MINNEAPOLIS — Amy Klobuchar wanted to make sure Minnesota lawmakers couldn’t ignore what she had to say. So she brought six pregnant friends to the state Capitol. The legislators were working out a bill to guarantee insurance coverage for longer hospital stays after childbirth, but insurance lobbyists wanted to delay its effective date for a year, Klobuchar recalled. Her friends had a more ...

Amy Klobuchar, D- Minn., speaks to supporters after clinching the Democratic nomination for governor at her election night gathering on Aug. 11, 2026, in Minnetonka, Minnesota.

Aaron Lavinsky/Star Tribune/TNS

MINNEAPOLIS — Amy Klobuchar wanted to make sure Minnesota lawmakers couldn’t ignore what she had to say.

So she brought six pregnant friends to the state Capitol.

The legislators were working out a bill to guarantee insurance coverage for longer hospital stays after childbirth, but insurance lobbyists wanted to delay its effective date for a year, Klobuchar recalled. Her friends had a more immediate interest.

Lawmakers asked in a committee hearing when the change should take effect. The women all raised their hands to let them know: now.

The Minnesota Star Tribune asked the four leading candidates for governor and U.S. Senate to choose a formative political moment in their life and explain it to readers. For Klobuchar, now the Democratic nominee for governor, it was a hospital experience with her daughter that led her to challenge the insurance restriction that affected her new family — while launching a new career.

Klobuchar was already familiar with the rule they wanted to change. After her daughter, Abigail, was born in 1995, the baby couldn’t swallow. Klobuchar remembers being awake for 24 hours, frightened and exhausted, receiving instructions about breastfeeding while being told she had to leave the hospital.

Her daughter needed to stay, but her insurance would cover only a single day in the hospital.

Klobuchar’s efforts — and those of her pregnant friends — helped change that. The Legislature passed the bill, and Gov. Arne Carlson signed it on March 19, 1996. It required health plans offering maternity benefits to cover at least 48 hours in the hospital after a vaginal birth and 96 hours after a cesarean section. The law took effect the next day.

“I kind of got hooked on public service after that,” she said in an interview.

Jeff Blodgett, who advised Klobuchar’s first Senate campaign and later her presidential bid, said the experience taught her how political power — both her own and that of entrenched interests — could be wielded.

“She was able to realize her power through her story and connecting with others who were in a similar situation and win something policy-wise at the Legislature,” he said. “It also, though, gave her a very healthy skepticism for the health care insurance industry, which I think is super helpful and important in this day and age.”

Now, as the Democratic nominee for governor, Klobuchar, 66, is drawing on a life spent trying to fix problems that first arrived close to home.

She grew up in Plymouth, the daughter of a teacher and a newspaperman. Her father, Jim Klobuchar, went from sports reporting to a widely read column in the Minnesota Star Tribune. She remembers his sense of service and appetite for adventure. She also remembers his drinking.

As she got older, there were conversations, attempts to persuade him to stop and a call to the newspaper asking for help. His drinking brought repeated arrests, the loss of his ability to drive and the prospect of losing his job. After his final DWI, she said, the choice became treatment or jail. He went to treatment.

For Amy Klobuchar, the years before her father’s recovery had helped establish a habit of taking responsibility, of trying to anticipate trouble and make it better. Children of parents with drinking problems can find themselves “begging, taking the keys away, and trying to make things better,” she said.

Her own path took her from Minnesota to Yale University and the University of Chicago Law School, then back to Minnesota and private legal practice. She married John Bessler in 1993. Abigail was born two years later.

The nexus of the personal and political also influenced her tenure as Hennepin County Attorney after she was elected to the office in 1998.

Her decision to support and expand drug court as Hennepin County attorney was informed by her father’s successful treatment. She wanted people to have opportunities for treatment while facing accountability if they continued to break the law.

She ran the prosecutor’s office for eight years before entering the U.S. Senate in 2007, the first woman elected to represent Minnesota in that chamber.

One of her first legislative milestones in the Senate was the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act, which had been championed by former Sen. Paul Wellstone. Blodgett said both Klobuchar and Wellstone drew on their own families’ struggles in the effort to pass the bill.

“Every Minnesota life and regular life has its own complications and secrets and adversity,” he said. “That makes her relatable.”

Her father remained sober for years, then developed Alzheimer’s disease. Klobuchar tracked the money available for his care, which shaped her thinking about the costs families with aging relatives face, even those who have savings and insurance.

In the race for governor, Klobuchar has made healthcare a major focus even as Republicans attack her record in the Senate. Her healthcare platform includes a proposed state tax credit for people buying insurance through MNsure if Congress does not restore enhanced federal premium assistance. She also proposes expanding the state’s bulk purchasing of prescription drugs and increasing access to lower-cost generics.

Klobuchar said the problems today are more complex than the hospital rule she challenged as a new mother, but she still has the impulse to try and fix things. She remembers watching the Legislature extend the protections she had needed when she was sent home without her baby.

“It did make me realize that democracy means something,” she said, “and you can get something done.”

_____