By Doug Cunningham

[Booth]: “There’s at a minimum 18,000 people a year who die because they didn’t have health insurance.”

Heather Booth, director of the AFL-CIO’s campaign for universal health care coverage. The campaign is building a million-person army of activists to make universal health care a focus of the 2008 presidential election in an effort to secure universal health care coverage in the U.S. by 2009.

[Booth 2]: “Our focus in this AFL-CIO health care reform campaign is to build together that kind of army with educating and engaging our members, inoculating them against some of these lies and false statements that are gonna be said, and then in organizing, organizing, organizing.”

More than fifteen thousand people have responded to the AFL-CIO’s online health care survey at healthcaresurvey.afl-cio.org. Booth says the stories of suffering under America’s current health care system are heartbreaking and come from people in all walks of life.