Republican state attorney general Rob McKenna is trying to overturn the newly passed health-insurance reforms by suing the federal government. If he gets his way, he'll repeal health protections for millions of people in Washington who previously had restricted coverage, risked losing their coverage, or had no coverage. Like these people.

A few years ago, after months of feeling under the weather, Marcelas Owens's mother, Tiffany Owens, began vomiting blood. As Marcelas tells it, she called her supervisor at Jack in the Box and said she was too sick to come to work. The supervisor told Tiffany she'd been taking too many sick days already and she now had a choice: show up or be let go.

Tiffany lost her job, and with it her health insurance.

This was October of 2006. A short while later, she was diagnosed with pulmonary hypertension. It's a tough-to-beat disease with no known cure, but with proper medical care and treatment, people who have it can live 20 years or more. Unable to access regular medical care, Owens was in and out of emergency rooms, and then, in June of 2007, she died at the age of 27, when Marcelas was 8.

If his mother had been able to get health insurance after she lost her job, 11-year-old Marcelas said in a phone interview with The Stranger, "I think she would have at least had a fighting chance against the disease. I couldn't say whether she would have lived or died because I'm not a doctor, but I think she would have at least had a fighting chance to live with the disease a bit longer."

The health-care reform law provides options for people facing situations such as the one Tiffany Owens faced—people with a "preexisting condition," no job, and limited financial resources for getting on a health plan. It prevents insurance companies from denying coverage to someone just because that person has, say, pulmonary hypertension. It also provides tax credits to help lower-income people pay for insurance.

After hearing about Marcelas, who goes to elementary school in Columbia City, Senator Patty Murray began telling policy makers what had happened to him and his mother. The Washington Community Action Network then paid to send Marcelas to the nation's capitol to lobby, testify, speak about his mother, and, ultimately, stand right next to President Obama as the bill was signed.

"It was exciting because I know that I helped, that I had a small part in helping with the health-care bill being signed," Marcelas said. "I don't want any other kid to lose a family member because they're not as rich as some people, or have to choose between food or medical attention."

Now far fewer kids will have to experience losing a parent too soon for lack of good health care, like Marcelas did. That is, unless Rob McKenna wins his lawsuit. ELI SANDERS

Carrie Sellar, a 38-year-old self-­employed mother, has been denied health coverage for a condition she doesn't have anymore. It's called AV nodal reentrant tachycardia, two short circuits in her heart's electrical system that used to cause her heart rate to jump suddenly, making her short of breath and giving her headaches. Doctors corrected the condition a decade ago. "They went in through my femoral artery and pushed an electrode into my heart," she says. "They mapped the electrical pathways to figure out where the fault was, zapped the short circuits to destroy them, and it was pretty much done. It's a neat treatment."

Even though the condition is cured, it continues to haunt her. Sellar, an independent logistics consultant, makes enough money to buy insurance for herself and her daughter in the open market, but insurance companies don't like her history of tachycardia. "They send you a great fat packet about your parents' health and your grandparents' health, what you eat, what you weigh," she says. "And on the front page was a list of conditions and boxes to check. If you've ever been treated for one of those, they tell you not to bother filling out the rest of the form, just go to the back and sign your name. And it's like: 'Oh, that can't be good.'"

Predictably, she was denied coverage.

For now, Sellar and her 8-year-old daughter, Morgan, have health insurance via Sellar's partner, who gets it from the company where he works. But having to depend on that limits their lives. He's frustrated about having to keep his current job when he'd rather work for a nonprofit that wants to hire him, but that nonprofit can't cover his family's health-insurance needs; Sellar is frustrated about her dependence on her partner's insurance when she could afford her own.

Under the new health-care law, insurance companies are barred from denying coverage to people because of preexisting conditions. McKenna, in pushing his lawsuit, would strip people like Sellar of the ability to purchase their own coverage.

"I was proactive and got my problem fixed years ago, and now it's a penalty," Sellar says. "It's ridiculous." She argues that it's not McKenna's place to spend taxpayer money to undo the work of our elected representatives in Washington, D.C. "He's not going to stop health reform," she says. "He is just going to spend a lot of our money—when we don't have any—on his personal political grandstanding." BRENDAN KILEY

Barry Faught is excited to finally buy his staff health insurance. He employs two people and himself at the Soho Coffee Company in the Central District, and all of them have been without health insurance for almost two years now. Faught's motto has been "Don't get sick." He says, "You don't realize how big of a deal [getting sick] is until one person can't cover their shift." Preventative medical care and access to a doctor would help Faught and his employees avoid medical emergencies and help them recover faster when they do get ill.

Among its other benefits, the new federal law grants business owners with fewer than 50 employees a tax credit (covering 35 percent of health-care premiums now, increasing to 50 percent by 2014) to help cover insurance costs. Faught researched insurance plans for months in anticipation of the bill's passing. "It's still a big expense," he says, "but it's also finally manageable. I'm proud to be able to cover my employees."

State attorney general Rob McKenna is suing the federal government to prevent insurance from becoming affordable for Faught. In Washington's 7th Congressional District, comprising Seattle and Vashon Island, the law immediately helps 21,300 small businesses afford insurance coverage—to say nothing of the estimated 142,300 other small businesses in the state—according to a study conducted by the U.S. House Committee on Energy and Commerce.

"Health insurance obviously isn't as important to Rob as it is to us," Faught says, "since he's already got it." Every tax-paying resident in the state already pays for McKenna's insurance plan—and his paycheck—which means that if McKenna suffers from exhaustion while fighting to kill insurance reform, he can afford to see a doctor.

"Every small-business owner in the state should be pissed off at Rob McKenna," Faught says. "We've been uninsured for too long. It's time for small-business owners to fight for this." CIENNA MADRID