A day after Senator Cruz’s 21-hour speech, aimed at blocking Obamacare, Stacey and Caleb Lihn spoke out about how their 3-year-old daughter with a severe congenital heart defect has already benefited from the health care law.
“To me, the access to health care, being cared for, and having care for a condition that you’re born with, through no fault of your own, having those rights taken away from you, for me that’s morally wrong,” Caleb Lihn said. “I think that Obamacare serves a purpose that is important. It’s really just infuriating to have [Cruz] stand up there and spend his time on that.”
A report released Wednesday by the Department of Health and Human Services announced that individual insurance premiums will be lower than projected for 95% of Americans.
“It’s all been repeal, repeal, repeal, and I don’t think they’ve been able to, or will be able to articulate an operable solution that is an alternative to Obamacare, and that’s just it,” Caleb Lihn told MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell. “They’ve realized that there’s good parts to it, and they’re gonna help people, people like Zoe and our family, but they want to sort of brush those to the side and cherry pick one or two things that they think can be perceived as negative, and focus on those and use that to, you know, sort of carry on this misinformation campaign.”
Last September, Stacey Lihn gave a moving and emotional speech at the Democratic National Convention about how Obamacare secured the treatment her daughter, who has congenital heart disease, needed in order to live. Lihn’s daughter Zoe had already had open-heart surgery twice and faced a third operation this year. Lihn spoke about the potential repercussions if Obamacare were to become abolished. “If Mitt Romney becomes president and Obamacare is repealed, there’s a good chance she’ll hit her lifetime cap. There is no way we can pay for all the care she needs to survive.”
“Obamacare provides my family security and relief,” Lihn told the crowd in Charlotte, North Carolina. Zoe successfully had her third open-heart surgery on Aug. 13.
Before the law’s passage, Zoe’s parents were told by their health insurers that their child had hit her “lifetime cap,” meaning that she would no longer receive coverage. But the family later received a letter that arrived from their insurance company, “saying that our daughter’s lifetime cap had been lifted.”
The family’s home state senator, John McCain, spoke on the floor after Cruz finished his tirade and reminded people that voters re-elected President Obama and his policies last November.
“I’d remind my colleagues that in the 2012 election, Obamacare as it’s called – and I’ll be more polite, the ACA – was a subject that was a major issue in the campaign. I campaigned all over America for two months, everywhere I could, and in every single campaign rally I said ‘And we have to repeal and replace’ Obamacare. Well, the people spoke. They spoke much to my dismay, but they spoke and they re-elected the President of the United States.
“That doesn’t mean we give up our efforts to replace and repair Obamacare,” the Arizona senator continued. “But it does mean that elections have consequences and those elections were clear in a significant majority that a majority of the American people supported the president and renewed his stewardship of this country.”
Clare Kim