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We all know health care in this nation has reached a crisis point. And we’ve heard the stats: 47 million people went without health coverage at some point in 2005, with the ranks of the uninsured rising by 6.8 million since 2000.

The crisis has gotten so bad, it’s no longer only people who are unemployed or working at low-income jobs who are without health coverage. Seems that more than one-third of those without health insurance—17 million of the nearly 47 million—have family incomes of $40,000 or more, according to the Employee Benefit Research Institute, a nonpartisan organization. More than two-thirds of the uninsured are in households with at least one full-time worker.

People like Amy. Amy is a married mother with two children but has had no health insurance since 2000. Now, Amy’s teenage son broke his hand in three different places and needs reconstructive surgery.

    We don't qualify for the state's health plan, because according to them, we make too much money.

    We have over $8,000 in medical bills and credit cards used to cover medical bills and groceries so we could pay cash for some of the medical bills! The creditors call us numerous times daily and are threatening to garnish our bank account, wages and all other assets they can find in our names.

Help! We're drowning! We're living paycheck to paycheck, with no end in sight!

Amy described her story as part of Working America’s “In the Heart of the Health Care Hustle,” an interactive online project to gather stories from America’s workers and channel that outrage into action. Working America, made up of nearly more than 1.5 million members, is the community affiliate of the AFL-CIO.

Although the Health Care Hustle site doesn’t officially launch until tomorrow, already more than 200 people have contributed their stories detailing their struggles to pay for health care for themselves and their families, tales of frustration with bureaucratic nightmares and worse, descriptions of loved ones who have passed away for lack of health care. Clearly, people are hungry for a way to share their painful experiences—because too many have nowhere else to turn.

Laurie Love (not her real name) is one of them.

    I was lucky enough to receive a transplant that saved my life. Unfortunately, this means that I may always be poor due to paying bills, medications, and the many things that aren't covered like healthy foods, vitamins, and items that are essential to take care of my new organ and my changing health. I have gone through bankruptcy once, and I have just been sent to collections again.

    The first bankruptcy had items listed as far back as 12 years when I was 17 years old. This time my payments had gone to a different account which resulted in collections turnover, even though I was paying an amount every month….After too many years of this, I would never have thought to look there for such important information. So once again I'm paying more for less…and I have insurance! How do Americans keep up?

While those who are uninsured face loss of homes and life savings, the rest of us also pick up the bill for our broken health care system. Families with health insurance pay premiums that are $922 higher each year to cover the health care costs of the uninsured. Taxpayers foot the bill at $21 billion a year when workers are forced to turn to government health care programs.

The AFL-CIO supports universal health care, and two weeks ago, the AFL-CIO Executive Council approved a statementsaying such a system should be built upon the nation’s most successful universal health coverage plan for seniors—Medicare.

In the meantime, the Health Care Hustle provides multiple options for taking action now. You can send an e-mail to one or all of the big health care “hustlers”: Big Pharma, the insurance industry, greedy corporations and Bush & Co.

PhRMa—Big Pharma—the official lobbying organization of the pharmaceutical industry, is raking it in while the rest of us pay. The cost of prescription drugs is now rising an average of 15 percent a year and the industry is making record profits.

PhRMa argues drug companies need to charge high prices so they can spend more money on research. But the seven largest drug manufacturers spend an average of twice as much money on marketing, advertising and administration than on research and development. Further, as Dr. Marcia Angell points out:

    The industry’s principal output is minor variations or combinations of old drugs—“me-too” drugs. These drugs cash in on already established, lucrative markets. For example, the world’s top-selling drug, Pfizer’s Lipitor, is the fourth of six cholesterol-lowering drugs of the same type.

Angell, former editor-in-chief of The New England Journal of Medicine, has a lot more great—and deeply disturbing—facts about the real deal behind the drug industry in her book, The Truth About Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It.

Meantime, drug companies also are paying big bucks to their CEOs. Henry "Hank" A. McKinnell, the former CEO of Pfizer Inc., retired in 2005 with more than $6.5 million in pay and benefits. His retirement package was second highest in the country, only behind the retiring CEO of Exxon Mobil Corp., Lee Raymond.

In 2003, PhRMa increased its lobbying budget to $150 million. According to The New York Times, the money was earmarked to lobby the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, state governments, Congress and to fight Canadian drug imports. The money also was used to develop "a standing network of economists and thought leaders to speak against federal price control regulations."

Turns out, 2003 also was the year that Big Pharma won a really big boondoggle, when the Bush administration and Republican Congress passed a Medicare prescription drug bill that barred Medicare from negotiating drug costs, as do the Veterans Affairs and other governmental organizations. House Democrats released a report last fall that showed drug manufacturers’ profits increased by more than $8 billion in the first six months after the Medicare drug plan went into effect.

Earlier this year, in its first 100 days, the new House passed by a 255–170 vote a bill that will require Medicare to negotiate with drug companies for lower prices. But, so far, no action in the Senate.

So let’s turn our outrage into action and tell Big Pharma, Big Business, Big Insurance and not so Big Bush it’s time for action. And if you have a story to share, the Health Care Hustle site is the place to go. Working America is listening.

Related posts:

  1. Breaking: Pelosi Unveils Merged House Health Care Reform Bill
  2. Funds Spent This Year by Health Care Lobby Would Have Insured All Who Died from Lack of Insurance
  3. Early Morning Swim: KO and Dr. Mehmet Oz Discuss Health Care Fairs
  4. Baucus Health Care Bill: In a Word, Awful
  5. Health Care: Jim McGovern Sets Them Up, Knocks Them Down in the Rules Committee