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 45,000 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
Mike 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, 2008. He was 33.
Mike is one of an estimated 45,000 people who die every year 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.
We want 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.
Latest Posts
Snowed out
The Consumers Union Activists’ Summit got postponed, so I’ll have time to write some letters to members of Congress and some grant proposals. Washington is snowed in, which means members of Congress are there to receive our letters. We need to keep up the pressure and let our legislators know we want health care done right [...]Dreary days
More rain, ice and snow. We haven’t had four consecutive dry days in weeks and my yard is a mud pit. It’s hard to keep up one’s energy. But things are taking off, and we’re looking for ways to raise money for Life o’ Mike. Word is spreading, and I frequently run into people I don’t [...]We have an office
We signed the lease on an office today. I was hoping for something downtown in Asheville, but I never thought we’d be able to afford anything. I came across this one quite by chance. I had been at a Homeless Coalition meeting at the United Way building. After the meeting I crossed the hall to the [...]Never give up!
As they say in “Galaxy Quest,: Never give up! Never Surrender! I’m heading to Sen. Kay Hagan’s Asheville office this afternoon with a group sponsored by MoveOn.org to deliver a survey that shows many North Carolinians won’t work to support candidates who didn’t come through on health care. With five people dying every hour, this is not [...]What a day!
Tuesday was an amazing day. I met 14 remarkable people who have struggled with the broken health care system. Kelly and David Arellanes had to go through bankruptcy after she fell off a horse and hit her head and the insurance company covered next to nothing. Heather Mroz had her insurance policy cancelled just before [...]
Our first class
We held our first Patient Pals and Family Friends training yesterday, a four-hour session that included a lunch of homemade soups and bread (I cooked most of Friday).
The training went well and we expect to tweak the curriculum with suggestions from this first class and hold another training, tentatively scheduled for Feb. 27.
You can sign up [...]
Recent Comments