A report out this week finds that West Virginia leads the nation in prescription drug deaths. This may be unsurprising as many of us know someone who has fought addiction to pain-killers, but what is surprising is that overdose deaths in West Virginia have increased by more than 600 percent since 1999! This is an…
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Unlike in the past, in today's economy, higher education is very important to finding a good paying job. Workers with higher levels of education have higher wages and lower unemployment rates, as do the states with more workers with higher education. One strategy to help low-income and long-term unemployed workers is through the creation of…
Last month, we released our State of Working West Virginia report, which looked at how workers in West Virginia are faring. Taking another perspective, the Center for American Progress released its State of Women in America report last week, which analyzes how women are faring in all 50 states. The report measures women's well-being in…
Kanawha County is getting set to vote on a proposed school excess levy in order to fund the county's library system, which recently lost the financial support of the county school district. The proposal would increase the school excess levy from 29.82 cents to 45.9 cents per $100 for class II properties, and from 59.64…
Yesterday, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to cut SNAP, or the food stamps program, by nearly $40 billion over the next two years, kicking nearly four million people off the program. The House bill achieves this primarily by denying SNAP benefits to unemployed workers and struggling families whose incomes are just above the poverty…
Who are the uninsured in West Virginia? Well, they are mostly the working poor, who, as it turns out, are exactly the people that the Affordable Care Act will help cover. Data released today from the United State Census Bureau provide detailed estimates on household characteristics at the state level including income, education, employment, race, and…
According to data released today by the U.S. Census Bureau, the number of West Virginians covered by an employer-sponsored health insurance plan has dropped significantly since 2000. In that year, over 63 percent of all West Virginians had insurance provided through an employer compared to less than 56 percent in 2012, a drop of over…
It's with a heavy heart that I share the news of the passing this weekend of Dr. George Pickett, a titan of public health, not only in West Virginia but nationally and abroad. Dr. Pickett was a physician who spent his career working in public health in every imaginable way possible. He worked at the local…
Obamacare isn't perfect and I don't hesitate to admit it. Recently, however, there has been a number of opponents referring to it as a "train wreck." They say it will put a government bureaucrat between you and your doctor, that it is driving health care costs up, and that people won't support it. Fortunately, we…
Over Labor Day weekend, the Economic Policy Institute released a handy tool, based on their inequality.is project, that shows you how much you would be making today, if wages had kept up with productivity over that last three decades. After WWII, wages and productivity grew hand in hand. As workers produced more, they earned more.…