Chair Kennedy, Chair Livingstone, and members of the Committee, I’m grateful to be here today to testify in strong support of H.50-85/S.30-95, and I want to thank Senator DiDomenico and Representative Decker for their leadership in filing this bill.
My name is Carley Ruemmele, and I am a Research and Policy Analyst at Children’s HealthWatch. We are a network of pediatricians and child health researchers, headquartered at Boston Medical Center. For 27 years, we have interviewed more than 80,000 parents with young children to understand the ways in which economic hardship impacts health outcomes.
Decades of research, including our own, has established poverty as the single largest Social Determinant of Health, or a factor that shapes health outcomes. Experiencing poverty in childhood negatively impacts health across the lifespan, increasing risks of infant mortality, impaired cognitive and socioemotional development, chronic disease, and reduced academic readiness. Due to critical windows of human development, poverty is especially consequential if experienced in the first 1,000 days of life, when 80% of the brain develops.
Poverty is not driven by individual-level choices but is the result of policy decisions that have led to decades of under-investment in Black and Brown communities, unequal opportunities for economic mobility, stagnated wages and reduced labor power, and social safety net programs that, while essential, are not enough to meet basic needs.
Often, families experiencing poverty are forced to make impossible choices about which essential needs to cut, like food, in order to pay for other needs, like utility bills or prescription medication costs, further harming health.
Additionally, current eligibility requirements force many to choose between pursuing small wage increases or losing access to critical programs like MassHealth or a childcare voucher, a phenomenon known as the “cliff effect”.
This is a policy failure across many levels.
To wholly improve the overall health of our communities, we need to advance policies to ensure no Massachusetts resident lives in poverty. This will require a multi-pronged approach, pushing forward solutions to address the root cause of poverty, while strengthening solutions that provide economic relief, advance equity, and build wealth.
This bill advances several evidence-based policies that would do just that. If passed, this bill would:
-Raise cash assistance grants to 50% of the Federal Poverty Level
-Create a Guaranteed Income program for former foster youth
-Establish a Baby Bonds program and a Matched Savings program to build wealth
and
-Expand and increase the Earned Income Tax Credit and Child and Family Tax Credit—some of the most effective tools we currently have to reduce poverty and advance economic stability.
We are living in the aftermath of largest cuts to federal safety net we’ve ever seen. Cost of living is soaring and wages have stagnated. Massachusetts leadership can and should make choices to protect residents from these harms, ensure no child or family living in a state as prosperous as Massachusetts lives in poverty. Thank you.