Opresident ial candidate joe biden met with families in lancaster pennsylvania to talk about health care and the Affordable Care act. Due to technical difficulties, this portion of the event is 20 minutes. The drawback is i can never tell the press reaction completely. Anyway, thank you all for taking the time. Do you mind if i take my coat off . How are you all doing . [inaudible] a little later about the Larger Program here but its all about making sure that we take care of making sure you and your families are taken care of. Who wants to tell me about their situation first . Fire away. I was nominated. Okay. Its all right if i [inaudible] sure. My name is amy and i am from pittsburgh. My daughter. Hello. I was diagnosed with stage zero Breast Cancer in july of 2017. Subsequently, i had a mastectomy and reconstruction and have had five surgeries since, various infections and implications. At the time, i ha have my own insurance with my employer. The bills were well over a million plus. After i entere enter treatment i was in sort of the recovery phase, i decided i wanted to go back to school, which meant i would lose my insurance. I enrolled in the university of pittsburgh, but because i have a preexisting condition coverage, i was able to do that. In two more years when i finish, i wont have that insurance anymore. So, im hoping that a preexisting condition coverage remains. I also benefited from the lifetime benefits certainly because we have moved past the million and a year and kept going to the annual limits. Preventive Care Services that they got for free. Theres just a myriad of elements that have helped me. Its helped me to continuing my treatment and recovery and its also going to help me to get back into being a productive member of Society Without being blocked or locked out. We very easily could have been a family that was bankrupt based on my care or my phase. Can you have the next surgery, can you have the next adjustment, or are we going to lose the house. Dad cant leave that job for a better job because we are going to lose our insurance. And both of my kids have preexisting conditions. They both have celiac disease, lifelong auto immune disorder. You know, if the Insurance Company had decided that they didnt want to cover that, they would have had no option. Shes benefiting now that she can stay on our insurance until shes 26, but then what is always our biggest fear. So, i mean, the benefits that they have seen for ourselves and that we have seen in the community, i work a lot with Medicaid Expansion families, multiple ways that people benefit that they might not even realize. Even the fact that the coverage that i have is required to have certain elements included that im not surprised, and i dont have that unexpected you are not covered for that, you dont know until you need it. Do you want to say anything ex well, obviously my mom has a lot more experience an it does s in every possible way, but yes i will be covered until i am 26 and im not sure after that. My grandfather was a worker in the pennsylvania mill in johnstown and this past summer he had been a stroke. He was home alone sweet tooth whitening to pittsburgh because all of my mom and her sisters lived there and i just remembered before of us sitting in the living room with a stack of medical bills about this big and just being so happy that the helicopter is covered. I know that if that hadnt been the case, he wouldnt have been able to afford it or ticket the surgeries and the therapy that hes been having now. I have been a significant consumer of health care myself, and my family. I dont think people really fully understand that there is 100 Million People with preexisting conditions that if the president wins this case it gets wiped out. The other thing we got to talk about we have the plan to expand access to medicare as well as medicaid. Thank you so much for this opportunity. My name is victoria, and i am the mom of a 4yearold son. He couldnt come today that this is a picture of him. Superheroes and star wars and anything outside, hes a very typical 4yearold little boy. But he has a medical bills. He has a medical disease called mitochondrial effects basically every cell in his body so he goes through a lot. He spent over half his life in the hospital. Things change for him daily and i echo many of the things that they have shared. When hwhen this first morning sd having issues, i have my own insurance. Sometimes we were spending 3500 out of pocket on top of everything a permanent lin one s into his chest and into his heart and it has all of the vitamins, minerals he needs and that is how he is fed through the. The cost is over 80,000 a month just for that alone on top of everything else. Thanks to the aca, he was able to qualify for medicaid because we were very close to having to look at the bankruptcy. Another private insurance doesnt pay for comity requires hospital level care and hes able to be home with nurses in his community and a part of everyday life in a being in a hospital. He has so many opportunities ahead of him and because of the aca he will be able to see that through. But then what happens when hes 26, these are the fears we have as families moving forward through this. As opposed to cutting medicare by 700 billion now in addition to the Affordable Care act. And there are so many people in your situation. There are so many people with similar kinds of needs and costs are just beyond capacity for anyone to handle them is you are a multimillionaire. By the way, bobby says hello. How are you guys doing. Okay. How are you. Tell me about you. I know ill about what youre talking about with tony about the twins as well. My name is stacy and this is one of my twins, jan, 22 now. When shannon and her identical twin sister had been diagnosed when they were 4yearsold, which required stem cell transplant which they had at the hospital in pittsburgh, im sorry, i keep thinking of pittsburgh, the hospital of philadelphia, obviously the procedure is incredibly expensive, so this was