Two weeks ago, we shared the story of Marie JeanLouis on the front page of the Sunday newspaper.
In the story’s opening scene, we find JeanLouis issuing the same gentle morning hectoring that begins the day in houses across metro Atlanta. An exhausted JeanLouis had just finished her third 12-hour shift in three days as a home healthcare worker.
As hard as she works, she can’t quite afford her life. To make ends meet, the 44-year-old mother of four daughters relies on her $265 monthly food stamp benefit.
As reporter Rosalind Bentley informed us in her detailed and intimate piece, JeanLouis is imperfect in her budgeting, which must account for student loans and other trappings of her earlier expectations. Many readers were stopped by the $256 JeanLouis pays monthly for a storage unit filled with furniture – and perhaps the hopes and dreams - from better times. That’s uncomfortably close to her food stamp allocation.
The story, which was unusual for our Sunday front page these days, generated a lot of conversation in social media and elsewhere. Roz (as she’s known in the newsroom) received a bunch of emails from people who offered both sympathy – one well-known local personality offered to provide JeanLouis a new set of tires – and condemnation.
One reader felt for JeanLouis until he read about her storage unit. “Here’s an idea: Sell all that fancy furniture and use that money, and the $256 you’ll save every month, to buy food!,” he wrote.
(News Update: JeanLouis has decided to get rid of the storage unit.)
Another reader was completely unimpressed. “It is past time (for) our lawmakers (to) challenge food stamp recipients, and if drug testing is an avenue, so be it,” she wrote. “Those of us who pay 47 million people to receive these freebies are getting tired of it, while we continue to pay increasing prices at the grocery store.”
Yet, quite a few readers were touched. “I read your story with an open mind this evening,” one wrote. “She seems to be someone genuinely needing the assistance.”
This is exactly the kind of discussion that journalists should provoke. We depict a specific reality that enables people to discuss and debate what that reality means. This is far different from parking two talking heads with conflicting world views and inviting them to yell across each other for five minutes. As spirited as our readers were in their responses, they tended to focus on the concrete realities of the story. They related JeanLouis’ story to their own lives and the lives of people they know. They talked about human experience rather than abstractions in a debate.
While we can’t base public policy solely on individual experiences, policymakers in Washington, state capitols and City Halls need to see the faces at the receiving end of their big ideas.
JeanLouis is one of 1.8 million Georgians who receive assistance from the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program – commonly known as food stamps. Starting Monday, food stamp recipients in Georgia will have to submit to drug testing if the state finds “reasonable suspicion” that the recipient is on drugs. Anyone ordered to take one must pay for it out of pocket.
For the record, JeanLouis is fine with the requirement. “For people like me who need the help, it’s not right that you get the same help and go out and buy alcohol or find a way to buy drugs,” she told Roz. “Every little bit of help I get I appreciate. They don’t owe it to me.”
As the law was debated in the Georgia Legislature, food stamp recipients tended to be cast as either venal loafers or innocent victims. They are neither. They are imperfect people — just as Marie JeanLouis is imperfect, just as I am, just as you are.
That’s why it’s important for us to write about people like JeanLouis. These stories are labor intensive yet worthwhile.
(subhed here) Telling the broader story
To be comprehensible, the Affordable Care Act story has to be told through individual experiences. And we’ve shown its good and bad sides through individual experiences.
Last summer, we wrote about Obamacare and Beth Brock, the owner of a small business growing toward the 50-employee threshold that would force her to offer insurance to her workers by 2015 or pay a hefty penalty. She concluded that she couldn’t afford to offer insurance and had resigned herself to watching good hires get away, rather than hitting the 50-employee threshold. She was particularly angry because she believed that the law’s authors didn’t consider enough how their policymaking would hit people like her. “They made an assumption that all businesses over 50 employees could afford to offer health care, and that’s just not true,” she said.
So, you want to compel a small business to provide health insurance? Fine, then look deeply into Beth Brock’s eyes and tell her where she fits in your grand plans. You want to limit food stamps, fine, then sit at JeanLouis’ kitchen table and opine about runaway federal spending and moral hazards.
By all means, damn them for their choices but please understand their realities.
