Fox Business host tries to shame welfare recipients for needing services

Trish Regan thegrio.com
Trish Regan poses during the Resident Magazine May 2013 Cover Shoot at the Bloomberg Foundation Building on April 1, 2013 in New York City. (Photo by Andrew H. Walker/Getty Images)

Fox Business host Trish Regan believes that folks who fall on hard times and need government assistance like welfare should feel shame for receiving help, something she believes doesn’t exist anymore, Newsweek reports.

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“I’m not against welfare entirely,” she explained.

“In fact my mother, my mother grew up at times on welfare. And she needed it and she grew up in a project in New Hampshire. But there was shame in that…. But I don’t know is there’s that same kind of shame anymore. There’s not the same kind of stigma. And, you know, I’m not saying that there should be, but there should be some desire to not have to take a handout.”

Regan’s doubletalk is shameful in itself given that many disabled and sick people and those who can’t find work, rightly benefit from government assistance. Shaming those people doesn’t help them, wrote Dr. Jennifer Stuber, a professor at the University of Washington School of Social Work, in a study for the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management.

In fact, the study found that shaming causes the direst of the population of people who need services to steer away from it and further worsens depression and anxiety and keeps them from signing up for life-saving benefits.

Placing a stigma on accepting welfare does nothing to help people and only makes matter worse, the study contends.

It’s that kind of attitude that contributes to troubling reports like the one in Alabama that revealed that Alabama has the highest rate of cervical cancer deaths in the US, according to a released by the advocacy group Human Rights Watch, AL.com reports.

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The report blasts the state for its lax approach to cervical cancer, which is curable when detected early. According to the report, it takes on average 10 to 15 years before the virus that causes it, HPV, turns into cancer. When it is caught early, there is a 93 percent survival rate.

Plus, it is difficult for those who are the poorest population in the state to get access to care because Alabama refuses to expand Medicaid, and has strict eligibility levels making the issue more pressing in what the report refers to as “Alabama’s patchwork public health system.” Therefore, Medicaid remains out of reach for even Alabama’s poorest population, unless they are disabled or pregnant, according to the report.

But according to Reagan, folks need to be ashamed for needing government help while many people are dying because they can’t get it. Sad.

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