President Obama stopped shaking hands for a moment today so that he could embrace a sobbing woman whose uninsured sister recently died of colon cancer.

The sister of Stephanie Miller, from Sandusky, OH, would have been covered if Obamacare were fully implemented when she got sick. Instead, the woman was left without insurance and couldn’t get the health care she needed. According to a report from the event, President Obama offered Miller his condolences:

As the president was working the rope line, he consoled a crying woman who was telling him a story. Pool reached the woman, Stephanie Miller, by phone and got these details.

Ms. Miller said her sister, Kelly Hines, died from colon cancer four years ago because she could not afford proper health insurance. She had no employer-provided coverage

“Even after she was diagnosed with cancer, she was told her income was too high for Medicaid,” Ms. Miller said.

“I thanked him for the getting the Affordable Health Act passed,” she said.

One hundred twenty nine million people have pre-existing conditions. The Affordable Care Act will prevent them from being denied care, either by an individual plan or by an employer. Should Republicans repeal the law, as they have promised, those people could once again find themselves in that situation. Republicans’ only solution is to put people like Miller’s sister into unsustainable, high-risk pools, or force them to go without care.

Anti-choice advocates in Ohio have failed to gather enough signatures to put a radical constitutional amendment that would define life as beginning at conception on the ballot this fall. The Associated Press reports that Personhood Ohio collected only a small fraction of the signatures required to add the issue to the November ballot — about 30,000 out of roughly 385,000 signatures — by yesterday’s deadline.

The resounding defeat in Ohio is just the most recent incident in a string of personhood initiative failures across the country. Since conservative lawmakers first began introducing radical personhood legislation to endow fertilized eggs with the same rights as humans, their legislation has been repeatedly struck down. Over the past two years, activists have failed to advance personhood measures in several states:

– NEVADA: Last month, Personhood Nevada organizers failed to collect enough signatures to get their proposed constitutional amendment on the ballot. A similar anti-choice measure was denied by the state’s courts two years ago.

– OKLAHOMA: Although the state Senate passed a personhood bill 34-8 in February, the Oklahoma House failed to bring it up for a vote in April, effectively killing the bill for this session. That same month, Oklahoma’s Supreme Court also struck down a proposed personhood ballot initiative, ruling that the measure was “clearly unconstitutional.”

– VIRGINIA: In February, the Virginia Senate sent a personhood bill back to committee rather than bringing it up for a vote, effectively killing the bill for the 2012 legislative session. The Senate voted 24-14 to carry the bill over until next year, when its sponsor can choose to bring it up again for additional consideration.

– FLORIDA: Since Personhood Florida collected only around 20,000 of the 676,811 signatures needed to put a personhood amendment on the state ballot in 2012, they were forced to drop their petition last December. The group vowed to try again for the 2014 ballot, but have only collected ten percent of the required signatures so far.

– MISSISSIPPI: In one of the first and arguably most stunning defeats for the personhood movement, Mississippi voters rejected a personhood bill with a 58 percent majority. Mississippi is regarded as one of the most anti-choice states in the nation, and the ballot initiative’s defeat served as a stark reminder of the personhood movement’s extreme radicalism.

Although some personhood initiatives remain undecided — bills in Alabama and Iowa stalled in committee — not a single piece of this type of radical anti-choice legislation has passed at this point. Personhood activists insist that their movement is growing stronger, but the evidence in states across the country doesn’t back up the claim.

While 16 Democratic governors have pledged to accept Obamacare funding to expand their state Medicaid programs, Republican governors say they will likely turn down billions in federal dollars to grow a “failed program,” even if it could insure millions of lower-income Americans.

In Florida, for example, Gov. Rick Scott (R) says he will refuse the funding because “the burden increasingly shifts to Florida taxpayers” — even though the federal government covers 100 percent of the Medicaid expansion costs for the first three years. After five years, the federal government finances 90 percent of the expanded population.

GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney also opposes insuring more people in Medicaid and has proposed transforming the program into a block grant that would significantly reduce the federal government’s contribution. But as governor of Massachusetts, Romney personally negotiated more federal funding for the program to finance his health care reform plan and benefited from the very kind of expansion that Republicans across the country are now opposing. Romneycare “included an expansion of Medicaid to children up to 300 percent of the federal poverty level” and increased enrollment caps for adults to cover an additional 92,500 people.

As the Boston Globe reported in May:

“It would have been impossible for Massachusetts to do what it did without increased federal Medicaid support,’’ said John McDonough, a major architect of the state’s health care overhaul law and now director of Harvard University’s Center for Public Health Leadership. [...]

As governor, Romney worked closely with the late Democratic Senator Edward M. Kennedy to secure hundreds of millions per year in federal aid to realize their shared goal of access to health care for all. Expanding Medicaid coverage – and the flow of federal money that came with it – was a key underpinning of the state’s 2006 law.

Back in 2010, Romney told Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly that from the beginning, the plan for Massachusetts’ health reform law “was a 50/50 deal between the federal government and the state government.” But since President Obama is now offering states a similar — if not substantially better — deal, Romney and the Republican party are lining up against it.