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Laura Mauldin's book, "In Sickness and in Health: Love Stories from the Front Lines of America’s Caregiving Crisis", highlights the lack of structural support in the US, forcing unpaid care to become an inescapable feature of most relationships between caregivers and their disabled or sick spouses, with Mauldin stating "what's really important is for disabled people to understand that their situation is political, and for caregivers to understand that their situation is political".
Mauldin's personal experience as a caregiver for her partner, who passed away in 2010, informs her research, which emphasizes that the US caregiving system fails both disabled people and their caregivers, with Medicaid cuts exacerbating the damage to an already broken system, leaving millions of people without adequate support.
The book aims to help caregivers feel less alone and to provide an emotionally accessible understanding of how social and political decisions shape their experiences, with Mauldin arguing that the state uses marriage to abandon disabled people, and that ableism is a systemic issue that devalues disabled people and their caregivers, as seen in the common narrative that disabled people are burdens, and that caregivers' lives are negatively impacted as a result.
