I was born in 1975 and after my father had worked in two family owned businesses, one with my uncle and another with his brother, he started his own carpet cleaning service with one buffer and an extractor in 1980. We moved to Sacramento from Salt Lake City and by 1983 he was making around $4000 a month in 1983 dollars, working by and for himself. Unfortunately, a downturn in our local economy cut his business more than half and by 1985 he was supporting a family of 5 on roughly $1500 a month. That was still okay money for the 80’s and he could afford a little home and yard. When he began shopping for health insurance, he found that the premiums for a family of 5 were around $500 a month(possibly he could have found a policy for less, I don’t know what it was like except for what he has told me) so he opted to ration care and invest that in advertising and living expenses.

Around 1986 he began to have blurring in his vision and discovered he was developing cataracts. Without health insurance and a monthly income that varied, after car repairs, rent, food for the kids, ect., there was simply no savings in the bank. My parents had to decide between taking out loans or looking at state assistance programs. This is where the Catch-22 for lower middle class people comes in. They were not financially stable enough to afford private insurance, and not poor enough for the government programs. He was only eligible for assistance provided that he was 100% blind from the cataracts and his income fell into the poverty threshold. After he was blind and had no income, then we were able to qualify for Medicaid, Welfare, and Foodstamps. He did receive his surgery and was able to work again, but in the meantime his small business since he was the sole owner/operator.

He decided to work under the table for the few customers he had remaining in order to avoid us kids losing our Medicaid, for if he officially started working full time and made too much, we would again be without insurance. Flash forward to 1987(Reagans stock market crash year), my parents hated living off of welfare wanted to rejoin the ranks of lower middle class society. After a period of unsuccessfully looking for a job that paid enough to support his family, my father decided that he would renew his business license and my mother would take a part time job to bring in extra money. My father was only making a little money as he was in the position of rebuilding a customer base. We were no longer eligible for government aid and no insurance, but they were behind on rent and had very little disposable income(if any at all), so of course private insurance was not realistic.

I did not know it at the time, but in 1988 my mother started to have stomach problems. She was trying to ease the pains with Tums and Alka-Seltzer. My parents considered going to the doctor, but they did not know how they were going to pay for doctor’s tests when they were a month late on rent, kids need school supplies, cars need repairs, and of course we needed to eat. Why go another $200 or $300 hundred in debt for an upset stomach, right? You see, we do not let the government ration care in this country, we do it ourselves based on money.

Maybe that might have been a mistake once her stomach began swelling later that year. Once they finally took her to the emergency room (because of course that is where our nation’s poor instead of getting a simple checkup. Diagnosis: intestinal cancer that had grown along the walls on three feet worth of small intestine. They were able to remove that, unfortunately, since they waited so long to seek medical care, some of the cells had spread to the liver; iImmediate chemotherapy to follow.

By April of 1989 my father was a widower with a $40,000 medical bill and bankruptcy to follow. My father was too shattered after that to work for fear that his kids would lose Medicaid and did not try to work until my youngest sibling turned 18 in 2000. I know that Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck would call a man like my father a "welfare bum" who was too lazy "pull himself up by his bootstraps." Even today I can see the broken dreams of a once promising small business owner when I am with him(he is 58 and starting to show signs of dementia), one of countless lives altered so that Bill McGuireand his ilk can continue to rake in hundreds of millions in blood money(li

terally).

Update: Write diaries. I have been a lurker for so long and thanks to everyone who rec'd my second attempt at one. There are so many talented diarists around here that I was shy about beginning to write them. I only had 4 comments after posting this that I signed off and went to do errands only to find over 100 comments to go through. Thankyou for everyone for sympathy, but this is not about personal heartbreak. This is about the reality. I encourage everyone who has posted there own stories in the comments to write a diary as MinistryOfTruth has requested. Let our voices be heard.

Had to make a quick edit to change "right" to "write" in my previous update. Sorry about that, but all changes are documented. No sneaky stuff with me; honesty is important.