How Private Welfare Companies Are Profiting Off the Poor

KQED's Forum

KQED

Politics, News, News Commentary

4.6 • 656 Ratings

🗓️ 16 May 2023

⏱️ 56 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Millions of families in the U.S. depend on welfare to get by, but it’s far from an efficient system. The bureaucratic mechanisms designed to help people find jobs, a requirement for receiving aid, often don’t work, even as they funnel millions of dollars into private companies with government contracts. In the latest season of Marketplace’s “The Uncertain Hour” podcast, host and producer Krissy Clark investigates the welfare-to-work industrial complex and how businesses profit off of people living paycheck to paycheck. As Washington debates work requirements as part of a deal to raise the debt ceiling, we talk with Clark about how welfare eligibility works and whether the current system is helping people escape poverty or keeping them trapped. Guests: Krissy Clark, host and producer, The Uncertain Hour podcast, and senior correspondent at Marketplace Jeanne Kuang, reporter, CalMatters Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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0:00.0	Support for Forum comes from Rancho La Puerta, a wellness resort in Baja, California, just an hour from San Diego,
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1:00.4	So-called welfare reform in the 1990s changed the nature of cash payments to people in need.
1:06.4	A bipartisan majority argued that welfare wasn't just about helping people survive.
1:10.8	Note, the cash payments became a tool for getting people to work. Bipartisan majority argued that welfare wasn't just about helping people survive.
1:14.8	Note, the cash payments became a tool for getting people to work.
1:18.3	And to many people not on welfare, the theory sounded good.
1:19.8	But what actually happened?
1:24.7	The welfare roles have fallen substantially, but what about the people who still need help? The new season of the Uncertain Hour, Marketplace's investigative
1:28.4	podcast, examines the unintended consequences of welfare work requirements and how private companies
1:34.8	have managed to capture millions of government dollars from that system. That's all coming up next
1:39.4	after this news.
1:47.4	Welcome to Fort. I'm Alexis Madrigal.
1:50.6	Chrissy Clark's podcast, The Uncertain Hour, reports on people in the precarious seams of our
1:56.6	economy. Past seasons of this marketplace produced in vetio have brought us inside chicken farms
	...

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