An emotional Joe Kennedy describes how the Affordable Care Act helped one of his interns
Rep. Joe Kennedy has been unhesitant to defend the Affordable Care Act amid the recent Republican efforts to replace the law, otherwise known as Obamacare.
Last week, the Newton Democrat called the Republicans’ replacement an “act of malice” — a barbed reference to House Speaker Paul Ryan’s labeling of the bill as an “act of mercy” — before challenging a GOP lawyer about the effects of the proposal on mental illness coverage.
Following the Congressional Budget Office’s report that the bill would result in an increase of 24 million uninsured people by 2026, Kennedy appeared Tuesday on MSNBC’s Morning Joe to continue his advocacy for the current law — which he admitted could be improved.
Thus far, the third-term congressman said he has been unable to find any Republicans colleagues to work with to “strengthen” the bill.
“For a wide variety or reasons, they’ve been unable to — fine,” he said, adding that he hoped Republicans would at least recognize that the ACA has helped some Americans.
Kennedy went on to describe — his voice cracking at times — how an intern in his office, who had twice been diagnosed with cancer, was able to afford live-saving coverage because of the health care law.
“That hearing for 28 hours that I was in last week, while you heard story after story from my Republican colleagues saying how disastrous this was, there was also an intern in there for a lot of it from my office whose life was saved — twice — by the Affordable Care Act,” Kennedy said.
As Kennedy previously told Boston.com, that intern, Jen Fox, lost the insurance she received as a 19-year-old through her college after her first diagnoses, because she couldn’t attend class full-time due to her chemotherapy treatments. However, the ACA provision allowing children to stay on their parents’ plans until the age of 26 allowed her stay covered.
As The Boston Globe reported, when Fox was diagnosed a second time, the law saved her family from potentially seven-figure bills.
“She’s 25 year’s old, and has had cancer now twice, and because of the ACA, she not only got access to the treatment that she needed, but her family could afford it,” Kennedy said, adding that “you cannot deny that this law has done some really good things to some people in need.”
