The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is a United States federal statute that was signed into law by President Barack Obama on February 23, 2010. Barack Obama’s intentions for the bill were to increase the quality and affordability of health insurance for American citizens to match levels of care in other developed nations. The bill also intended to expand public and private insurance coverage to lower the number of uninsured Americans. Over four years later, many people still do not understand their rights under the Affordable Care Act, as it is hard for citizens to find clear, politically unbiased information about the Affordable Care Act.
	The Affordable Care Act is almost 1,000 pages long; there is little surprise that few Americans know what the act entails. The Affordable Care Act attempts to accomplish the goals outlined previously through a number of ways. The Affordable Care Act expands access to healthcare coverage through the expansion of Medicare and the creation of health insurance exchanges. The bill includes various measures for cost control, including accountable care organizations, bundled payments and an independent advisory board. Quality of care is improved by reducing the amount of hospital-acquired infections and increasing the accessibility of medical records. Individual mandates on insurance are included to incentivize Americans to enroll in a health insurance plan.  The bill prevents insurance providers from denying benefits due to pre-existing conditions, allows citizens under 26 years of age to remain covered on their parents’ healthcare plan, prevents insurers from cancelling coverage due to mistakes and allows insured to repeal denial of payment. The Affordable Care Act also ends lifetime spending limits on coverage, makes insurance providers publicly justify premium increases and premium increases must primarily be spent on healthcare and not administrative costs. Finally, the Affordable Care Act also allows coverage for preventive care at no extra cost to the insured, allows the insured to choose any doctor that they would like and removes barriers to receive emergency healthcare services. 
	It is important to know what the Affordable Care Act is to understand why there is opposition to the bill. Some of the opponents to the bill have well thought-out arguments on how the Affordable Care Act could be better, while other opponents offer no way to improve the bill and have other reasons for opposing the bill. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the arguments of the major opponents of the Affordable Care Act to see where their disapproval lies and to determine if the disapproval stems from a fault in the bill itself or due to other factors. This is critical to determine because other factors that are not healthcare related should not play a role in improving the lives of millions of American citizens. By analyzing the arguments of the major opponents of the Affordable Care Act, the faults of the bill can be identified. Attacks on the bill that do not stem from the bill itself can be disregarded as they will not improve the bill and healthcare in America.  
