Our guest blogger is Kimberly Ortiz, an organizer for the Retail Wholesale and Department Store Union and a member of the Retail Action Project.

Two years ago, I sat in the ER with my two-year-old Aiden, who had a double ear infection. Though I’d been working as a manager at the Statue of Liberty gift shop for five years, we didn’t have health insurance, I only made $9.25 an hour, and I didn’t get a single paid sick day. Knowing I wasn’t “allowed” to be sick or have a sick child, I called my boss in a panic.

I was told she couldn’t guarantee there would be no repercussions.

Aiden was sick for four days, crying in pain as his fever raged on. Back at work I was written up and “cautioned” even after submitting doctor’s notes. Those four days were all unpaid, so I had to borrow money from friends, family, and neighbors for diapers and food. As long as we have basic necessities, I know how to make do with nothing else.

Balancing childcare, rent, chronic conditions, and my job as a single mother living in the Bronx can be nearly impossible. As Ellen Bravo wrote in response to Anne-Marie Slaughter’s “Why Women Can’t Have it All,” I worried about losing it all, not ‘having it all.’

While I identify with Ms. Slaughter’s insanely busy days, I disagree with her statement that “We may need to put a woman in the White House before we are able to change the conditions of the women working at Walmart.” I’m newer to the world of the politics of work-life balance, but I know that we can’t just rely on our elected officials to change the lives of women like me.

Low-wage women workers need to have a greater voice in the conversation. There are far more women working hourly jobs facing issues of limited advancement than “top women leaders” like Anne Marie Slaughter. And we’re less worried about “having it all” than in achieving a job and schedule that can sustain a family.

By providing sick leave, paid family leave, protections so caregivers have opportunities to advance, and scheduling with enough notice to arrange childcare, and by requiring part-time parity in health insurance benefits, we can prevent working caregivers from feeling like we could lose it all at any time.

This Mother’s day, I found myself speaking on a Senate Congressional panel about my experiences and these solutions, because I’m committed to getting what I deserve for my children and other women like me. And I couldn’t have felt like a better mom.

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Rep. Steve King (R-IA) has a message for those Republicans wavering on whether to repeal popular provisions of Obamacare: “it’s all or none.”

ThinkProgress spoke with King, who has been leading the fight against Obamacare since it was signed into law, at the Supreme Court following yesterday’s ruling. In an expectedly dour mood, the Iowa Republican pointed to the November election as their remaining chance to repeal the landmark health care law.

King promised that if Republicans took control, they would undo every part of Obamacare, even popular provisions like protections for people with pre-existing conditions and allowing young adults to stay on their parents’ health care plans. “I don’t want to hear any talk from Republicans about preserving any aspect of it,” King declared. “It’s all or none”:

REPORTER: It seems like as a practical matter, it’d be very tough to get rid of the law if he wins a second term.

KING: I agree. This is it. The battle is enjoined and it’s about Obamacare here to November. And if we seat a majority of the United States Senate of Republicans, hold this majority in the House and elect Mitt Romney, we will undo Obamacare and all of it. I don’t want to hear any talk from Republicans about preserving any aspect of it. It just dilutes the argument. It’s all or none. This is it, we’re all in and I’m ready for that fight.

Watch it:

As polls show an overwhelming majority of Americans support Obamacare’s provisions, many Republicans have begun to show their support for maintaining some of its protections. Even hard-liners like Rep. Allen West (R-FL) and Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO) have pledged to protect certain aspects of Obamacare.

If Republicans prevail in November, there will almost certainly be a showdown between Tea Partiers like King who want to scrap even Obamacare’s popular provisions and more sensible legislators who recognize the importance of maintaining those protections. Unfortunately, given the rightward lurch of Republicans over the past decade, it’s not difficult to guess which side will prevail.

Steven Perlberg contributed to this report.

Republicans are in complete upheaval over Obamacare, fired up by the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold the law yesterday. They have continuously claimed that the government is ramming this legislation down the throats of the American people, and now they are calling it an unwanted financial burden on everyday Americans. In fact, the individual mandate — the portion of the law that Republicans most vociferously oppose — wouldn’t even affect most Americans.

