The Two-Income Trap Read Online Free PDF Page A

aspirated. I had to do CPR on him.”
    Gabe survived, and over the next three years, he made some advances, but his progress was slow. Carmen explains that at age three, “He can’t really walk or talk yet. . . . He’s still on the bottle, [and] he’s just now starting to eat table food. We have to make sure it’s chopped up real fine. He could choke.” Gabe is less passive now.
He screams incessantly when he is anxious, which presents a particular challenge because he still needs so much medical attention. “He’s traumatized by doctors. He’s traumatized by nurses, because of being stuck and probed. He knows the uniforms.”
    She had gone back to her job as a lab technician shortly after the birth of each of their other two children, but it didn’t occur to either Carmen or her husband, Mike, that she could leave Gabe. “People are afraid to keep him, because of him being delicate,” which made child care impossible to arrange. Even family members were reluctant to look after Gabe: “My mother-in-law was afraid to take him because of his condition. If I had her to watch him, I had to be back in an hour.”
    When Gabe was first born, Carmen had arranged a leave of absence from her job. But when the leave ran out, “I just resigned,” explains Carmen. She pauses, adding hopefully, “But just until he’s better.”
     
    Like many of the couples we interviewed for this book, Carmen and Mike ultimately filed for bankruptcy. The reason? Not the one their friends might guess: the staggering expense of tending to Gabe’s medical needs. That is not to say that Gabe’s care was inexpensive. He had undergone four surgeries by the time he was three years old, and, as Carmen explains, “His diaper bag comes along with a lot of medication.” Then there are the specialists, the lab tests, the breathing machine, the special supplies. Gabe is well on his way to becoming a “million-dollar baby.”
    But Carmen and Mike were also very lucky: Nearly all of Gabe’s expenses were covered by Mike’s health insurance. Carmen reflects, “Thank God we had insurance. . . . We only paid for a few medications from time to time, the rest are copays.” Three years after Gabe’s birth, the family had paid less than $2,000 in medical bills—a tiny fraction of the debts they owed when they entered into bankruptcy.
    So how did Carmen and Mike end up in so much trouble?

The All-Purpose Safety Net
    When trouble strikes, the family falls back on its safety net. They seek out extra resources—more medical care, extra cash, someone to lend a hand—hoping they can regain their stability at some future time.
    Liberals (and many moderates) are quick to point out that America’s safety net has frayed. Welfare has been slashed, hospitals no longer offer free care to the poor, public housing has been shuttered, Medicaid funding has been cut, and so on throughout the pages of the New York Times .
    There is something beyond the obvious hardship implied in this litany that is important to notice. The “safety net” provided by each of these programs serves only one segment of the population: the poor. Nearly all these programs involve a stringent means test, making them available only to those near or below the poverty line. They are designed to keep hunger, disease, and destitution at bay for the poorest members of society, at least for a while.
    But what about the middle class? What is their safety net? Where do they turn in the case of a calamity? Unemployment insurance offers modest protection, and Social Security protects against penury in old age. But there is little more. For most families to qualify for any other form of government assistance, they would have to forgo everything that makes them middle-class—their homes, their jobs, their places in their communities.
    There is little discussion about the safety net for middle-income families, no wise folks expounding about it on the Sunday talk shows, no long articles about it in