When we met Claudia, a Latina in her late twenties, she was pregnant with her fifth child and had recently separated from her partner. Like so many of the mothers we interviewed, Claudia was engaged in a nearly constant struggle with the welfare bureaucracy over her family's health coverage. The task was made more difficult by the fact that each of her four boys had to qualify for various social services, including Medicaid, separately and because of their different ages according to different criteria. The fact that family coverage was not available to them presented Claudia, as well as the other families we studied, with a wide range of difficulties. Obviously frustrated, Claudia told us about the problems she encountered in trying to comply with the paperwork requirements for Medicaid and other social welfare programs. Despite her best efforts, often one or another of her children was without health coverage. As she explained,