It’s one impossible choice after another: between food and medicine, getting to work and paying the heating bill. In 2014, there were 47 million people who were living in poverty within the United States. The poverty rate for 2014 was 15 percent.

In 2014, the median household was reported as $53,657 which statistically is the same as it was in 2013. The same stagnation held when it came to the poverty rate, with about 14.9 percent of Americans, or about 47 million people, falling below the poverty threshold of about $24,000 for the year.

This was worse for minorities and women. The poverty rate for African-Americans and Hispanics was well over 20 percent. Women also struggled to make ends meet. This was especially the case with elderly women, whose poverty rate was nearly double that of men 75-years-old and upward.

Although more women we re participating in the workforce, with 61 percent of women full time employed in 2014, they still earned only an average of 79 cents for every dollar their male colleagues earned.

For years, critics have stated that the means of measuring poverty in the United States is overly simplistic. It includes forms of income such as social security as well as unemployment. Yet, it excludes other things that shape families’ finances, such as food stamps and tax credits. The metric also ignores the cost of some vital services, such as health care, for which costs have risen faster than inflation and that the cost of childcare matters more to families than it did half a century ago, when fewer women were working.

According to the supplemental data, the poverty rate in the United States was about 15.3 percent, which is 0.4 percentage points higher than the report’s official rate. The additional measure shows difference in age groups. Those under age 18 have a poverty rate of 16.7 percent, which is quite a bit lower than the 21.5 percent reported in the main findings.

More inclusive measures might help monitor the effectiveness of programs meant to improve the economic well-being of specific populations, such as children or the elderly. Better understanding of the persistent poverty problem requires greater attention to nuanced and localized data that can better illustrate areas where the cost of essentials are outstripping income and benefits and where families continue to suffer.