Amador County – A new report that measures the cost of basic necessities for older adults reveals the federal poverty line leaves many California seniors destitute. The Elder Economic Security Standard Index, calculated by the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research, indicates thousands of seniors in the state are suffering with severe economic insecurity, yet have too much income to qualify for vital public programs like Medi-Cal and cash assistance.
The index reveals that the cost of living for single elderly renters in Amador County was $21,873 in 2009. Federal Poverty Guidelines are $10,830 for every county in the nation.
“This year the federal government officially acknowledged it’s time to improve the outdated Federal Poverty Guidelines (FPL’s) by announcing that it will release a ‘Supplemental Poverty Measure’ in the fall of 2011 – a baby step in the right direction,” said Assemblyman Jim Beall, Jr. (D-San Jose) in a release last week from the studies’ authors. “California has the largest senior population in the country, so we simply can’t afford to take baby steps. That’s why we are embracing the Elder Index, from City Hall to the State Capitol.”
The most expensive county by this standard in California is San Mateo at $27,710. The release said that even in Kern County, where the cost of living is the lowest at $17,276, real costs add up to $6,447 more than the FPL’s nationwide, one-size-fits-all amount of $10,830 per year.
“One size does not fit all," said Steven P. Wallace, Ph.D., associate director of the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research and the lead author of the new policy brief containing the data, Older Adults Need Twice the Federal Poverty Level to Make Ends Meet in California. “California’s high costs make a single national income standard like the FPL totally inadequate for seniors.”
The studies’ authors said “the inadequacy of the FPL is important to California’s older adults since it is used to determine income eligibility for many public programs, to allocate funding for other programs, and is used as an evaluation measure when determining program effectiveness. Yet unlike the Elder Index, the FPL is the same dollar amount across the country, and it is based on the cost of food alone.”
The Elder Index is based on data and research from each of California’s 58 counties. Researchers said the data being released last week “was calculated using the most up-to-date publicly available data from several different federal agencies.”
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