The Battle Scars They Don’t Want You to See

There’s little or no question that most Americans believe that they and their children have seen the best this country has to offer… in their rear-view mirror. The future, with income polarization creating a very small but embedded elite at the top, has almost everyone else either slowly or more rapidly drifting downwards and away. Upward mobility – once taken for granted by most Americans – has become an endangered species. The growing gap of income inequality seems to reflect the big “why.”

“[A recent study by a clutch of economists at Harvard University and the University of California, Berkeley] confirms previous findings that America’s social mobility is low compared with many European countries. (In Denmark, a poor child has twice as much chance of making it to the top quintile as in America.) … A recent Gallup poll found that only 52% of Americans think there is plenty of opportunity for the average Joe to get ahead, down from 81% in 1998. It also jars with other circumstantial evidence. Several studies point to widening gaps between rich and poor in the kinds of factors you would expect to influence mobility, such as the quality of schools or parents’ investment of time and money in their children. Cross-country analyses also suggest there is an inverse relationship between income inequality and social mobility—a phenomenon that has become known as the ‘Great Gatsby’ curve.” The Economist, February 1, 2014.

But even these lowered positive expectations seem to fly in the face of reality. Research (published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology) “conducted by psychologists Michael W. Kraus and Jacinth J.X. Tan of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, suggests that Americans have more faith in the idea of upward mobility than they should based on real-world trends. Across four experiments, test participants overestimated economic mobility by an average of roughly 23 percent. The gap suggests that overall, Americans think it's easier to pull out of poverty than it truly is, possibly leading them to downplay the severity of income inequality as a result.

“[The study’s authors conclude:] Beliefs in the American Dream permeate our parenting decisions, educational practices, and political agendas, and yet, according to data we present in this manuscript, Americans are largely inaccurate when asked to describe actual trends in social class mobility in society. Across four studies, samples of online survey participants and university students exhibited substantial and consistent overestimates of class mobility—overestimating the amount of income mobility and educational access in society by a wide margin.” CityLab.com, February 2^nd. In short, we’re kidding ourselves. We seem to mistrust government, but in the process of downsizing that bureaucracy, something’s got to give.

With a wave of social and fiscal conservatism sweeping the nation, the majority of governorships, state legislatures and even Congress have pushed an new agenda of tax cuts and deregulation to favor the wealthiest Americans – under the thoroughly disproved theory of trickle-down economics which was supposed to create a litany of solid, well-paid jobs that somehow never appeared – at the expense of almost everybody else. Programs have been cut, and for the remnant of programs that remain, the ability to monitor standards has been equally impaired by budget cuts.

You know I am a tea leaf reader, and if you want one more arena where evidence of what we have become is terrifyingly manifest, take a really close look at that bastion of protection we call “workers compensation.” It is a system that was designed to take “causation” and “fault” out of the equation of covering workers’ benefits when they are injured. The insurance is state-mandated but provided by private carriers. Workers lose the right to sue their employers, and no matter why they are injured on the job, their treatment is covered and their disability economically compensated in accordance with fixed rates adjudicated by workers compensation judges. Well, that’s the way it used to be.

“Over the past decade, state after state has been dismantling America’s workers’ comp system with disastrous consequences for many of the hundreds of thousands of people who suffer serious injuries at work each year, a ProPublica and NPR investigation has found.

“The cutbacks have been so drastic in some places that they virtually guarantee injured workers will plummet into poverty. Workers often battle insurance companies for years to get the surgeries, prescriptions and basic help their doctors recommend…

“The changes, often passed under the banner of ‘reform,’ have been pushed by big businesses and insurance companies on the false premise that costs are out of control… In fact, employers are paying the lowest rates for workers’ comp insurance since the 1970s. And in 2013, insurers had their most profitable year in over a decade, bringing in a hefty 18 percent return…

“All the while, employers have found someone else to foot the bill for workplace accidents: American taxpayers, who shell out tens of billions of dollars a year through Social Security Disability Insurance, Medicare and Medicaid for lost wages and medical costs not covered by workers’ comp.

“ProPublica analyzed reams of insurance industry data, studied arcane state laws and obtained often confidential medical and court records to provide an unprecedented look at the unwinding of workers’ comp laws across the country.

“Among the findings:

Since 2003, legislators in 33 states have passed workers’ comp laws that reduce benefits or make it more difficult for those with certain injuries and diseases to qualify for them. Florida has cut benefits to its most severely disabled workers by 65 percent since 1994.

Where a worker gets hurt matters. Because each state has developed its own system, an amputated arm can literally be worth two or three times as much on one side of a state line than the other. The maximum compensation for the loss of an eye is $27,280 in Alabama, but $261,525 in Pennsylvania.

Many states have not only shrunk the payments to injured workers, they’ve also cut them off after an arbitrary time limit — even if workers haven’t recovered. After John Coffell hurt his back at an Oklahoma tire plant last year, his wages dropped so dramatically that he and his family were evicted from their home.

Employers and insurers increasingly control medical decisions, such as whether an injured worker needs surgery. In 37 states, workers can’t pick their own doctor or are restricted to a list provided by their employers.

In California, insurers can now reopen old cases and deny medical care based on the opinions of doctors who never see the patient and don’t even have to be licensed in the state. Joel Ramirez, who was paralyzed in a warehouse accident, had his home health aide taken away, leaving him to sit in his own feces for up to eight hours.

The scope of the changes, and the extent to which taxpayers are paying the costs of workplace accidents, has attracted almost no national attention, in part because the federal government stopped monitoring state workers’ comp laws more than a decade ago.” Michael Grabell, ProPublica, and Howard Berkes, NPR, ProPublica.org, March 4^th. Is this a country that makes you ripple with pride? Time to do something about this? Let your elected representatives know. Maybe “reform” was needed, but the results hardly restored common-sense balance!

I’m Peter Dekom, and too many Americans have their heads buried in the sand, don’t want to see what they know they aren’t going to like, have out-sourced their vote and their opinions to folks who will do them no good… and it’s time to stand up and force a change back to the country I know we can be.