On healthcare, 'We have to do better'

Diane Black didn't come from much.

Her father dropped out of school in the sixth grade, her mother in the ninth. They fell in love on the assembly line of a paper-box factory on the dodgy side of Baltimore, got married, had children and lived in public housing.

At age 4, the future congresswoman from Tennessee asked for a doctor's kit. At age 5, her family moved to rural Maryland; they were still poor, so she and her two brothers slept in the same bed, her sister in a crib beside them. All six family members crowded into a 1,000-square-foot house filled with safety, love and poverty.

"Despite all of that," she says now, sitting in her Longworth House Office Building on Capitol Hill, "I really never understood we were poor until I went to high school," where she was exposed to kids who could shop for the clothes they wanted, make plans to go to college or get out of town to chase bigger and better things.

The first woman to chair the influential House Budget Committee is confident the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, eventually will be repealed and replaced, but she also worries whether Americans will be able to achieve the American Dream.