Abbey Paxton is the owner of Storyhouse Bookpub in Des Moines.

In 2021, I opened an independent bookstore in downtown Des Moines. My husband, also a small business owner, and I have had two children since moving back to Iowa in 2020, and we work full time running our businesses. 

Like many other small business owners and self-employed Iowans, our family resides in the gap between barely affordable, mediocre, private individual health insurance and Medicaid—a gap that will only widen after the most painful provisions of the Republican budget reconciliation bill (the so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill Act”) are fully implemented.

Every Iowa member of Congress voted in favor of the bill, which makes historic cuts to Medicaid while providing big tax breaks for the wealthy and new tax loopholes for big corporations like health insurance and prescription drug companies.