When the author's sister-in-law, Marcella Wagner, was run off the freeway by a hit-and-run driver, she was left paralyzed from the chest down. Like so many Americans, neither Marcella nor her husband, Dave, had health insurance. Using Marcella and Dave's situation as a case in point, the author reveals the system's many shortcomings.
Campbell s book revolves around the experiences of her brother s family when his pregnant wife suffered a horrific accidentleaving Marcella a quadriplegicwithout health insurance. Yet the accident was more than a physical and emotional tragedy. It was an economic tragedy that hurtled Marcella and Dave out of what passes today as the middle class into the world of means-tested social assistance programs. A world where, like tens of millions of other Americans, they find themselves trapped in the safety net of public programs for the poor. As a social policy expert who has taught at Harvard and at MIT, Campbell thought she knew a lot about these programs. This eye-opening and disturbing book tells us what she learned. Passionate, but clear-eyed, it compellingly traces her brother s family s Dickensian odyssey through America s health insurance and other social insurance programs. Using her brother s family and her own situation as examples, she reveals the many shortcomings and inequities of America social policy that leave people exposed to tremendous risk. Nowhere else among advanced industrialized democracies can a single accident render a person bankrupt, or forever impoverished. Nowhere else can one s economic fate differ so much from one state to another within the same country. And, far from being too generous and breeding dependency, many of our means-tested programs are perversely structured not to give people a hand up, but to keep them trapped in poverty. Behind the statisticsbeyond the ideological battles over social assistance programsare human beings whose lives are molded, distorted, and diminished by the very policies purported to help them. In showing how and why this happens, "Trapped in the""Safety Net" offers a way to change it."
