February 2006

President Bush's proposals to expand Health Savings Accounts and health insurance tax breaks may help a little. However, the help appears mostly targeted to the healthy and wealthy and does little to curb health care costs. It may even raise the cost of employer-based coverage on which sicker workers will still have to rely. Even if Bush's ideas were helpful, they are small-scale, nibbling at the edges of the country's health care crisis.

Illinois has the worst poverty rate in the Midwest and ranks last on 14 other economic, health, housing, and education indicators despite being one of the richest states in the region. This information and much more can be found in the 2006 Report on Illinois Poverty, newly released by Heartland Alliance

About $12 million, or 40 percent, of the $30 million estimated annual proceeds from Illinois's rental assistance program, set to start this summer, will come to the Chicago Low-Income Housing Trust Fund and enable the trust fund to expand its current rental assistance work.

Housing counselors are at risk of legal action and insufficient compensation under the proposed rules of the Residential Real Property Disclosure Act (H.B. 4050). Housing advocates are calling on the state to establish legal protections for housing counselors and to administer a sufficient, counsensual, and centralized payment system.

The federal budget reconciliation bill for federal fiscal year 2007 (which began on October 1, 2006) passed in early February. That bill included the long-awaited reauthorization of the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program. Congress was originally scheduled to reauthorize the TANF program four years ago and has been operating the program on stopgap resolutions since then.