When Tom Casciato and Kathleen Hughes of Okapi Productions began work in 1991 on their documentary, “Two American Families,” the original premise was to look at the way technology was going to change the way Americans lived and work, creating large amounts of leisure time. Instead, what the film captured was the disintegration of middle-class American family life.
The documentary, which aired on PBS’s Frontline with Bill Moyers narrating, chronicles the life of two ordinary families – one black, one white – for more than 20 years as they battle to keep from sliding into poverty.
Providence Business News asked Hughes to talk about the way that the high cost of health care was intertwined with the families’ financial hardships.
PBN: In your documentary, “Two American Families,” what role does the high cost of health care and health insurance play in the financial struggles of the Neumanns and the Stanleys?
HUGHES: Heath care, specifically paying for health care, has without a doubt been an overriding concern inside the households of the Neumanns and the Stanleys since we started filming with them back in 1991.
In both homes the loss of union jobs marked the end of full health care coverage and the beginning of a new tougher reality.
For most of the years we’ve been filming, the Neumanns and the Stanleys have lived with spotty and/or expensive coverage. There was a point when one of the Neumann kids was diagnosed with asthma and there was no health coverage, so money that would have gone to pay for groceries was spent on medicine.
At another point the father in that family needed to be rushed to the hospital. He’d fainted from exhaustion. His wife could not believe the ambulance cost about $500 out of pocket.
In the late 1990s, the Stanleys spent $30,000 out of pocket when Claude Stanley fell ill with a lung infection and spent more than a week in the hospital.
PBN: Some have argued that we don’t have a health system, but a wealth extraction system, consuming 18 percent of our annual GDP. Do you agree?
HUGHES: Call it what you will, the system as it currently exists is not serving a huge chunk of hard-working Americans and their families.
PBN: How do the two families experience stress as a chronic condition of economic survival?
HUGHES: It goes something like this: mom works the day shift, dad works the night shift. Having dinner together hardly ever happens, even on the weekends because dad and mom each have another part-time job.
It must be so, in order to make ends meet, but it’s exhausting. Because they work so much, neither parent is able to connect with teachers at school. Neither parent is able to stay on top of their children’s homework, never mind their other activities.
The lack of spare change also causes tensions to rise. Saying no to new clothes, toys and many other things kids want is difficult. Vacations? Mostly out of the question.
PBN: Do you see the loss of good-paying union jobs in the manufacturing sector, and with it, health insurance coverage, as an intentional policy direction set by business leaders to cut costs and increase profits?
HUGHES: As a reporter, I have never sat inside a boardroom and heard such a strategy outlined.
However, over the past 30 years, most major U.S. manufacturers have moved high-wage union jobs – first to southern, non-union states, then to Mexico and eventually to China and other low-wage countries.
There’s no question that cutting labor costs has been a major corporate strategy. And it seems that it continues to be so. Downward pressure on wages is a feature of modern American life.
Just look at how many of the new jobs created in the Obama recovery are low-wage and part-time, with no benefits.
PBN: What are the lessons you would like to see the business community better understand as a result of your documentary?
HUGHES: We made “Two American Families” so that everybody, including the business community, could better understand the effects of long-term downward mobility on regular people.
Let me be clear: we examined what is a long-term American trend. Our families and millions like them began losing ground 20 or even 30 years ago. Our film is not about the crash of 2008.
The Neumann and the Stanley children are among the first generation of Americans who are not expected to do better than their parents did. That’s a profound shift away from the American Dream. This morning Terry Neumann asked me whether anybody cared enough to try and turn the trends around. I couldn’t answer that question.
To view the documentary, visit www.pbs.org.
