The Two-Income Trap - Elizabeth Warren [30]
In the next chapter, we explore just how much can go wrong.
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Mom: The All-Purpose Safety Net
Carmen’s third pregnancy was difficult. When she was thirty weeks along, she started hemorrhaging, and her obstetrician performed an emergency cesarean section. Little Gabe weighed just under two pounds at birth, and the doctors predicted a lifetime of severely impaired physical and cognitive ability for him. Many would have considered Gabe’s fate a tragedy, but Carmen Ramirez saw it differently. “This was God’s gift. He is my miracle baby. He came when my sister suddenly passed away. I could not believe I was pregnant. I felt so blessed.”
Months later, Gabe still needed the support of a machine to breathe. He was a quiet baby who rarely fussed, but Carmen checked on him constantly. One evening, after putting Gabe to bed, Carmen started to fix dinner for her two older children. The macaroni had just started boiling when she left the kitchen abruptly and ran to the baby’s room. “I don’t know why, but I just needed to check again.” She was confronted by a terrifying silence. Her heart began to race. “He 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