Amy Fitzpatrick was laid off two years ago on February 20^th 2008 from her job as a Legal Receptionist.  While working as a Legal Receptionist for years she had good health care coverage.  Amy contributed a portion, but it was reasonable and she felt secure knowing she could have her medical conditions treated and monitored regularly.

Currently, Amy is working a survival job and is underemployed at her part-time weekend job, the best she has been able to find thus far.  As an underemployed concierge, Amy does not have health insurance and being that she suffers from two separate medical conditions it is impossible for her to find affordable insurance.

She does use one of the health centers in Philadelphia that is able to monitor one of the conditions and provide her with one of the prescriptions she currently needs.  However, the prescription for the other condition the health center does not carry and Amy cannot afford it.  Also, she has a great doctor just for that second medical condition, but again without insurance she cannot afford to visit him.  So now Amy has a serious medical condition for which she cannot afford her medication and which is not being monitored by her doctor.

Amy currently gets a portion of unemployment and has this part-time weekend job.  It is barely enough for her to get by, yet she is taking off one of her weekends to March to the Finish Line and ask Congress to give Americans comprehensive health care reform.  It is a big sacrifice to her and she had this to say about it, “Affordable and quality health care for everybody is something that everyone should have.  I mean it’s a right that there should be no question about.  And that’s why I’m walking.  We need to have it.”

William (Bill) K. West was laid off from Cigna last year, February 6^th 2009, at the age of 62.  He has spent the past year job hunting and volunteering at a number of nonprofits and a local school.  Bill has his own story as an unemployed worker, so close to retirement age, hoping to stay on health insurance.

But Bill’s main story is his son, Ben who suffers from a chronic condition called Crohn’s Disease.  Ben was diagnosed at the age of 25 after graduating college and looking forward to starting law school.  He had to get very expensive coverage through the university.  As Ben was about to finish law school, Bill and his wife, Lois, became very concerned about the potential of Ben not being covered.  “We had this big fear, there was going to be a gap between university coverage and when he got a job…at times we were spending a fortune on double coverage just to be sure there wasn’t a gap,” Lois recalls.

Ben now has a good job as a lawyer in New York, but his Bill and Lois still worry a great deal.  “As a parent the fear is what if he loses his job.  It’s really something that keeps a mother awake at night.  I worry about his health insurance more than his illness.  I worry more about him losing coverage than being hospitalized.”

She adds, “We’re just regular people who have always done the right thing. –Always had insurance, always worked and took care of our children.  It’s really really frightening and if we just knew that all Americans had coverage and paid a reasonable amount…That’s real freedom in America.  The real freedom to know that people can just live knowing that they’re not going to be denied medical care.”

Bill has been collecting unemployment from DE and utilizing COBRA subsidies since February 2009.  The unsubsidized COBRA rate for his insurance is $425/month and with this subsidy, that will expire in July, he pays $165/month.  When his COBRA subsidy ends Bill is can enroll in the Cigna retiree medical plan.  Cigna recently raised the rates by 48% so instead of paying $270/month, a year later it will cost Bill and his family $400/month.

Bill will be the first to tell you that the four hundred dollars a month is something his family can manage.  They can adjust the family budget, make sacrifices and get by.  Adding him onto his wife’s insurance is not an option, because his family cannot make enough sacrifices to afford the $1000/month that it would cost them.

“This is the part people don’t get,” Bill points out, “When I was employed I was paying $82 a month for single coverage for myself.  Now we are talking $400 a month.  Can I afford that?  Yes I can… I’m not a truly tragic case, but I’m one of the more mundane cases where people say, when is this going to stop?”

Athena Ford: Health care is a very personal issue for me because it’s directly affected every member of my family.

My younger brother Austin was born with a medical condition that required surgery immediately after birth and several follow-up surgeries over the next few years.  At the time, my father had a good job with a health care plan that paid 80% of the bills—that is, after my mother won the fight with the insurance company to actually cover the procedures.  But still, in Austin’s second year of life, the 20% co-pay was more than our family’s total annual income. And so, my dad had to get a job that paid more but required long hours, so he hardly ever was home to spend time with the family.

