Quote of the Day, June 26, 2012
Living in poverty is painful, but especially so for the elderly because their options for escaping poverty are limited. They typically have fewer employment options, and those may be further limited by health issues. Programs such as Social Security were created to reduce the probability that people would fall into poverty during old age, and indeed old-age poverty rates have fallen notably compared to three or four decades ago. Still, a significant number of seniors live in poverty, and data from the Health and Retirement Study (2002– 2010) show that poverty rates increase with age. For most age groups above 50, poverty rates declined during the first half of the past decade and then started rising again. — an excerpt from Time Trends in Poverty for Older Americans Between 2001-2009, a study by Sudipto Banerjee, Ph.D. of the Employee Benefit Research Institute.
Banerjee found that nearly 15 percent of Americans 85 and older lived in poverty in 2009 – the highest rate of all age groups – and that women have much higher rates of poverty than men. Read more here.
