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Affordable Care Act

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The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), commonly referred to as “Obamacare,” completely changed the American healthcare system. The purpose of the bill was to lower the cost of healthcare, improve health outcomes, and lower the national uninsured rate. To lower the cost of healthcare, the bill provides federal subsidies for government-sponsored healthcare plans to any person or family whose income is between one and four times the federal poverty level and is not covered by their employer, Medicaid, or Medicare (Neporent). In addition, the bill allows children to stay on their parents’ insurance plans until they are 26. Previously, children could only be on their parents’ plans until age 19 ("Is the Affordable Care Act Working?"). …show more content…

Two different versions of the Affordable Care Act were initially written and proposed in Congress: one in the House, the Affordable Health Care for America Act, and one in the Senate, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Ray and Norbeck). Since the House only needs a simple majority to pass a bill, the Democratic majority was able to pass a more extensive bill. In the Senate, however, the Democrats only had 58 votes, which would not be enough to end a Republican filibuster. In order to get 60 votes, the Democrats in support of the bill had to convince conservative Democrat Bill Nelson (NE) and independent Joe Lieberman …show more content…

Paul Kirk, a Democrat, became the interim senator, and voted for the bill. Soon after the bill passed, Massachusetts held a special election to decide who would serve the rest of Ted Kennedy’s term, and Scott Brown, a Republican, won. Had Massachusetts elected Martha Coakley, the Democratic candidate, PPACA and the Affordable Health Care for America Act would have gone to a conference committee, where the House and Senate would have resolved the differences and negotiated a final bill that incorporated aspects of both the versions. However, since the Republicans now had 41 votes, the House was forced to abandon the Affordable Health Care for America Act and pass PPACA (Condon). The Senate version of the bill was signed by President Obama on March 23, 2010 (Ray and Norbeck). However, when the House passed the Senate’s version of the bill, they demanded it be amended in a subsequent bill. The House wrote and passed the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act, which amended PPACA to better resemble the Affordable Health Care for America Act. The act contained only budget-related issues, so the Senate was able to pass it using the reconciliation process. The reconciliation process is reserved for bills that deal solely with matters of the budget. Bills introduced through the reconciliation process cannot be filibustered. As a result, the Democrats in the Senate passed the bill with a

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