On Becoming the Heroes We Were Waiting For: The Affordable Care Act saved my life. I am one of many health care activists in the United States who wouldn't be here without it.

• Author: Packard, Laura
• Position: FIRST-PERSON SINGULAR

Four years ago, I walked into a doctor's office with a nagging cough and walked out with a stage-four cancer diagnosis (Hodgkin's lymphoma). Without the Affordable Care Act, I could never have afforded the six months of chemotherapy and month of radiation I needed to achieve remission.

Were it not for the ACA, millions of Americans like me with pre-existing conditions would be uninsurable. And without insurance, many of us in the chronic disease and disability communities could not afford the care we need to stay alive and thrive.

We cannot go back to a time where insurance companies can pick and choose whether to cover the care you need, or whether to cover you at all. Our elected officials should be focused on expanding affordable health care, not taking it away.

Instead, we've gone through more than a decade of attacks on the ACA led by Republicans in Congress. In June, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its third straight rebuke to these efforts to kill the Affordable Care Act. However, conservative anti-health care elected officials in Congress and in state legislatures continue to try and chip away at our care, and they will not stop bringing lawsuits.

But there is a new and formidable obstacle to those who want to turn back the clock. It's people like me who are determined not to let them get away with it.

Cancer nearly killed me, but it also forged me. The day after my first chemo appointment in May 2017, Republicans in the U.S. House voted to dismantle the ACA.

For me, staying out of the fight was not an option.

I spent six months of chemotherapy struggling through medical appointments and then leaving my couch to speak at rallies and press conferences and vigils outside my Republican Senator's office. Rinse, repeat. I learned to expose my most personal thoughts and feelings, through writing my story in my own words and having it published locally and nationally, and sharing self-filmed videos to ever-larger audiences.

Willingly or not, people living through their own health care struggles around the country were thrust into the fire. Flipping the script on the Tea Party protests against the AC A prior to its passage in 2010, a generation of people who have lived thanks to the ACA were now here to defend it.

These include disability rights activists from ADAPT; the group Little Lobbyists for kids with complex medical conditions and their parents; health care activists organized through Health Care Voter, which I now have the honor of...