From The Boston Globe
By Cheri Andes

Fifteen years ago, my husband and I belonged to that unglamorous group known as the working poor. He was a teller manager for Fleet Bank, making $14,000 a year. I did part-time clerical work at a private school for $8 an hour. After subtracting child care for my 2-year-old son and bus fare, our combined annual income came to $19,200.

I managed a budget that allowed us $50 per week on food. We could not afford a car, so we walked the mile to the store. I will never forget pushing my son through the supermarket in his stroller, adding up the price of every item with a calculator and then deciding if there was money left over to buy one or two cans of frozen orange juice.

We struggled to pay off our huge student loans of more than $50,000. Debt wasn’t our only problem. We paid $20 a month for our share of the bank’s employer-sponsored health insurance — a bare-bones plan with an annual $1,000 per-person deductible before any benefits kicked in. Thankfully, my husband and I were both healthy. Our first-born son was not.

For the first three years of George’s life, he struggled with multiple bronchial infections, frequent pneumonia, and persistent asthma. During these years, we maxed out his deductible each year and accumulated more than $2,500 in medical debt.

My story is not unique. In Massachusetts there are an estimated 200,000 uninsured, lower-income people (those with a household income less than $39,000 for a couple). There is no official estimate of those in my category: the underinsured.

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