When Andrea Louise Campbell’s sister-in-law, Marcella Wagner, used to be run off the highway by means of a hit-and-run driving force, she was once seven-and-a-half months pregnant. She survived—and, miraculously, the infant was once born fit. yet that’s the place the excellent news ends. Marcella was once left paralyzed from the chest down. This coincidence was once even more than simply a actual and emotional tragedy. Like such a lot of Americans—50 million, or one-sixth of the country’s population—neither Marcella nor her husband, Dave, who works for a small company, had medical health insurance. at the day of the coincidence, she was once on her strategy to type for the nursing software wherein she was hoping to safe one of many few last jobs within the sector with the promise of employer-provided assurance. as an alternative, the twist of fate plunged the younger relations into the tangled net of means-tested social assistance.
          
As a social coverage pupil, Campbell concept she knew much approximately means-tested tips courses. What she fast discovered was once that lacking from such a lot govt manuals and scholarly analyses was once an realizing of ways those courses really impact the lives of the folks who rely on them. utilizing Marcella and Dave’s state of affairs as a working example, she finds their many shortcomings in Trapped in America’s defense Net. simply because American security internet courses are designed for the terrible, Marcella and Dave first needed to spend down their resources and drop their source of revenue to near-poverty point ahead of qualifying for aid. What’s extra, to stay eligible, they are going to need to remain less than those strictures for the remainder of their lives, which means they're barred from doing the various issues middle-class households are inspired to do: keep for retirement. advance an emergency fund. reap the benefits of tax-free university discount rates. And, whereas Marcella and Dave’s tale is tragic, the monetary precariousness they persevered even earlier than the twist of fate is all too universal in the United States, the place the superiority of low-income paintings and unequal entry to schooling have generated vast—and growing—economic inequality. The implementation of Obamacare has reduce the variety of uninsured and underinsured and diminished the various disparities in insurance, however it maintains to depart too many of us open to super risk.

at the back of the facts and past the ideological battles are people whose lives are stunted by way of rules that purport to assist them. In displaying how and why this occurs, Trapped in America’s safeguard web offers the way to swap it.