DES MOINES, IOWA — With portions of the Iowa Health Care Reform Act taking effect today, Iowa for Health Care joined with the Lieutenant Governor and state legislators to celebrate the progress being made in Iowa toward improving access to quality health care -- while also calling for national solutions to the crisis.

Beginning today, legislation passed here in Iowa makes it harder for insurance companies to exclude people with pre-existing conditions and allows young adults to be covered by their parents’ plans until age 25. Eventually, the act will provide coverage for the state’s 50,000 uninsured children.

Among those applauding the new measures is Sarah Posekany, a health care voter from Cedar Falls. “At 20, after several surgeries led me to take a semester off school, I was dropped from my parents' insurance plan. This led to hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt and eventual bankruptcy,” she said. “I'm now ineligible for student loans and can't go back to school. This necessary new health care bill will give young adults a cushion of time after high school so that what happened to me never has to happen in this state again.”

Iowa for Health Care is working to make health care a top issue in federal, state and local elections. There is no time to waste. Health care costs are skyrocketing, and more than 47 million Americans have no coverage at all – including over 240,000 in the state of Iowa.

“Even as we celebrate success here in Iowa, presidential candidate John McCain has proposed a national health care plan that would allow insurance companies to ignore these patient protections and state laws,” said Kirsten Running-Marquardt, director of Iowa for Health Care. “It would make it harder for Americans to get coverage and would do nothing to control rising costs, while delivering another taxpayer-financed gift to insurance industry profits.”

Running-Marquardt was joined at today’s press conference, held on the steps of the state capitol, by Lt. Gov. Patty Judge, State Sen. Jack Hatch and State Rep. Ro Foege. At the event, she distributed a report detailing how John McCain’s health care proposals would make it harder for Americans to get coverage, would jeopardize quality by eroding consumer protections, and would do nothing to prevent the continuing escalation of costs.

Today’s event was sponsored by “The Road to American Health Care,” a national bus tour aimed at mobilizing voters around comprehensive health care reform. The bus tour is being organized by SEIU, the largest union of health care workers in North America, as part of a sweeping campaign to elect a new President and Congress committed to fixing health care -- and then make sure those newly elected leaders immediately pass comprehensive legislation that makes quality health care affordable for everyone.