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The latest on the Key Bridge collapse, New York puts forth legislation to get clean energy projects on the grid and Wisconsin and other states join a federal summer food program to help feed kids across the country.

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Republicans float conspiracy theories on the collapse of Baltimore's Key Bridge, South Carolina's congressional elections will use a map ruled unconstitutional, and the Senate schedules an impeachment trial for Homeland Secretary Mayorkas.

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Historic wildfires could create housing and health issues for rural Texans, a Kentucky program helps prison parolees start a new life, and descendants of Nicodemus, Kansas celebrate the Black settlers who journeyed across the 1870s plains seeking self-governance.

Anniversary of Affordable Care Act Marks Progress

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Thursday, March 22, 2012   

PHOENIX, Ariz. - Friday marks the second anniversary of the Affordable Care Act. The organizer of a national grassroots effort to get the law passed has written a book about the experience.

Richard Kirsch is the author of "Fighting for Our Health: The Epic Battle to Make Health Care a Right in the United States." He says Tea Party activists got all the publicity when they raucously pressed their members of Congress to oppose the bill in the summer of 2009. But he says the media ignored what happened next, when citizens came out to tell their stories of the suffering - even deaths - of loved ones because they were denied health care.

"Health care supporters turned out in droves at town meetings held by Democratic congressmen, and those stories got the congressmen to go back to Washington and say, 'We're going to pass this thing.'"

Supporters of the law say it has already made a difference for Arizonans, enabling individuals to get preventive care for the first time without co-pays, beginning to close the Medicare Part D donut hole and allowing young adult children to stay on their parents' insurance plans until the age of 26.

The U.S. Supreme Court is expected to rule on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act later this year. Opponents claim the individual mandate, requiring those who can afford it to buy health insurance, is unconstitutional. Kirsch sees another way for the law to survive.

"Even if the Supreme Court rules against that, there's still ways to enact key parts of the bill, but you need to have a president and Congress working to do that, so the fate of the bill more than anything else depends on the election for president."

He says the message of his book is that ordinary people, when they get organized, can still make change in the United States, despite the influence of the insurance industry, drug companies and lobbyists.




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