We are kicking off our Legislative Series with a doozie: the Affordable Care Act.
In case you haven’t ever looked at the actual text of a law, it can be really confusing. To give you an idea, the easy-to-read version of the ACA is 955 pages.
Why so confusing? For one, it’s complex. There are a lot of moving parts to a major law. But what makes it especially confusing is that Congress places all the various parts of a new law into many different sections of the United States Code.
The United States Code is the big “book” of all federal laws. When the ACA was enacted, there was already a chapter of the US Code on Public Health. So a bunch of the ACA provisions went into that section. There was already a part on Medicaid, so the Medicaid Expansion went there.
If you want to figure out what the ACA does in its entirety, you will have to trace every one of its provisions into a lot of different sections of the United States Code.
We are doing it for you. And we are displaying it… in a picture, of course!
Click here for our breakdown of Title I of the ACA.
See our Legislative Series main page for more information on the codifying process.
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