Most Georgians struggle with cost of living, researchers say

As many as 70% of Georgia residents are struggling to afford basic necessities, such as food, housing, healthcare or childcare, according to new data from the Georgetown Center on Poverty and Inequality.

The data was released as part of the center’s national family economic well-being index, which measures the economic pressures that families are facing and how severely they are being squeezed by the cost of living. In Georgia, 36% of respondents said they were burdened by the cost of food, and 48% said they faced challenges related to healthcare costs. Forty percent of respondents said they struggled to afford multiple basic needs.

Affordability is more than a political buzzword for many Georgia voters 

The data, researchers said, helps illustrate how rising costs of living are affecting Americans, particularly as affordability continues to be a central issue in the midterm elections.

“We’re hearing stories from people at all income levels who feel squeezed by the costs of those everyday essentials,” said Lelaine Bigelow, the center’s executive director. She added that the goal of the index was “to bring a data frame to this and see how widespread those pressures have become.”

One of the most striking results, she added, was the extent to which concerns about the cost of living crossed socioeconomic classes. Ninety nine percent of respondents in the bottom 20% reported facing at least one economic burden, but nearly half the population in the upper-middle 20% did too.

Economic hardship, Bigelow said, “is not limited to families who are experiencing poverty. It reaches well into the middle class.”

Policies at the state level also impact residents’ ability to afford things like healthcare and childcare, said Danilo Trisi, one of the researchers behind the index. In many southern states that chose not to fully expand Medicaid, a higher share of residents reported concerns about healthcare costs.

“The states that didn’t [expand Medicaid] have higher insurance costs and therefore show up in our index as having a higher percentage of the population burdened by healthcare costs,” Trisi said.