By Brian Boyce
The Tribune-Star

TERRE HAUTE — Donna Smith and her husband, Larry, spent a lifetime building their American dream. As a daily newspaper editor and a machinist, with six grown children and retirement just around the corner, the two Baby Boomers from South Dakota never imagined that within a matter of months they could become bankrupt, homeless and without transportation, all because of unexpected illness.

After all, they both had health insurance through their employers.

“Nobody is talking about what’s happening to the insured, the middle class, in this country,” Donna Smith said. “I decided I would no longer stay neutral on the issue of health care.”

She and other volunteers with Healthcare-NOW traveled to the office of U.S. Rep. Brad Ellsworth’s, D-Evansville, in Terre Haute on Tuesday as part of the nationwide Sicko-Cure road show in conjunction with representatives of U.S. Rep. John Conyers Jr., D-Mich.

The 501c3 organization is touting Conyers’ H.R. Bill 676 as the most viable means of providing universal health-care coverage to all Americans.

The group also promotes the recent film “Sicko” by activist Michael Moore, which investigates the health care/financial industrial complex. Smith and her husband are featured in the film.

“H.R. 676 is the only bill that will make health care right for you,” said Olivia Boykins, special assistant to Conyers.

The bill — which now has 85 co-sponsors in the House — is titled “The United States National Health Insurance Act,” or the “Expanded and Improved Medicare for All Act,” and would expand the current Medicare system universally to all American citizens regardless of age or economic status.

The proposal is gaining local supporters as well. Bill Treash of the Wabash Valley Central Labor Committee and Bionca Gambill of the League of Women Voters attended the meeting with Ellsworth’s representatives, hoping to sway his support to the bill.

“I thought it was very good,” Treash said of the meeting afterward. “We jumped on board in 2006.” He added praise for Ellsworth — who is currently in Washington D.C. — and staff in that “we feel truly we have someone we can talk to, and that means a lot, where before the door was shut.”

To meet the financial requirements for including all citizens under the program, the bill asks that payroll taxes be raised 3.3 percent to 4.5 percent, matched both ways by employee and employer. But, as the supporters point out, this would negate the need for third-party payers and most private insurance.

“This is not socialized medicine,” Boykins said. “It’s a single-payer system.”

Boykins argues that payroll tax increase will be more than negated by the savings in health-insurance premiums to industry and employees alike.

The plan also has provisions for increasing Medicare reimbursements to providers and shoring up what even Boykins and other supporters acknowledged were logistical problems in the past.

“Who does this not touch?” she asked, citing examples of health-care costs harming automotive giants such as Chrysler and General Motors all the way down to the self-employed.

For the Smith family, the problem was not lack of insurance, it was simply the overwhelming complexity of co-pays, deductibles, prescription costs and out-of-pocket expenses.

When Donna was diagnosed with cancer, those loophole expenses overwhelmed the couple who were already covering her husband’s ongoing heart disease. Soon they were behind on everything from their mortgage to credit cards and their grown children had become cash-strapped from loaning them money. Finally, the Smiths filed for bankruptcy protection, surrendered their home and moved in with one of their daughters.

“It was humiliating,” Donna almost sobbed as she recounted the expressions friends and family gave her when finding out she was bankrupt.

Healthcare-NOW, as part of their Terre Haute stop, offered a screening of “Sicko” later last evening at Indiana State University’s Holmstedt Hall. Their next stop will be this morning in Bloomington with the staff of U.S. Rep. Baron Hill, D-Bloomington.

More information on H.R. 676 is available online at www.healthcare-now.org.