Advocates for working poor deliver petitions for health-care reform

When Jim Cooksey met a homeless man outside Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch's office, he saw his fellow boilermakers' futures without a revamped health care system.

Cooksey, a member of Utah's boilermaker union, had his shop closed down last March because they weren't getting enough orders. Of his 16 employees, three of them have wives with terminal cancer. None of them can afford health care insurance without making some serious sacrifices to pay for treatment.

"They're going to have to lose their home, their car, and they've accepted as fact that this is going to happen to them," he said.

His brother can't afford a necessary bypass surgery. It costs more than his house.

"That is just wrong in this country," he said.

Utah's working-poor advocates like Cooksey are holding out for President Obama's health care reform to step in and save the day. Cooksey was one of about a dozen Utahns and MoveOn.org members who delivered petitions, with 867 signatures, for a public health care option to the offices of Republicans Hatch, Sen. Bob Bennett and Democratic Rep. Jim Matheson Thursday afternoon.

It's in line with Obama's proposed public health care plan to lower health care costs and obligate employers to offer affordable health care to their employees, without exclusion, because of a pre-existing condition. It's also supposed to give Americans a choice between staying with their current provider and switching to public health insurance.

The advocates delivered their petitions the day after Hatch walked out of a bipartisan group of Finance Committee members drafting the health care bill, a proposition he vocally opposes. Hatch and other critics of the health care reform plan complain that it will drive up costs for employers, create unfair competition, put the government between Americans and their physicians and turn health care into a bureaucratic nightmare.

For some of those who delivered the petition, however, health insurance is already a nightmare.

Terry Mitchell, a real estate agent who couldn't get insured because of what health insurance companies determined was a preexisting condition. She'd been in a car accident in October 2006. Her doctors found a lesion on her spine that could either be from the accident or stage-four cancer.

"They told me if I'm not dead by April, then it's not cancer," and showed her the door, she said.

Hatch and Bennett's representatives who accepted the petitions declined to comment.

The Associated Press contributed to this story.

e-mail: mmcfall@desnews.com