It might be time for Republicans to take a look back at their own record of health care legislation that they did like — and that forced American people, particularly women, into a lot of things:

Forcing women to get transvaginal ultrasounds: Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell wanted to force every woman seeking an abortion to go through the extremely uncomfortable and medically unnecessary procedure of a transvaginal ultrasound — sticking a medical wand far into a woman’s vagina to get a clearer ultrasound image.

Ordering women to cremate and bury their miscarried fetus: A huge abortion omnibus bill in Michigan could force women who miscarry to cremate the miscarried fetuses. This comes at no small expense to the woman: cremation of a fetus costs hundreds of dollars, and interment can be additional thousands. The bill has been passed by the Michigan House, and is awaiting a vote by the Michigan Senate.

Requiring doctors to lie to female patients: In Kansas, Republicans tried to force doctors to tell women that they faced risk of cancer from having an abortion. That is patently untrue, and making doctors say that it was true would be, in effect, requiring them to lie to their patients.

Making a dying woman consult two doctors before she can get a life-saving abortion: The New Hampshire legislature just overrode a veto by the Governor, forcing through a law that bans “partial birth” abortions. The law only reinforces federal law, but has the additional requirement that any woman who is exempt from the abortion ban because her life is at risk must visit not one but two doctors before she can get the procedure to save her life. For many rural women, especially those facing life-threatening conditions, this is near impossible.

Mandating people pay extra to give medical device companies a tax break: Rep. Erik Paulsen (R-MN) worked so hard to protect medical device companies from having to pay, that he has instead passed their costs onto the consumer — regular Americans — by increasing the cost of health coverage.

House Republicans have long promised to “repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act, but their actual plan to replace the 2010 health care reform law, which the Supreme Court upheld on Thursday, has been uncertain. Some members want to preserve aspects of the law, while others have urged for a full repeal.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) announced shortly after the court’s ruling that the House will vote to repeal Obamacare on July 11. As far as what replaces it, he told Tom Brokaw on MSNBC’s Morning Joe that the GOP’s 2009 health care plan is their alternative to President Obama’s health law:

CANTOR: Tom, you knew back in 2009 when the Obamacare bill was being considered on the House floor, we put forward our alternative. So to sit here and say we don’t have a replacement is not correct. What we have now, though, is the challenge of repealing this law.

Watch his comments:

Of course, as ThinkProgress reported in 2009, the plan Cantor mentions is the one that would have shifted the costs and risks of insurance onto individuals and divided the market into low-cost plans for the healthy and high-cost insurance for the sick. The 230-page Obamacare alternative would have done very little to expand access to health care or lower costs. When the Congressional Budget Office compared the GOP plan to the Affordable Care Act in 2009, the CBO found that the Republican proposal would leave 52 million people uninsured and add $8 billion to the deficit, even though a spokesperson for then-House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) falsely claimed their alternative “will cover millions more Americans” than the Democrats’ bill.

Compared to the roughly 30 million who will have insurance under Obamacare, it’s hard to see how Cantor’s replacement plan would help make health care more patient-focused while leaving so many without access to care.

Republicans are responding to the Supreme Court’s ruling upholding the individual mandate by constructing a new “death panels”-like lie. The law, they argue, imposes a burdensome tax on millions of middle class families who will have to pay a penalty for not purchasing health care coverage by 2014. The line originates in the majority’s decision, which found that Congress has the authority to require individuals to buy coverage under its taxing power, but it doesn’t mean what the Republicans are suggesting.

The truth is that the penalty for not buying insurance — $695 or 2.5 percent of household income — is well in line with other policies that are designed to encourage and promote a particular kind of economic behavior. On Friday morning, NBC’s Chuck Todd compared the penalty to a speeding ticket and asked House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) to distinguish between the two taxes. Cantor could not:

TODD: On the tax front quickly, is a speeding ticket a tax? By that same definition? You can avoid paying this tax if you get insurance. [...]

CANTOR: First of all, let me — I can’t respond to whether the speeding ticket would be considered a tax or not under the states’ authority any states’ authority. What I can tell you is the court came down on this issue decided that it was a tax to coerce some type of behavior.

