountain Dew is perhaps the lesser of many evils. Opioid addiction, smoking, chewing tobacco, lack of access to municipal water systems, and the necessary preoccupation with getting food on the table over worrying about nutritional value are also having an enormous effect on people’s teeth. The soda is ruining teeth, in an epidemic known as “Mountain Dew-mouth.” The acid causes erosion and the sugar abets decay.

“I would see a lot of kids who had a mouth full of rotting teeth,” Dr. Edwin Smith, a traveling dentist who drove his mobile dental truck for 12 years throughout Kentucky, told CNN last September. “They were in pain, and they’d be hurting at school.”

In Kentucky, the state with highest proportion of adults under 65 without teeth, Smith has witnessed the extremes of Mountain Dew-mouth—toddlers with baby teeth filled with cavities, kids who won’t brush their teeth because of inflamed gums, and teenagers who have pulled out their own rotting teeth with pliers.

Other forces are at play. Hundreds of prescription medications, as well as chewing tobacco and cigarettes, cause dry mouth, preventing the natural flow of saliva and making teeth more susceptible to decay. Use of these substances is rampant in Appalachia; a single Kentucky county filled prescriptions for over 2 million doses of painkillers last year, which is about 150 doses for every man, woman and child. Kentucky is also the state with the most smokers, followed closely by West Virginia, according to a Gallup study. On top of that, without municipal water systems, people rely on well water, which is unfluoridated—or they drink more Mountain Dew to quench their thirst. Nearly half of the people in Kentucky, and 25 percent of the national population, depend exclusively on well water, posing a threat to natural resources as well as people’s teeth.

With 26 percent of preschool-age kids suffering from tooth decay and 15 percent of young adults extracting a tooth because of erosion, Mountain Dew-mouth in Appalachia has created one of the worst dental health problems in the United States according to a legal brief by Priscilla Harris, an associate professor at the Appalachian College of Law. Nonetheless, the factors that contribute to poor dental health are not simply Mountain Dew; they are not even specifically linked to Appalachia. Noxious substances merely exacerbate a national problem that is affecting every region of the United States. Bad oral hygiene could be significantly remedied through the American health care system; that is, if the United States adopted a holistic approach to health care. However, as it stands now, dental care is treated separate from health care, launching an epidemic that weighs heaviest on those who need it most—the rural poor.

Dental health is essential to overall health, and serious and sometimes fatal illness can result from untreated oral conditions. A problem as common as gingivitis (excess plaque) can result in serious health problems such as heart disease, diabetes, or cancer. Yet throughout the United States, from remote areas of Alaska and across the contiguous 48, poor people struggle to get access to regular dental care, relying on charity clinics and hospital emergency rooms. According to the federal government, more than 50 million Americans live in areas officially designated as Dental Health Professional Shortage Areas, and must travel hundreds of miles to get help. A suburb of Washington, D.C., could have one dentist for 350 residents, while Dickenson County, Virginia, has one dentist for every 15,468 residents.

The distinction between dental care and health care extends to insurance. Medicaid, the joint federal-state health care program that provides health coverage for 72 million people, reckons dental benefits as optional for adults, leaving it up to states to decide. It was not until the Affordable Care Act passed under President Obama in 2010 when Medicaid gave dental care to children under 19. Medicare, the federal health care program that covers 55 million seniors and disabled people, has never included insurance for routine dental services.

While Medicaid, as the medical safety net for the poor, should provide help for those with dental needs who cannot afford to pay, only 15 states offer full dental benefits and five states offer nothing at all, as reported in a study by Pew. However, even in the states that do offer dental benefits, poor patients have difficulty getting appointments. As an isolated industry, dentistry has remained private and unencumbered by the brunt of market forces. Dentists cannot turn away patients based on “race, creed, color, sex, or national origin” according to the American Dental Association’s Principles of Ethics and Code of Conduct; however, dentists can turn away patients based on their ability to pay. In order to cover high overhead costs, pay back dental school bills and earn an income, many dentists refuse to treat people on Medicaid. In 2013, only 34 percent of general dentists accepted Medicaid patients, according to Pew.

With limited benefits through Medicaid and no benefits through Medicare, in order to receive insurance, people must purchase private plans or employer-provided plans. Most dental insurance limits annual benefits to between $1,000 and $1,500 per person—this cap has hardly changed since the mid-’80s, despite inflation. Employer-provided plans—assuming the patient has a job and the job offers a plan—can exceed $500 a year or more and do little to ease the burden when other concerns take priority. So millions of Americans go without dental insurance.

More than a third of Americans do not have dental coverage, according to a Washington Post article. Appalling already, the state of dental care in America faces even greater challenges with the threat of the Trump-backed American Health Care Act currently being debated in the Senate after passing in the House at the beginning of May. The ADA has reported that Obamacare’s requirement to provide dental care for children under 19 will be rolled back, and the 5.4 million adults who gained coverage under the Medicaid expansion will lose all dental benefits.

