…Hmmm… Sometimes you don’t get what you work for. Congress has defunded Social Security Disability to the point where we can’t get any help for my disabled wife even though we’ve paid into it for decades. And to make matters worse, the private long-term disability insurance company we’d been paying in to for years has used Congress’ deregulation to change the rules and has now stopped paying her monthly benefits as well. I’ve had to let my people go and sell off most of my business in order to stay home and care for her… We’ve given plenty of effort – we’re both college educated, we were both highly regarded professionals in our fields, I started my own company – then she gets ill and *poof* it’s all gone. We’ve worked. I’m still working 18 hour days. We’ve already lost so much, now we’re in danger of losing our home… We don’t want anything free, we just want to get what we’ve paid for.

And trust me, she WANTS to work! She’s trained her whole life to do her job, to be a professional. But she’s in so much pain, is so very ill there’s no way she could even get down the steps to the driveway let alone actually work.

If Americans don’t have government protection, if we don’t regulate the insurance industry, if Congress doesn’t fund Social Security, it’s people like Wifey and myself who get caught in the machinery and lose everything. The people on Social Security Disability, Medicare, Medicaid, etc. aren’t scamming the system – they’re people who need help, who have paid into the system, who are depending on those programs to survive.