People with health insurance — legislators, say — might have a hard time understanding what it’s like to be unable to see a doctor when seriously ill. A book that many lawmakers recently received tells them exactly what it is like, in the voices of their neighbors. They should keep it close at hand when they consider LD 1477.

“Living Without Health Care: Maine People Tell Their Stories” describes the difficulties of a mere 100 or so of the 188,000 Mainers without health-care coverage, but the lessons they offer can be applied broadly. The stories are of minor injuries that, untreated, become sources of chronic pain; of curable illness that becomes permanently debilitating; of more serious problems that become fatal.

Shirley, for instance, had a heart attack three years ago. She recently ran out of heart medicine and could not afford to buy more for three weeks, then had to borrow money from a neighbor to pay for the doctor’s visit to get the prescription filled. Or consider Ken, a 72-year-old with cancer and epilepsy. He pays $100 a month from Social Security for coverage but can’t afford prescriptions, so he depends on his doctor to find free samples for him to use. And there is Beth, who has a lump in her breast that she cannot afford to have checked out because last year she had a similar lump removed and is unable to pay off the $2,200 bill from the operation. Colleen has a heart condition and other health problems. She also has a daughter who is autistic and epileptic and who is about to turn 21, when she will lose her Medicaid insurance. Colleen has given up trying to pay for her own health care and is now worried about how she will pay for her daughter’s.

New parents and grandparents, singles and couples, almost all of these people work, have spouses who work or did work until retirement. They are part of Maine’s great economic boom that has driven unemployment rates down but has failed to push salaries up. They make $6 or $7 or $8 an hour and cannot afford hundreds of dollars a month in health care. Though their children may be covered through Medicaid, they do without, often painfully without.

LD 1477 doesn’t try to cover everyone who needs health insurance. It takes only the 10,400 adults whose incomes fall beneath 150 percent of poverty and gives them the kind of coverage their kids have through the recently expanded Medicaid program. The proposal would cost Maine between $3 million and $4 million a year, to be paid for through the money the state will receive as part of the tobacco settlement. The other two-thirds of the needed funding would come from the federal Medicaid program.

Without LD 1477, two logical conclusions that working poor parents could and sometimes do make is to either leave their jobs so that they qualify for Medicaid coverage or leave their spouses so that at least one of them qualifies. These are terrible choices to put before people desperate for health care.

LD 1477 is a humane act and an affordable act. It gives Maine’s working families the basic care they deserve and need to remain healthy for themselves and their children.