Achieving the American Dream may take the painstaking toil of generations, yet it takes only two bills to shatter it: a health insurance premium and a college tuition statement.
For Yang Lin, a data scientist at a Bay Area tech company, this August feels particularly stark. Her daughter is heading to a private college this fall as a freshman while her husband has been out of work since last September. When their company-subsidised health insurance terminated, Lin shopped around the marketplace and got a monthly quote of $2,400. "Are you kidding me?" she said, adding that her daughter's college tuition alone runs $70,000 a year, with another $20,000 for room, board and a meal plan.
"I'm afraid we are going to go broke," she said quietly. A first generation immigrant, Lin is now the sole breadwinner for a family of three in one of the most expensive states in the US. "We are a living example of the working American family squeeze," she told China Daily. "I don't have an American Dream. If I have one, it's this: give me affordable health insurance now."
Lin is not alone. Elevated prices of healthcare expenses and rising costs of living in recent years have become a new normal, and have exerted financial strains upon millions of American families.