Without insurance, people often go years without seeing a dentist. Toothaches are the most common problem, causing lack of sleep and difficulty eating. With time, a toothache can become another entity entirely. Germs collect, white blood cells accumulate, pus escalates, and suddenly a swelling, debilitating dental carbuncle has taken residence in one’s mouth.

Dee Matello, a small business owner and mother of three in Laurel, Maryland, had not been to a dentist in nine years. To compensate for the cracked molar on the left side of her mouth, she had simply learned to chew on the right side. Like many Americans without dental insurance, it was not until Matello heard a free dental clinic would be held in the town of Salisbury, just 20 minutes away from her home, that fixing the cracked tooth seemed like a possibility.

“It’s always bothering me,” Matello told the Washington Post as she waited outside the Wicomico Civic Center in Salisbury. Over the course of two days, among the reclining chairs and portable dental equipment that had been erected on the civic center floor, 116 dentists provided $1 million worth of care to 1,165 patients, many of whom had traveled across state lines to endure long lines and the bitter cold as they waited for treatment. After getting an x-ray and having the tooth extracted—a procedure that would have cost from $600 to $800 in a regular dentist’s office—Matello left the clinic, wondering why people who work hard and put faith in their government for help are obligated to endure such demeaning treatment.

At the University of Maryland dental school, a team of researchers explored the effect of toothaches in poor Maryland adults like Matello: 44.3 percent of their respondents reported having experienced more than five toothaches in the past 10 years. Nearly half said that their most recent toothache had caused them the worst pain possible and interfered with many aspects of their daily lives. When initial strategies to remedy their pain, such as nonprescription medicines, failed, many resorted to seeing a dentist.

For Americans who do not have health insurance and need dental treatment immediately, the emergency room remains the only option. However, this poses a significant problem because, in the eyes of the American health care system, the mouth is separate from the rest of the body. So even though hospital visits for dental problems cost an enormous amount to the health care system as a whole—an estimated $2.7 billion over a three-year period according to one major study—people rarely receive the treatment they need.

Dr. George Kushner, the director of oral and maxillofacial surgery at the University of Louisville in Kentucky, explained that he sees ER patients with dental pain on a daily basis. “I take out teeth every week that could have been saved with restorative work,” he told a reporter for USA Today. The vast majority of doctors lack the knowledge and tools to treat dental ailments. They offer the services they can, provide prescriptions for painkillers and antibiotics, and recommend a dental clinic for a follow-up. However, clinics are often too crowded to meet the demand. Thus, patients leave the ER with no long-term solution for treatment.

Though pain and discomfort are unfortunate enough, lack of dental care presents other, more enduring problems. While millions of Americans suffer because of their teeth, another portion of America supports a $110 billion-a-year dental industry, investing in procedures such as gum contouring and spending up to $2,000 on a single veneer. As the wealth gap continues to increase, teeth represent the dividing line between the classes.

Glimmering pearly whites have long been a symbol of social and financial success in America. Consider what every movie star, news anchor and television personality has in common: not height, weight or ethnicity (though there is certainly an enormous amount of room for more diversity). All share an enviable smile—gleaming, bright white, smooth, ovular teeth.

In a country where significant value is placed on a perfect smile, bad teeth prevent economic mobility. The predominant jobs of the working class—waitressing, housekeeping, nursing, etc.—are in the service sector, yet these jobs are hard to come by without a certain degree of oral health. A study published in the Nation Bureau of Economic Research found that a missing tooth can result in a loss of $720 of earnings (and 178 million people are missing at least one tooth).

As she waited to have teeth removed at a free clinic in Jonesville, Virginia, Emma Marsee told Mary Otto, the author of Teeth: The Story of Beauty, Inequality, and the Struggle for Oral Health in America, that people only want “a healthy-looking individual” taking care of them. In areas where jobs are scarce, a person’s financial security depends on her teeth. For 10 years, Otto researched and conducted interviews about oral health in America, traveling across the country attending beauty pageants and clinics, talking to dentists and patients alike. In her book, she writes:

“In the way that they disfigure the face, bad teeth depersonalize the sufferer. They confer the stigma of economic and even moral failure. People are held personally accountable for the state of their teeth in ways that they are not held accountable for many other health conditions.”

Regardless of cultural influences—Mountain Dew-mouth or not—the dental health epidemic in America is rooted in the historical and political legacy of an unequal system. Without access to preventative measure like regular oral checkups and teeth cleanings, as well as comprehensive care, America’s poor fight an uphill battle, involving increased health risk, social stigma and reinforced economic disadvantage.

 

Anna Sanford is an editorial assistant at AlterNet’s office in Berkeley, CA.

This article was made possible by the readers and supporters of AlterNet.

Atheist Surge Confounds Right-Wing Evangelicals

Atheist Surge Confounds Right-Wing Evangelicals

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

Religion was a major backdrop in the 2016 election. Donald Trump campaigned hard in white Christian America, promising voters that he would essentially turn back the clock to an America when religion and Christians overall were more influential in the country.

This strategy paid off, as the Washington Post reported: “Exit polls show white evangelical voters voted in high numbers for Donald Trump, 80-16 percent. That’s the most they have voted for a Republican presidential candidate since 2004.

