As SEIU members today marked four years since Congress passed and President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act into law, we celebrate that more than 5 million Americans have already signed up for healthcare coverage through the state and federal marketplaces alone and millions more have enrolled in the law's expanded Medicaid coverage.

SEIU's nurses, healthcare workers, child care providers and security officers have made more than 1.6 million contacts to help spread the word to uninsured Americans about their new options for coverage.

And it's made a life-changing difference for Americans like:

- Jamal Leefaltimore,mallusinesswnerho,eforeettingnsuredhroughhe Affordablearect,raveledonotherountryoaveostsnedicalrocedures.
- Kristen Boefstherville,owa, a stay-at-home mother in her 20s who has benefited from being able to stay on her father's plan until age 26 then get a marketplace plan after going two years without insurance and without needed thyroid tests.
- Sheri Hendrix of Grants Pass, Ore., got coverage under the Affordable Care Act after going without it for four years and that saved her from having to cover $30,000 in medical bills fram a broken ankle after a fall.

We all benefit when insurance companies can no longer: deny coverage to people with pre- existing conditions; charge women whatever they want, whenever they want to; and cut off coverage when people are in the middle of costly treatments.

Since passage of the Affordable Care Act, extremist Republicans have spent hundreds of millions of dollars attacking the healthcare law - and refusing its expanded Medicaid coverage -- instead of helping their own uninsured constituents find ways to get coverage. They wasted time and energy voting over 50 times to repeal, gut or dismantle the law at the expense of priorities crucial to working people: proposals to help the long-term unemployed, raise the minimum wage and pass commonsense immigration reform.

Polling consistently shows that most Americans reject the GOP's obsession with plans to repeal the healthcare law and go back to the days when insurance companies called all the shots. A recent Bloomberg poll found that 64 percent of Americans either support the law as it is or back it with small changes.

SEIU members, like most Americans, know the healthcare law isn't perfect. But we'll oppose every effort to turn the clock back on people with pre-existing conditions and people who are getting preventive care coverage - such as birth control and mammograms - for the first time in their lives.

That's the choice many voters will have in November: between candidates who would take us back to the days when insurance companies could cancel your coverage on a whim and candidates who will make sure that a law that is working for more than 100 million Americans will work for all of us.

Republicans at many levels are running to repeal the law. But this year is much different - for the first time they are running to take away benefits that virtually every American who has health care is benefiting from.

This is the year for all of us to instead deliver on the promise of the Affordable Care Act, make sure it is working for as many people as possible and expand the landmark protections it provides.

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