“I told him I wasn’t going to let other people’s children die because they can’t get health care,” the 62-year-old said. “I told him that I’d try to change things.

“I’m not very good at speaking, but I swore I’d talk about this. If I could save just one child, that would mean something. Eric was 33 years old. That’s not a child to you folks, but he was to me.”

Bill and his wife Donna were in the Knox County Health Department for Monday afternoon’s news conference with Rep. Phil Hare, D-Rock Island. The topic was health care.

Or, better yet, the estimated 47 million Americans who lack medical insurance. The Fairs offered an all-too-familiar story.

Their son Eric worked at Butler Manufacturing for eight years before he was laid off in 2001. Over the course of the next five years, he was the present-day equivalent of the migrant workers who populated the American West in the 1920s and 1930s.

“Eric fell into a gap,” Bill said. “He worked temp after temp job. Sometimes he’d be laid off, sometimes he got fed up and left.

“But he never got health care.”

After Hurricane Katrina, Eric found a job in Mississippi doing steel roofing with a contractor. He told his dad he liked the work. But one day the contractor shut down the operation and Eric was stuck in Mississippi for a time.

Chest pains caused Eric to make a visit to a Quad Cities hospital in 2006. According to Bill, the doctors there gave Eric a brief test and sent him home. Eric returned to a hospital in February 2007 complaining of more chest pains and a cold. He was given antibiotics.

Bill and Donna’s son died following heart failure a little over a year later. An autopsy showed his arteries were 80 to 90 percent blocked by plaque.

“I believe quality health care is a right, not a privilege,” Hare said. “People are dying because they don’t have affordable access to health care. This is a black eye on our nation.”

Bill and Donna’s story isn’t much different from millions of other uninsured Americans. Bill worked for 38 years at Butler and took early retirement in 2003. At that time, health insurance for him and his wife cost $486 a month. He took a part-time job to make ends meet.

A year after retiring, Bill’s health insurance premiums rose to $1,700 a month. The Fairs were forced to drop out of the plan. Their life insurance through Butler was dropped the next year.

Donna had a heart attack the day her son died. In short time, the Fairs were mired in $140,000 of debt. Bill makes $8 an hour at his job and has a $3,000 deductible on his health insurance.

For the Fairs, death is more cost effective than living. More will face that stark reality as employers large and small struggle to provide health insurance for their employees.

According to the National Coalition on Health Care, employment-based health insurance premiums have increased 100 percent since 2000. Cumulative inflation rose 24 percent and cumulative wage growth gained 21 percent during the same period.

The Kaiser Family Foundation and the Health Research and Educational Trust estimated premiums for employer-sponsored health insurance in the United States rose four times faster on average than workers’ earnings since 2000.

Few employers and employees can keep pace.

“We need some kind of health care system for all people,” Bill said. “I’m not talking about me and my wife. Our destiny is done. The debt will never go away. I’ll go to the bank tomorrow and finish borrowing the money to pay off my son’s funeral.”

The man who spent a lifetime working at Butler Manufacturing sobbed a bit and clenched his fists.

“It isn’t supposed to be this way in this country,” the angry father said.

His next words might read like a sermon, but they were delivered in a near-trembling, halting tumble weighed down by anguish and regret.

“I believe the Lord is our Savior,” Bill said. “People talk about God’s plan. But God didn’t take my child. God didn’t intend for parents to bury their children. The system took my child.”

Donna grasped his hand. Husband and wife are never going to win awards for oratory. That isn’t the point.

Perhaps eloquence is nothing more than truth spoken plainly.
Donna found her own words after Hare talked some more about the political fight for universal health care coverage.

“The people out there sit back and just take it,” she said. “You should stand up and fight. You’re fighting for your kids.”