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Before nursing home patient Carmencita Misa became bedridden, she was a veritable “dancing queen,” says her daughter, Charlotte Altieri.
“Even though she would work about 60 hours a week, she would make sure to go out dancing once a week—no matter what,” Altieri, 39, said. “She was the life-of-the-party kind of person, the central nervous system for all her friends.”
A massive stroke in March 2014 changed all that. It robbed Misa, 71, of her short-term memory, her eyesight and her mobility—and it left her dependent on a feeding tube for nourishment.

It was a cold March night when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. turned his pulpit towards health care. Speaking to a packed, mixed-race crowd of physicians and health-care workers in Chicago, King gave one of his most influential late-career speeches, blasting the American Medical Association and other organizations for a “conspiracy of inaction” in the maintenance of a medical apartheid that persisted even then in 1966.

Aiming to attract and keep top-notch talent, a growing number of companies are dangling family-friendly perks such as lengthy paid leave for new moms and dads, back-up child care and onsite infant vaccines. But the attention-grabbing headlines — such as “IBM plans to ship employees’ breast milk home” — obscure the reality that for many workers, basic benefits such as guaranteed parental leave, even unpaid, is unavailable.