The revised for­mula for mea­sur­ing poverty in the US is about to become a real­ity. Leg­is­la­tion may soon be intro­duced to change the method­ol­ogy, or the White House might just resolve to do it on it’s own.

The method includes gov­ern­ment assis­tance received by peo­ple when mea­sur­ing income, whereas the old for­mula did not. The results in chang­ing the for­mula cre­ates tragic and per­haps not sur­pris­ing numbers.

From this Asso­ci­ated Press arti­cle that we found at WCAX, writer Hope Yen gives us the results.

A revised for­mula for cal­cu­lat­ing med­ical costs and geo­graphic vari­a­tions show that approx­i­mately 47.4 mil­lion Amer­i­cans last year lived in poverty, 7 mil­lion more than the government’s offi­cial figure.

The dis­par­ity occurs because of dif­fer­ing for­mu­las the Cen­sus Bureau and the National Acad­emy of Sci­ence use for cal­cu­lat­ing the poverty rate. The NAS for­mula shows the poverty rate to be at 15.8 per­cent, or nearly 1 in 6 Amer­i­cans, accord­ing to cal­cu­la­tions released this week. That’s higher than the 13.2 per­cent, or 39.8 mil­lion, fig­ure made avail­able recently under the orig­i­nal gov­ern­ment formula.

That mea­sure, cre­ated in 1955, does not fac­tor in ris­ing med­ical care, trans­porta­tion, child care or geo­graph­i­cal vari­a­tions in liv­ing costs. Nor does it con­sider non-cash gov­ern­ment aid when cal­cu­lat­ing income. As a result, offi­cial fig­ures released last month by Cen­sus­may have over­looked mil­lions of poor peo­ple, many of them 65 and older.

Accord­ing to the revised NAS formula:

–About 18.7 per­cent of Amer­i­cans 65 and older, or nearly 7.1 mil­lion, are in poverty com­pared to 9.7 per­cent, or 3.7 mil­lion, under the tra­di­tional mea­sure. That’s due to out-of-pocket expenses from ris­ing Medicare pre­mi­ums, deductibles and a cov­er­age gap in the pre­scrip­tion drug benefit.

–About 14.3 per­cent of peo­ple 18 to 64, or 27 mil­lion, are in poverty, com­pared to 11.7 per­cent under the tra­di­tional mea­sure. Many of the addi­tional poor are low-income, work­ing peo­ple with trans­porta­tion and child-care costs.

–Child poverty is lower, at about 17.9 per­cent, or roughly 13.3 mil­lion, com­pared to 19 per­cent under the tra­di­tional mea­sure. That’s because sin­gle moth­ers and their chil­dren dis­pro­por­tion­ately receive non-cash aid such as food stamps.

–Poverty rates were higher for non-Hispanic whites (11 per­cent), Asians (17 per­cent) and His­pan­ics (29 per­cent) when com­pared to the tra­di­tional mea­sure. For blacks, poverty remained flat at 24.7 per­cent, due to the cush­ion­ing effect of non-cash aid.

–The North­east and West saw big­ger jumps in poverty, due largely to cities with higher costs of liv­ing such as New York, Boston, Los Ange­les and San Francisco.

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