before the Affordable Care act was passed. With the correct that some of th, thePatient Protection and Affordable Care act was passed. We did it the Million Dollar cap on the employerbased coverage. We fortunately and unfortunately at the time were unable to go on cobra because we had four children. So the twins are the oldest. I have a toddler that was one at the time and i was pregnant with my fourth one we found out the twins have cancer. My husband was able to take family medical leave in order to help go back and forth and had been staying at the hospital and taking care of my son. So, there was no income coming in. We kept the entrance, but it was expensive. So when you have nothing coming in and everything is going out, we ended up filing for bankruptcy. Fortunately, we were able to go on medicaid as a secondary through the state which did help pick up some of the things, but we didnt sign up for that until after we had gone bankrupt. So, not only is the Patient ProtectionAffordable Care act so important to me for my kids com,for the Patient Protectionst one of the reasons i voted for you and obama back in 2007 is because he understood what it was like to watch them on my mom died of cancer at 52 years of age. She put off going for care because she couldnt afford it. She was going to wait and go when she could afford to pay for it and she was already paying off a previous medical issue, so she was waiting to pay that off. By the time she went, it was too late and it has grabbed and she passed away. And i do after waiting for president obamas plan she got it because of his mom. I knew in my heart that he would see this through and he did. Here we are. We couldnt save my mom, but we can help our children by not discriminating against them and making it so they can stay on our insurance until they are 26 is very important. Chan had to leave college initially for some Health Issues and has now gone back at 22 to go ahead and continue her degree in education. So, at 26 its important that we are able to see that through. Coverage for the chronic care. My kids were only two, 15,000 kids a year are diagnosed with cancer, and only two of over 400,000 Childhood Cancer survivors in this country. So 400,000 children with preexisting conditions, and that is just cancer. That doesnt include juvenile diabetes. The list goes on and on. So, how can we in good conscience take that away from our children . I just dont get it. I dont get it either. The fact is you know, the concern about whether or not, the reason everybody kind of forget why we allow people to stay on their appearance policy until age 26 is because of the financial crisis a whole generation lost access to good jobs and access to instruments and it made a gigantic difference for people. And preexisting conditions be the difference. But also just being able to afford a basic coverage. I lost both of my parents and they each live with me the last parts of their lives and my wife lost both of her parents at home as well. But i think the vast majority of the American People understand is that through the significant population is nothing like watching your child being under stress. I got elected. Im probably the only person that ever got sworn in in the hospital decorated and coming home a year after being in iraq and had stage four video blastoma can get in just a matter of months to live, i used to sit there and wonder what in gods name would have happened had she made it almost 17 months in pain, what would happen if they said suffer in peace now, youve outlived your coverage. I dont know what weve done. But it does not just for the toe patient to the parents. So i just think its important, and i appreciate you all being here around the country in similar circumstances i think one thing that gets lost in the personal piece of this gets lost in this debate is that this is about one day at a time. What i did when my son was diagnosed with cancer, i visited every major cancer facility in the world, not only the United States but everywhere in the world to set up a major Cancer Foundation they set up a feed dealing with the ability to do a lot of research in the administration on how we dealt with cancer. Then when i left the 21 cancer hospitals as well as the and then it really matters to people my daughter was diagnosed early on into the problem she had with his dysplasia when she was an infant it seems to me we should be thinking about healthcare as a basic right. And focus what is going on right now as we speak. And to do away with the Affordable Care act. Talking about cobra, there are millions of people who lost their jobs and although technically they are able to pay workers they are out of business so they cant pay so that is why proposed in fact the federal government makes that cobra payment so they can keep with a negotiated whether they have a job or not during the pandemic. A lot of people are frightened and when i learned a long time ago supposedly am an expert in Foreign Policy that healthcare is more complicated than foreignpolicy. Think about the bright people with phds to the guy who breaks his neck to make sure we keep the roads open and to have a chance to sign up and then they can we up insurance. So it is complicated staff. The idea that our family should have to declare bankruptcy and the idea and that a child it is just the ultimate deprivation. My dad used to say, joe your dad is more than a paycheck but dignity and respect in place in a community how can a parent maintain their dignity to realize theres nothing they can do to help a child . So im confident that we can pass the beefedup element of the Affordable Care act to make significant progress because in the most consequential Health Crisis since 1918 getting access to insurance while so many businesses to provide their own Health Insurance good afternoon. Today we are in the middle of the worst global Health Crisis and donald trump will file in the Supreme Court to strip away healthcare coverage from tens of millions of families in the united