Watch it:

In the case of health care, the law is offering an incentive for younger and healthier Americans to purchase health insurance coverage before they fall ill and pass on the costs of their treatments on to the government and other premium payers. Widespread take-up of coverage could cut government expenditures on uncompensated care in half. As Mitt Romney explained in 2006, “I don’t think the free market ever envisioned an idea that people would be able to do something and make other people pay for it.” And after successful implementation of reform in Massachusetts, few are.

On the federal level, the Congressional Budget Office is projecting that 30 million Americans will enroll in insurance as a result of the law, millions more will receive a tax cut to help them afford coverage, and of the remaining uninsured, “the majority of them will not be subject to the penalty“:

21 million nonelderly residents will be uninsured in 2016, but the majority of them will not be subject to the penalty. Unauthorized immigrants, for example, are exempted from the mandate to obtain health insurance. Others will be subject to the mandate but exempted from the penalty—for example, because they will have income low enough that they are not required to file an income tax return, because they are members of Indian tribes, or because the premium they would have to pay would exceed a specified share of their income (initially 8 percent in 2014 and indexed over time). CBO and JCT estimate that between 13 million and 14 million of the uninsured in 2016 will qualify for one or more of those exemptions. Of the remaining 7 million to 8 million uninsured, some individuals will be granted exemptions from the penalty because of hardship, and others will be exempted from the mandate on the basis of their religious beliefs. [...]

After accounting for all of those factors, CBO and JCT estimate that about 4 million people will pay a penalty because they will be uninsured in 2016 (a figure that includes uninsured dependents who have the penalty paid on their behalf).

Real world experience suggests that Americans are more likely to purchase insurance than pay the penalty for going without coverage. For instance, in Massachusetts, the only state with an insurance mandate, less than 1 percent of the state’s residents paid the penalty in 2009. Surveys of the uninsured have also found that an overwhelming majority — 76 percent of the uninsured — would rather comply with the individual mandate in the Affordable Care Act and purchase insurance than pay the far less onerous penalty for forgoing it. Experts believe that “health insurance mandates differ from some other requirements, such as the requirement to pay taxes” because “enrollees individually receive a tangible good–health insurance—that they value.”

WASHINGTON, D.C. — More than two years after Obamacare passed, a longtime Republican congressman admits that his party has “no” plan to replace it if they succeed in getting rid of the landmark health law.

Before the Supreme Court ruling was released yesterday, ThinkProgress spoke with Rep. Lee Terry (R-NE) about what Republicans would do to protect the 57 million Americans who have pre-existing conditions. “We’re going to work on that,” Terry promised, offering no specifics beyond “there’s going to be lots of ideas. We just have to accept all of them.”

When we pressed him on whether, two years later, Republicans had come up with the “replace” part of “repeal and replace,” Terry was frank: “no.”

KEYES: If it does ultimately all get struck down, what do we do for 57 million people who have pre-existing conditions?

TERRY: We’re going to work on that. We’re going to do it by looking at first, how do we lower health care costs, how do we make the system more efficient and less costly.

KEYES: Are there any ideas on how to do that?

TERRY: There’s going to be lots of ideas. We just have to accept all of them.

KEYES: Do we have any yet?

TERRY: We’re going to hold hearings, we’re going to invite experts. This is not going to be a closed process at all. It’s going to be completely open where we take as many ideas for reform as we can get and then we’ll see what it takes to deal with those that need more attention if they have significant pre-existing. So we’re going to deal with all of those issues.

KEYES: The mantra for a while has been “repeal and replace.” Is there an idea of what the replace would be yet?

TERRY: No. We want to take it in a very deliberate, open approach and take everybody’s ideas.

Watch it:

Republicans controlled Congress for most of the past two decades, yet did nothing to protect people with pre-existing conditions from health insurers who wanted to deny them coverage. Nor did they have any plan to help the tens of millions of Americans who lacked health insurance.

Though the GOP is again harping the “repeal and replace” mantra, it’s clear their plan begins and ends at step one.

Steven Perlberg contributed to this report.