Years later, my family started their own business.  Within two years their premiums tripled.  My mom recalls, “As a small business we couldn’t budget for that increase.  You work with really tight margins and there’s no way to budget for an increase like that.  We had to put a cap on what we could offer our employees and we were competing with large companies that didn’t have that problem.”  They would have been able to take on an additional employee if not for the outrageous costs of health insurance.

My grandfather’s doctors advised him to retire early, after he had a second stroke at age 62.  But he was afraid to leave his job and lose his insurance, which also covered my grandmother. He’d been working for 54 years. (He started working on the family farm at age six and got his first “real” job when he was 11.) But he had to work longer than he should have in order to keep his family insured.

As for me:  I found myself uninsured a few years ago waking up in an ambulance.  I had slipped on the ice and was knocked unconscious by the concrete.  My first thought was “who was the jerk that called the ambulance?!  I can’t afford this.”  It wasn’t event, “what am I doing here?”

I wonder if people really understand all the hidden costs faced by American families like mine:  Moms are forced to fight insurance companies for the lifesaving surgery their newborn needs instead of devoting that energy to their sick child.  Dads are forced to work 80 hours a week to pay off medical bills, instead of spending that extra time with their young family.  Grandpas are forced to risk their health by working too hard against doctors’ orders.  Young people resist going to the ER because they don’t have insurance.  And small family businesses can’t hire another employee because they have to find a way to pay for health care coverage.

We really need to change this system.  The costs are just too high if we don’t.

Athena Ford, 26, grew up in Luzerne County, PA, and works at the Philadelphia Unemployment Project as a health care organizer.

Antoinette Kraus: At the age of 28, I feel pretty lucky that I have gone through life fully insured and with no major health problems. But I worry about family members who aren’t so fortunate. My mother was diagnosed with epilepsy at a very young age. When I was five, I was waiting at the school bus stop with my mom when she suffered a seizure. An ambulance came and she had to be rushed to the ER.  This happened several times during my childhood. At the time, of course, I didn’t realize how lucky my parents were to have excellent health coverage.  Without it, these ambulance trips to the ER could have led to years of medical debt, if not bankruptcy.

For my mother, going without health insurance has never been an option. Her first job out of college offered a choice: either a retirement plan or health care coverage.  The employer could not afford to offer both.  No one should ever have to choose between retirement and health care coverage. Now my mom receives health coverage from my father’s employer. My dad works for a large technology company that has been hit hard by the current economic recession. There have been major layoffs, and now all employees are forced to take two weeks of vacation at the same time to save money. If this cost-cutting measure fails, more layoffs are certain to occur. My parents live in a daily fear about what would happen if they lost their health insurance. They are just out of reach of being eligible for Medicare, and with no insurance they would have to pay over $1,300 a month just for prescription drugs. My mother needs these drugs, plus monthly visits to the doctor, to keep her from having life threatening attacks. Cobra would only cover them for a short time, and after that my mother would certainly be denied by insurance companies or at best have a high deductible plan because of her “preexisting condition.”

My sister was honorably discharged from the United States Marine Corps after being injured in the field, but she hadn’t been able to serve long enough to be fully covered by veteran’s benefits. She is covered only for the injury sustained while in the military but has to pay out of pocket for anything else. Because of a car accident several years ago, she has two herniated disks, three bulging disks and annual tears in her back muscles. She’s now more than $40,000 in debt from trips to the hospital. She’s been in and out of work for the past few years and on and off Medicaid.  At one time she was working at a local coffee shop, 30 hours a week at minimum wage with no health benefits. But she was making too much money to still be eligible for Medicaid. She couldn’t afford health insurance on her own—the rates were too high because of her “pre-existing conditions.” She wants to work, to pay her own way, but our health care system makes that impossible.

I am fighting for health care reform not just for my family but also fo all the people I have met over the past two years who have fallen through the cracks of our broken system. I am marching for my mother and my sister.  I am marching for every single person who has shared his or her health care story with me. I am marching for those I haven’t met who suffer in silence as victims of insurance companies. I am marching the 133 miles to Washington, D.C. because the issue touches me personally, because enough is enough, and because it’s time to deliver on health care reform.

Antoinette Kraus lives in Norristown, PA., and is the lead organizer for PA Health Access Network (PHAN). She grew up in Western, N.Y.