Earlier News Coverage

Congress has proposed cuts to Medicaid to reduce federal spending. However, this leaves more than 3.4 million Illinoisans at risk of losing coverage. Stephanie Altman, the director of healthcare justice and a senior director of policy, spoke to Reset about the implications.

Stephanie Altman, the Shriver Center’s director of healthcare justice and senior director of policy, discussed the detrimental effects that defunding Medicaid would have on public health and financial stability in Illinois. She highlighted the potential strain on underfunded hospitals serving low-income communities.

Andrea Kovach, a senior attorney for healthcare justice, warned that eliminating a state-run Medicaid-like health care program for immigrant adults would have a devastating impact on individuals and families across the state. “Cancer doesn’t care what someone’s immigration status is. Diabetes doesn’t go away because someone has a particular immigration status. So the cost will still be there,” Kovach said.

Wendy Pollack, the founder and director of the Shriver Center’s Women's Law and Policy Initiative, talked to NPR’s Andrea Hsu about the Trump administration’s reversal of the 1965 executive order forbidding most federal contractors from using discriminatory hiring practices. Pollack, a former union carpenter, said the “end of the executive order sets the stage for a very dire situation for women and people of color.”

An Illinois judge ruled against landlords who threatened to call ICE on tenants. The decision was based on a 2019 law passed by Gov. JB Pritzker that protects renters from retaliation based on their immigration status. Samir Hanna, the director of housing justice, told the USA TODAY that in states without these safeguards, landlords are more likely to mistreat immigrant tenants, "particularly as our current climate creates incentives for abuse.”

Stephanie Altman, the director of healthcare justice and senior policy director at the Shriver Center, talks about the devastating impact that cutting Medicaid would have on the state of Illinois.

In an essay for Crain’s Chicago Business, Stephanie Altman — the Shriver Center’s director of health care justice and senior director of policy — describes how defunding Medicaid would make people less healthy and more financially unstable. She says the cuts would have ripple effects across the state, leaving Illinoisans more vulnerable to public health emergencies and push many underfunded hospitals that serve low-income communities to the brink of bankruptcy.

Jeremy Rosen, the Shriver Center's director of economic justice, was quoted in the Sun-Times about the benefits of the state’s expanded earned income tax credit. As of the 2023 tax year, the credit includes people who file using an IRS-issued Individual Taxpayer Identification Number, commonly used by undocumented workers.

On Inauguration Day, President and CEO Audra Wilson joined “Chicago Tonight” to discuss the significance of a second Trump White House. She didn’t mince words: “It feels like a war on poor people. He has used his platform to pit white working class people against people of color, who are also working class…when in fact he’s looking to cut the same supportive systems that white working class people have relied upon.”

A few weeks before his death in 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke about the “other America” to a union group in New York. In his remarks, he condemned the structural nature of poverty, saying “this country has socialism for the rich, rugged individualism for the poor.”

We live in a trickle-up economy, where the three million individuals who make up the wealthiest one percent of Americans are collectively worth more than the roughly 291 million people that make up the bottom 90 percent. This trend has accelerated in recent decades. For people in the middle, or at the lower end of the income spectrum, their piece of the pie is getting smaller.

As an organization committed to seeing governments raise money through progressive taxation, we at the Shriver Center on Poverty Law agree with the Tribune Editorial Board that Mayor Brandon Johnson’s plan to use regressive property taxes to raise $300 million to close a portion of the city’s $1 billion deficit was a poor idea. We also believe that at least one proposal made in recent budget negotiations, eliminating the city’s guaranteed income pilot program to save $60 million, would be a terrible one.