Like many waiting Tuesday afternoon at the Chippewa Valley Free Clinic, Kristin Baker needs help finding health care.

"I’m uninsured, I’m unemployed, and I’m taking care of my mom,” says Baker. “We're up here from Alma Center trying to scrape gas money to come up here because she's got COPD."

She says she even when she was employed, her health care was inadequate.

"They found out I had a pre-existing conditions and they dropped me instantly and it's just bogus they way they treat people," she says.

And recently published research by Dr. Jennifer Johs-Artisensi, Dr. Eric Jamelske, Dr. Lois Taft, Katherine German-Olson, and Cindy Wold-Schmidt at UW-Eau Claire in the Wisconsin Medical Journal shows Baker's not alone in her wish for better health care.

“People know that the system is broken, they just don't know how to fix it, and they’re looking to their legislators and policy makers for the answers," says German-Olson.

According to two related studies done over the past two years, 68 percent of the 222 people surveyed thought there are major problems with the health care system. Out of that same group, 90 percent favor a universal health care system.

Many of the people surveyed say it's tough having health care plans tied to employment, because so many people are losing their jobs and losing their benefits.

But Baker says politicians, even the ones fighting for universal health care, really don't understand what it's like to be uninsured or underinsured.

"If they had to live how 90 percent of Americans have to live, I bet they'd do something about it," she says.

The researchers say Wisconsin has an advantage over other states because it offers Badger Care for people who are otherwise uninsured, but they say Badger Care still doesn't fully cover all medical conditions.

Meanwhile, in Washington today, a key senate committee got down to the nitty-gritty, plowing through hundreds of ideas to come up with a plan to fix the nation's health care system.

Senators on the finance committee hope they can sign off on a plan that can at least come up for a vote.

Researchers at UW-Eau Claire say they had hoped their research would be timely, but never realized when they started this project two years ago the storm that would be brewing over health care now.