Nija

Milford, Connecticut

In 2014, Nija Phelps was living with her husband in Indiana, where he was getting his doctorate and working part time at Panera. She had a job at the university. When her mother-in-law in Michigan needed surgery—high blood sugar had damaged her heart and she faced a long recovery—Nija and her husband offered to move there to help. “That’s what you do for family,” Nija said. She and her husband quit their jobs and had trouble finding new ones in Michigan. “If we’d each been able to take paid leave for 12 weeks, we could have kept our jobs. It was six months of not knowing what the future would be like. I was grateful for Obamacare—otherwise we would have had nothing.”