United States: House passes Obama’s historic healthcare overhaul. “House Democrats approved a far-reaching overhaul of the nation’s health system on Sunday, voting over unanimous Republican opposition to provide medical coverage to tens of millions of uninsured Americans after an epic political battle that could define the differences between the parties for years.” (…) “We didn’t give in to mistrust or to cynicism or to fear. Instead, we proved that we are still a people capable of doing big things,” Mr. Obama said. “This isn’t radical reform,” he added, “but it is major reform.” New York Times, March 21, 2010  “The House’s passage of health care legislation late Sunday night assures that whatever the ultimate cost, President Obama will go down in history as one of the handful of presidents who found a way to reshape the nation’s social welfare system. (…) Whether it was a historic achievement or political suicide for his party — perhaps both — he succeeded where President Bill Clinton failed in trying to remake American health care.” New York Times, March 21, 2010. Read also: In Health Care Bill, Obama Attacks Wealth Inequality

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Paraguay: Public health care almost entirely free of charge. ‘The measure was one of the campaign promises of centre-left President Fernando Lugo, a former bishop who took office in August 2008. (…)Seven percent of Paraguay's population of 6.1 million currently have private health coverage, 20 percent are covered by the health services of the social security institute, the Instituto de Previsión Social, and the rest depend on the public health system. But an estimated 40 percent of the population were unable to afford health care of any kind. "What we are doing is making health care a right, regardless of a person's ability to pay," Diego Gamarra, director general of health services in the Ministry of Public Health and Social Welfare (MSPBS), told IPS.’ Source: IPS, January 6, 2010

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Agriculture: 75% of hungry are rural poor. ‘Climate change, associated with a four-fold increase in natural disasters in the last decade, and the growth of world population, which is expected to reach nine billion by 2050, pose new challenges for aid initiatives like those of the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP). (…) The WFP report titled Climate Change and Hunger: Responding to the Challenge says that "By 2050, the number of people at risk of hunger as a result of climate change is expected to increase by 10 to 20 percent more than would be expected without climate change.”’ Source: IPS, January 8, 2010

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Senate Passes Health Care Overhaul Bill. “The Senate voted Thursday to reinvent the nation’s health care system, passing a bill to guarantee access to health insurance for tens of millions of Americans and to rein in health costs as proposed by President Obama.”  Source: The New York Times, December 24, 2009

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Many Will Not Feel Effect of Health Care Changes. ‘What about the roughly 160 million workers and their dependents who already have health insurance through an employer? For many people, the result of the long, angry health care debate in Washington may be little more than more of the same. As President Obama once promised, “If you like your health plan, you can keep your health plan.”That may be true even if you don’t like your health plan. And no one seems to agree on whether the legislation will do much to reduce workers’ continually rising out-of-pocket costs.’  Source: The New York Times, December 24, 2009

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Hunger in the United States. ‘According to the new federal data, the number of people in households that lacked consistent access to adequate nutrition rose to 49 million in 2008, 13 million more than in the previous year and the most since the federal government began keeping the data 14 years ago. About a third of struggling households had what the researchers called “very low food security,” meaning that members of the household skipped meals, cut portions or passed on food at some point during the year because they lacked money. The other two-thirds managed to feed themselves by eating cheaper or less varied foods, relying on government aid like food stamps or resorting to food pantries and soup kitchens, which have been seeing heavier and heavier traffic in recent years.’ Source: New York Times, November 17, 2009

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United States: Poor Children Likelier to Get Antipsychotics. “Some children from poor families may be receiving powerful drugs not because they need them but because it is deemed a cheaper way to treat a problem.  New federally financed drug research reveals a stark disparity: children covered by Medicaid are given powerful antipsychotic medicines at a rate four times higher than children whose parents have private insurance. And the Medicaid children are more likely to receive the drugs for less severe conditions than their middle-class counterparts, the data shows. Those findings, by a team from Rutgers and Columbia, are almost certain to add fuel to a long-running debate. Do too many children from poor families receive powerful psychiatric drugs not because they actually need them — but because it is deemed the most efficient and cost-effective way to control problems that may be handled much differently for middle-class children?”  Source & full article: The New York Times, December 11, 2009

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According to a new report by the US census bureau, “the world is about to cross a demographic landmark of huge social and economic importance, with the proportion of the global population 65 and over set to outnumber children under five for the first time.” The US census bureau “highlights a huge shift towards not just an ageing but an old population, with formidable consequences for rich and poor nations alike. The transformation carries with it challenges for families and policymakers, ranging from how to care forolder people living alone to how to pay for unprecedented numbers of pensioners – more than 1 billion of them by 2040. The report, An Ageing World: 2008, shows that within 10 years older people will outnumber children for the first time. It forecasts that over the next 30 years the number of over-65s is expected to almost double, from 506 million in 2008 to 1.3 billion – a leap from 7% of the world's population to 14%. Already, the number of people in the world 65 and over is increasing at an average of 870,000 each month.” Source: The Guardian, July 20, 2009

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Prolonged aid to unemployed is running out: “Over the coming months, as many as 1.5 million jobless Americans will exhaust their unemployment insurance benefits, ending what for some has been a last bulwark against foreclosures and destitution. Because of emergency extensions already enacted by Congress, laid-off workers in nearly half the states can collect benefits for up to 79 weeks, the longest period since the unemployment insurance program was created in the 1930s. But unemployment in this recession has proved to be especially tenacious, and a wave of job-seekers is using up even this prolonged aid. Tens of thousands of workers have already used up their benefits, and the numbers are expected to soar in the months to come, reaching half a million by the end of September and 1.5 million by the end of the year, according to new projections by the National Employment Law Project, a private research group.” (…) “If more help is not on the way, by September a huge wave of workers will start running out of their critical extended benefits, and many will have nothing left to get by on even as work keeps getting harder to find,” said Maurice Emsellem, a policy director of the employment law project. Source: The New York Times, August 1, 2009

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"I am now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to be the most effective -- the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income."  (...)

"Two conditions are indispensable if we are to ensure that the guaranteed income operates as a consistently progressive measure. First, it must be pegged to the median income of society, not the lowest levels of income. To guarantee an income at the floor would simply perpetuate welfare standards and freeze into the society poverty conditions. Second, the guaranteed income must be dynamic; it must automatically increase as the total social income grows. Were it permitted to remain static under growth conditions, the recipients would suffer a relative decline. If periodic reviews disclose that the whole national income has risen, then the guaranteed income would have to be adjusted upward by the same percentage. Without these safeguards a creeping retrogression would occur, nullifying the gains of security and stability."
from 'Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?', 1967,  Dr. Martin Luther King

Link to full text: 'Where are we going'

 basic income links.

http://www.usbig.net/ : website of the U.S. Basic Income Guarantee Network.

American Income Security Institute

http://www.basicincome.org/bien/ : website of the Basic Income Earth Network.

www.citizensincome.org : website of the Citizen's Income Trust, U.K.