BEDFORD – 2006 was a bad year for Wayne Eddy.

In the spring he had a valve in his heart replaced, a surgery he had long been anticipating -- and dreading. Doctors had not set a specific date for the procedure, but the 62-year-old Goffstown resident knew it was time when the fall's cold weather made routine things like climbing the stairs an uphill battle.

"That fall, when it got cold, it just hit me like a ton of bricks," Eddy said.

The surgery came and went, and after three months of rehabilitation, Eddy was back to work as a computer programmer in June. That's when his health really started to deteriorate, he said.

He still can't quite describe his illness, but he knew something was wrong. At work, he found himself falling asleep at his desk, a habit that broke the patience of his employer. "The company got tired of that and fired me, which as you heard several times tonight meant no health insurance," Eddy said at a recent forum on health care in Bedford.

One week later he woke up feeling strange and called 911. In the hospital, he was told that he had a system-wide sepsis, or an infection, that was likely not related to the surgery he had had earlier that year.

His condition had a stroke-like effect on Eddy, confining him to a wheelchair, slurring his speech, and impairing his ability to think clearly. Early on, he even had trouble doing simple addition -- something that should have been second nature, he said, to the son of a math teacher.

About eight months later, Eddy is out of the wheelchair and has recovered enough to tell his story. Somehow months of medication, speech therapy and encouragement from his family has gotten him where he is today, he said.

Had it not been for a chance family connection that Eddy declined to discuss openly, he said his health crisis could have become a health-care crisis.

Eddy was one of about a dozen area residents who showed up recently to a health-care forum in the Bedford Public Library, sponsored by the Divided We Fail campaign, which officially kicked off in New Hampshire last week.

At the meeting, organizers handed out a brochure asking, "Am I just one medical emergency away from bankruptcy and financial ruin?"

For Eddy, that question resonates strongly. "I do know how close," he said, softly.

Long-term illness can be just as much of a financial burden as sudden illness, one Manchester woman told the forum. Deborah Fenton said the main reason she is still working, after her husband retired, is so she can receive the health-care benefits necessary to cover all the costs associated with her Crohn's disease, which involves the inflammation of the digestive tract.

As a result of the medicine she has been taking for Crohn's, Fenton said she also had developed diabetes. "So you now have two chronic diseases with no cure," Fenton said. "I have no chance."

Fenton also had to undergo surgery several years ago. She was scheduled to spend 12 weeks in the hospital recovering, but instead was kept there for five months. Soon after returning to her job, she was let go.

She filed a complaint against her employer. "I won," she said. "I prevailed, but I don't want to go through that again."

Now she works as a senior administrator for the AARP New Hampshire office. Without her job, Fenton said, she would not be able to afford the $4,500 cost of a three-month supply of durable medical supplies that she must have. Insurance pays for a lot, but Fenton and her husband still claimed $10,000 in medical expenses on their taxes last year.

Eddy's and Fenton's stories of how sickness, sudden or chronic, can combine with high costs to spell financial disaster sparked a spirited debate in the basement of the public library.

Participants considered three approaches to fixing the system: Get government more involved through a nationalized health-care plan or a guaranteed income program; focus on individual responsibility through private health and Social Security accounts; or combine the two approaches.

The two approaches came nowhere close to getting a consensus at the forum. Participants said they were wary of a single-payer, nationalized system, but they were equally worried about the go-it-alone approach of vesting all responsibility with individuals.

Businesses, individuals, communities and government should all be involved in the solution, they said. "It's a shared burden that's not shared across the board," said one small-business owner who wished to remain anonymous.

Representatives of the Divided We Fail campaign said they will host a number of these forums across the state, trying to collect public opinion on the issue and drive the message home to presidential candidates that they should be listening, too.

Divided We Fail has yet to issue a health-care plan of its own. More information is available by visiting www.dividedwefail.org.