that s a much better solution. create an environment where you don t tax the daylights out of people. aren t we all happy that under obama we created 15 million new jobs in the private sector? senators, i want to get to more audience questions. this one is about the fact that the affordable care act requires that all insurance plans cover what the law calls essential health benefits. this includes maternity and delivery costs. we have a question on what will happen to that coverage for maria who is pregnant with her second child. i m a nursing student at the medical university of south carolina. i m concerned about the implications that repealing the affordable care act will have on women s health and specifically for pregnant women. i m five months pregnant and i qualified for medicaid due to being a full-time student. senator cruz, what policies do you have in place to protect pregnant women from losing their
so i m glad that you re receiving healthcare. ki te a great many of the people on medicaid aren t. i d much rather see a system where we can have millions of those on medicaid getting health insurance. the only way we can is if we have competition so that rates are lower so you can afford to have health insurance. senator sanders? we heard from a woman who runs a hair salon in ft. worth who can t afford to provide health insurance for her workers and herself. we hear a story now about a woman who has to leave her own state and go to another state because that state is providing medicaid. my friends, you are living by these stories. you re living in the wealthiest country in the history of the world where the rich are becoming phenomenally richer while we have 43 million people living in poverty and the middle class is in decline. these stories are obscene.
promise. the overwhelming majority of americans as much as 78% who have employer provided coverage or medicare or medicaid aren t seeing their plans change. but no amount of policy design or blanket promises can change the bedrock truth we are seeing now. change, real change, like the kind the affordable care act represents, is hard, and unwielding and it requires disruption. and some people aren t going to like it. election night is a good time to remind ourselves of the simple basic truth. politicians may try to hide or hedge that truth, but we shouldn t, because it is elemental to what it means to be a progressive to believe in progress and change and be part of the left broadly construed, to be pushing out past the frontiers of the status quo into the darkness of the unknown with the belief there is something better in the future than in the past. that things can improve, that they must improve and that our collective will and dedication and struggle can make it so.