Trapped in America's Safety Net: One Family's Struggle

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Trapped in America's Safety Net: One Family's Struggle (Chicago Studies in American Politics)

When Andrea Louise Campbellâ€™s sister-in-law, Marcella Wagner, was run off the freeway by a hit-and-run driver, she was seven-and-a-half months pregnant. She survivedâ€”and, miraculously, the baby was born healthy. But thatâ€™s where the good news ends. Marcella was left paralyzed from the chest down. This accident was much more than just a physical and emotional tragedy. Like so many Americansâ€”50 million, or one-sixth of the countryâ€™s populationâ€”neither Marcella nor her husband, Dave, who works for a small business, had health insurance. On the day of the accident, she was on her way to class for the nursing program through which she hoped to secure one of the few remaining jobs in the area with the promise of employer-provided insurance. Instead, the accident plunged the young family into the tangled web of means-tested social assistance.

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As a social policy scholar, Campbell thought she knew a lot about means-tested assistance programs. What she quickly learned was that missing from most government manuals and scholarly analyses was an understanding of how these programs actually affect the lives of the people who depend on them. Using Marcella and Daveâ€™s situation as a case in point, she reveals their many shortcomings in Trapped in Americaâ€™s Safety Net. Because American safety net programs are designed for the poor, Marcella and Dave first had to spend down their assets and drop their income to near-poverty level before qualifying for help. Whatâ€™s more, to remain eligible, they will have to stay under these strictures for the rest of their lives, meaning they are barred from doing many of the things middle-class families are encouraged to do: Save for retirement. Develop an emergency fund. Take advantage of tax-free college savings. And, while Marcella and Daveâ€™s story is tragic, the financial precariousness they endured even before the accident is all too common in America, where the prevalence of low-income work and unequal access to education have generated vastâ€”and growingâ€”economic inequality. The implementation of Obamacare has cut the number of uninsured and underinsured and reduced some of the disparities in coverage, but it continues to leave too many people open to tremendous risk.

Behind the statistics and beyond the ideological battles are human beings whose lives are stunted by policies that purport to help them. In showing how and why this happens, Trapped in Americaâ€™s Safety Net offers a way to change it.

Country	USA
Author	Andrea Louise Campbell
Binding	Kindle Edition
EISBN	9780226140582
Format	Kindle eBook
Label	University of Chicago Press
Manufacturer	University of Chicago Press
NumberOfPages	208
PublicationDate	2014-09-02
Publisher	University of Chicago Press
ReleaseDate	2014-09-02
Studio	University of Chicago Press

Trapped in America's Safety Net: One Family's Struggle (Chicago Studies in American Politics)

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