A woman who stood for justice has passed.

Year in and year out, Evelyn Coke left her Queens house early to go to the homes of elderly, sick, often dying people. She bathed them, cooked for them, helped them dress and monitored their medications. She sometimes worked three consecutive 24-hour shifts. She sometimes worked 70 hours a week.

She loved the work, but she earned only around $7 an hour and got no overtime pay. For years Ms. Coke, a single mother of five, quietly grumbled, and then, quite uncharacteristically, rebelled. In a case that reached the Supreme Court in 2007, Ms. Coke sued to reverse federal labor regulations that exempt home care agencies from having to pay overtime.

The Supreme Court’s answer was, essentially, “It’s hard to get good help these days, and so expensive. What do these people expect?”

In most occupations we take it for granted that we get paid time and a half for working overtime. That is a hard-won concession, a benefit of the labor movement. Working multiple shifts takes away from family time, from personal time, from sleep.

Evelyn Coke did not get to enjoy a healthy retirement. She was badly injured in a car accident. She was only 74 when she died, her death hastened by a bed sore, the kind of injury she prevented in her patients with her good care. She also suffered kidney failure, a condition that can often be managed with good primary medical care. She was one of the many health care workers who lack coverage themselves.

When Ms. Coke became old enough for Medicare, she got the medical checkups she had skipped when she had no medical insurance from her job and was ineligible for Medicaid, the insurance program for poorer people.

Doctors found that her kidneys were failing. She ended up having dialysis three times a week.

Like many home care workers, Ms. Coke was an immigrant. But native-born Americans are not more secure. I worked with a nurses aide named Mary, who was in her early 60’s, and she told me one day that she was worried about injuring her back. She had no health insurance and was waiting to turn 65 so that she could qualify for Medicare. Before that happened, she had a massive stroke and ended up in a bed in the same nursing home she had worked in. Like kidney disease, stroke is often preventable with regular checkups and treatment of high blood pressure, but Mary could not afford to see a doctor and was trusting to her luck.

Representatives of the home care industry opposed Ms. Coke’s suit, saying that they couldn’t afford to pay their workers overtime, but this is short-sighted. Requiring all employers to pay overtime levels the field so no one profits by shortchanging their workers. Decent pay and benefits help retention and cut turnover. Low-income workers spend their money in their local stores and businesses, boosting the economy. Providing access to health care for workers is not only basic justice, it relieves the burden on emergency rooms and helps families. Mothers and fathers need to stay healthy to care for their children.

Anyone can be uninsured. Your neighbor who was laid off, his daughter who is not covered yet by her job, the small business owner and her employees, the artist, the home health aide. We urgently need to reform our health care system so that everyone can get basic health care. Every day we wait costs lives.