“White evangelicals are the religious group that most identifies with the Republican Party, and 76 percent of them say they are or lean Republican, according to a 2014 survey. As a group, white evangelicals make up one-fifth of all registered voters and about one-third of all voters who identify with or lean toward the GOP.”

So it is no surprise that Trump has quickly moved with an executive order to relax restrictions on the political activities of tax-exempt churches in an effort to strengthen the role of religion, in essence working to strengthen the political hand of churches in political campaigns.

Trump playing the conservative religious card is in stark contrast to the role nonbelievers play in American society. Atheists, those who disbelieve in the existence of god, comprise a growing sector of American society. Their numbers are often hidden in polls and generally undercounted because some fear reporting their identity and facing social stigmatization.

There have been various reports showing a marked increase in nonbelievers, including atheists, agnostics and others who do not identify with a religion or say that religion is not important to them. Between 2007 and 2014, the portion of Americans who do not believe in a god grew by over 10 percent, according to a study done by the Pew Research Center. The growing numbers of nonreligious people in the United States are propelled by generational change, as young people, who are more likely to be unaffiliated with a religion, reach adulthood and slowly replace their older and more religious counterparts.

Report: Christianity decreasing, atheism rising

A recent study by psychologists Will Gervais and Maxine Najle at the University of Kentucky concluded that the number of atheists in the United States “exceeds 20 percent with a roughly 0.8 probability.” This estimate is more than double the conclusion of the study collected over the telephone by Pew Research Center, which found that approximately 10 percent of Americans don’t believe in god and only 3 percent of Americans identify as atheists. This disparity toward what is essentially the same question suggests that people are hesitant to identify themselves as atheists. Furthermore, a study by PRRI in 2016 revealed that more than 30 percent of atheists hide their disbelief from friends and family for fear of disapproval, suggesting that many might find an admission over the telephone similarly difficult.

To obtain accurate results, Gervais and Najle constructed a very subtle test that would remove the stigma around atheism. Using a sample population of 2,000 Americans, they asked respondents to answer true or false to seemingly banal statements such as “I am a vegetarian” or “I own a dog.” The control group responded to nine statements while the test group responded to the same nine statements plus an additional one—“I do not believe in God.”

Participants only had to acknowledge the number of statements that applied to them. They never had to deny believing in god or identifying as an atheist, which omitted any social stigma from the test.

By comparing the responses of the two groups, Gervais and Najle came to their conclusion—approximately 26 percent of Americans are atheists. Assuming the number of vegetarians and dog owners is the same between the two groups, any increase in the test group compared to the control group indicates the number of atheists.

The two psychologists admit that their study is not free of error, but they have undoubtedly proven that previous polls conducted over the telephone or in person have yielded deceptively small numbers.

In fact, another study performed by the Pew Research Center found evidence supporting the existence of social stigma around being openly atheist. Pew found that only a third of Americans feel warmly toward atheists. Daniel Cox of PRRI wrote in FiveThirtyEight that a third of Americans believe that atheists should be banned from becoming president, and a similar percent thinks that they should be prohibited from teaching in public schools. With pressure to conform to the dominant religious beliefs, some American atheists choose to hide their beliefs.

In an interview with Slate, Renee Johnson, a single lesbian mother in Point, Texas, said that she would “rather have a big ‘L’ or ‘lesbian’ written across [her] shirt than a big ‘A’ or ‘atheist,’ because people are going to handle it better.” Johnson is just one of many who feel uncertain about revealing their nonbelief in a country where religion and spirituality seem like national imperatives.

As the discrepancy between the poll performed by Gervais and Najle compared with previous polls indicates, the role of religion in the daily lives of Americans is becoming increasingly complex. Many polls require respondents to select a single religious identification from a list, which does not allow people to choose multiple answers. By this method, someone can’t be Jewish and an atheist or Catholic and atheist. Although it’s possible to follow a religion for cultural, heritage or spiritual reasons—separate from a belief in god—in previous polls, religion and atheism have been considered mutually exclusive. This method of polling fails to recognize the possibility that religion may be determined by heritage and cultural background, rather than belief; it also presumes one concept of god.

However, ideas of god or spiritual forces are entirely subjective, as indicated in a study by Gallup, which found that 89 percent of Americans believe in god, but only about half believe in an anthropomorphic god. The various studies about religion, belief and god exemplify how the United States necessitates having a society that can accept a full range of religious belief and spiritual ambiguity.

While feelings toward atheism are certainly changing—60 percent of Americans report knowing an atheist, which is significantly more than 10 years ago—the stigma surrounding people who do not believe in god is continuing to stifle freedom of belief in America. As with his other attempts to turn back the clock in America, President Trump’s remark in his inaugural address about joining all Americans together with “the same almighty Creator,” threatens the intricate and varying histories, beliefs and ways of being that are present in this country.

Anna Sanford is an editorial assistant at AlterNet‘s office in Berkeley, CA.

This article was made possible by the readers and supporters of AlterNet.