COEUR d'ALENE — When Chenoa Crettol's son, a full-time electrician raising a family in North Idaho, needed health care, he couldn’t pay for it.

He was among more than 75,000 Idahoans who made up "the gap" — the hard spot felt by Idahoans whose earnings aren’t high enough to afford insurance, or low enough to qualify for federal health care programs.

Crettol, whose son lived for a while in what has been referred to as the Medicaid gap, said she and her employer, Idaho Forest Group, are supporting Idaho’s Proposition 2 in an effort to fill the gap.

Prop 2, which is on the Nov. 6 ballot, seeks to expand Medicaid eligibility to everyone under 138 percent of the poverty line.

Crettol, head of human resources for the Laclede and Athol plants, addressed a group of about 45 gathered on the green lawn of Heritage Health Tuesday afternoon to support the Medicaid expansion initiative.

Mike Baker, CEO of Heritage Health — whose employer, once called the Dirne Health Clinic, operated twice per week in Coeur d’Alene providing free health care, or care on a sliding scale, to the area’s uninsured — said the people who fall within the gap are not unemployed. People who don’t have access to health care are often people with good jobs and families who are unable to pay high health care costs.

So, they simply go without.

“This place started as a volunteer clinic to provide health care for people who couldn’t access it,” Baker said.

The clinic has grown to one of the largest in North Idaho with 160,000 patient visits last year “regardless of your ability to pay or your insurance status,” he said.

An estimated 10,000 Kootenai County residents fall within the gap’s parameters, he said.

Passing Proposition 2 would cover those previously uninsured, and create jobs in the medical field statewide, he said, as Nancy Mertz watched from the crowd.

Mertz was inspired by a group of high school students walking through the rain last spring in support of student victims of a Florida shooting.

The student march prompted Mertz of Coeur d’Alene to take up the cause for Prop 2.

“I can’t sit on my couch” Mertz thought. “This is a democracy. We have the right to petition our government. We have to participate.”

Mertz joined the effort, going door to door to help gather 175,000 signatures — about 15,000 more than required — to get Proposition 2 on the ballot.

She was surprised at the response across the political spectrum, she said, from people who supported the initiative.

“I did it every day for weeks, for months,” Mertz said. “This is a very citizen-backed initiative.”

Opponents of the measure say that most people who would fall under a Medicaid expansion do not work.

“Data from numerous ObamaCare expansion states reveal that, if new enrollees are not required to work, they will not work — at all,” Wayne Hoffman of the Idaho Freedom Foundation wrote in an August column. “Based on recent research, this conclusion bodes ill for Idaho should Medicaid expansion pass in November.”

Tuesday’s speakers opposed Hoffman’s perspective.

“This is not an entitlement,” Rep. Luke Malek said. “We’re talking about people working hard to make ends meet. We need to give them access to coverage. It’s part of a bigger job we have.”