KANSAS CITY, Mo. – Fear of losing their health insurance if they change jobs haunts nearly three-fourths of American workers, according to a survey released Tuesday by the AFL-CIO.

More than 26,000 individuals responded during a seven-week “Health Care for America” survey, accessible at www.healthcaresurvey.aflcio.org.

Working America, an affiliate organization of the labor federation, co-sponsored the survey, in which 95 percent of the respondents said they were dissatisfied with the cost of health care, and 64 percent said they were dissatisfied with the quality.

Three-fourths of the respondents had some kind of health care coverage, with about four-fifths of them obtaining it through employers.

The results are being sent to candidates running for public office this year, said AFL-CIO President John Sweeney.

The labor organization rejects John McCain’s health care proposals as “status quo” and insufficient to correct deficiencies in the health care system.

It has not yet endorsed either Hillary Clinton’s or Barack Obama’s proposals, but officials said both offer more promising suggestions to correct current cost and access problems.

“We knew people were hurting,” Sweeney said. “The response we received was stunning enough – both in content and sheer volume – to redefine the debate over health care in America, during the election season and beyond.”

Sweeney noted in a conference call to reporters that “conventional wisdom says it’s the uninsured who care most about health care reform,” but the survey results challenged that perception.

“Most of our survey respondents are employed and are college graduates and many are union members. They’re the lucky ones – except they’re not. … They’re struggling to pay doctors’ bills and skipping medications because of the costs,” Sweeney said.

One survey respondent, a woman identified as Jennifer from Independence, Mo., described the trouble she has getting health care for her 2-year-old daughter who has breathing problems.

A single, working mother, Jennifer said she earned too much to qualify for Medicaid assistance and had been unable to find an insurance company willing to cover her daughter on the private market.

“They tell me I would be better off to quit my job,” she wrote on the survey. “I would lose our house and all I have worked for. Instead we pray for another healthy day and hope her lungs mature. For today a mother is helpless, a child suffers, and this is America.”

Among survey respondents who had health insurance, about half said it did not cover all the care they needed at a price they could afford.

Prescription drugs were ranked as the most unaffordable element of health care.

Guy Molyneux, a partner with Peter D. Hart Research Associates who analyzed the survey results, said a third of respondents said their insurance companies had at some time “refused to cover them for something that should have been covered through their policies.”

So they “have to fight to get coverage due them,” Molyneux said.

Others, he said, “make excruciating choices” between paying for health care or rent and utilities.

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AP-NY-03-25-08 1903EDT