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C indy Dreeszen, 41, and her husband may have seemed like unlikely visitors to the Interfaith food pantry last month in affluent Morris County, N.J., 25 miles from New York City. Both have steady jobs and a combined income of about $55,000 a year. But with "the cost of everything going up and up" and a second baby due, the couple was looking for free groceries. "I didn't think we'd even be allowed to come here," Ms. Dreeszen told The New York Times. "This is totally something that I never expected to happen, to have to resort to this." 1 Countless middle-class Americans are thinking similar thoughts these days as they ponder their suddenly fragile futures. Millions of families who once enjoyed the American dream of upward mobility and financial security are sliding rapidly down the economic ladder-some into poverty. Many are losing their homes along with their jobs, and telling their children to rethink college. 2 And while today's economic crisis has made life for middleclass households worse, the problems aren't new. Pressure on the middle-class has been building for years and is likely to persist long after the current recession-now 14 months old-is over. The middle class "is in crisis and decline," says sociologist Kevin Leicht, director of the Institute for Inequality Studies at the University of Iowa. "Between wages that have been stagnant [in inflation-adjusted terms] since the middle of the 1970s and government policies that are weighted exclusively in the direction of the wealthy, the only thing that has been holding up most of the American middle class is access to cheap and easy credit." Affordable health care for all Americans is a key element of the budget recently announced by President Barack Obama, along with other policies aimed squarely at helping the middle class. Nearly half of home foreclosures in 2006 were caused, at least partly, by financial issues stemming from a medical problem, according to the advocacy group Families USA. Above, emergency room physician Jason Greenspan cares for a patient in Panorama City, Calif.