We are an advocacy and education group. Our purpose is to educate the public and government officials about the disastrous state of the current health care system and the toll it takes on Americans and their families.

Every year, some 30,000 Americans die prematurely because they didn’t have access to health care. Mike’s story is just the one we know, but it’s hardly the only one.

We are not a political group; we work to bring people together in hopes of reaching a workable solution. Register and share your experience.

Your Stories

Bobby Butterworth

My Friend, Bobby Butterworth had some chest pains a month ago, on a Thursday. We told him to go to the ER. He decided to wait the evening, because he had no insurance - He felt a hospital bill would bankrupt him and leave him on the street (the ER asks for money up front [...]

Story o' Mike

intheparkMike was Michael Timothy Danforth, an egomaniac with self-esteem issues. He was a smart, funny, generous, wise and loving person who died because he didn’t have health insurance.

That meant he couldn’t afford the colonoscopy that might have found his cancer before it was too late. He died April 1. He was 33.

Mike is one of an estimated 200,000 people who have died in the last eight years because they didn’t have insurance and so didn’t have access to the lifesaving diagnostic tests, or diabetic supplies that would help them monitor blood glucose, or medication that would help lower blood pressure.

Our mission is to put faces to those numbers. Tell us your story. Post blogs, post photos. Let everyone see that good people are dying — beloved people. After all, every one of those people was loved as much as we all loved Mike.

Letter Writing Party

Join us in 0 days at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Asheville for our next letter writing party. The party starts at 11:15 a.m. on Sunday, June 21. We’ll have paper, pens, statistics, ideas and stamped envelopes and post cards so we can remind our legislators that we really want meaningful reform now, and that we’re counting on their votes.

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Ask them what they're doing to fix health care!

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    Latest Posts

    What else can we do?

    As everyone wrangles with health reform legislation, let’s also talk about ways we can reduce our own risk of getting sick. Apparently some of us need some real motivation to live healthier lives. Here at the Asheville Citizen-Times, people who smoke cigarettes are charged more for health insurance than people who don’t. I’m just waiting for them [...]

    Where Mike is

    I was feeling so sad and tired today after the activism of the last few weeks. The sermon at church was the story from Mark of the synogogue official whose daughter was dying. He grabs Jesus and implores him to come heal his daughter. He was desperate. But on the way, a woman who has been [...]

    A good day for advocacy in Asheville

    WNC for Change sponsored a health care rally this mkorning in Pritchard Park, where we had our rally last fall. We drew about 175 people then; 300 came out today. It was amazing. I was the keynote speaker, so I got to tell Mike’s story. I asked people to visit our site and leave a story [...]

    Doesn’t surprise me a bit

    Today’s Washington Post has a story about how the health insurance companies deciced on how much they would  pay policy-holders for visits to out-of-network physicians based in a “customary” charge that was calculated by the insurance industry. They routinely shortchanged policy-holders by nearly 30 percent, costing consumers billions. The practice was detailed today in a US Senate Finance Committee [...]

    Flexible

    I went to a WNC Health Partners session on advocacy tonight and the most important word I heard was “flexible.” One man spoke about how we can’t settle for anything less than a single-payer system. I spoke up and told him we did all-or-nothing last time and got nothing. This time, we have to listen, and we [...]

    Another poll on health care

    Most people agree the system is broken and most of them support some government involvement, from regulation of the private sector to a full-on single-payer plan — or something in the middle. From the article in the NY Times: “The national telephone survey, which was conducted from June 12 to 16, found that 72 percent of those questioned supported [...]

    More letters, more voices

    We had two letter-writing parties in Asheville today and we had 41 letters written to federal lawmakers. A dozen more people took our “What you can do” flyer home and wrote letters there. All in all, a productive day. I don’t know what the letters said - we don’t read them. One woman told me she was going [...]