I wanted to read it and try to figure out what it actually said, but the PDF is 1990 pages long and written in pidgin Politician.
At any rate, its major points relate to Medicare, regulation and mandate.
Re: Medicare -- insert joke about geriatric individuals running the country, etc. -- it fixes a couple loopholes that had let average users get reamed by average use. The prescription drug coverage is the one that has been popping up in the news most (probably because it has a soundbyte-able nickname in "donut hole"), but the amount of support the federal government is pledging to the states in matching is interesting as well.
Re: regulation, this one is huge. Pre-existing condition exemptions, gone! Considering the number of exclusionary conditions (including mild asthma and the like), this is not a small issue. It has been VERY hard to get the privilege to pay out the nose for private insurance up until this point, and this is the major problem: if you aren't employed, you likely won't be insured.
Re: mandates, well:
Yeah, hear hear. We're going to make sure everybody has health insurance...by making it illegal not to have health insurance! Man, if only we'd known this was so easy years ago -- next we can outlaw poverty.
To be honest, the actual "affordable" points of the Affordable Healthcare for Americans Act seem to be really vague. They set a limit on the amount of money you make before they'll stop helping you, but they don't really seem to be suggesting how or how much they will help you if you're within that threshhold. They offer a few payment options, including cost-sharing which is a unique idea for individuals, and a number of tax credits, but most of that is aimed at families of four making less than $50,000 a year. I hear that's the national average, but by no means does that include every person who has had trouble securing health insurance.
There's also a lot to be said about the tack-on of the student loan program, because that is also huge, but... yeah. Healthcare's enough to talk about here and the student loan stuff doesn't directly affect me yet (though limiting the repayment term to 20 years instead of 25 is awesome).
In short, the bill seems to cover a lot of simple loopholes for people who shouldn't've been excluded from healthcare in the first place: kids up to 26; pre-existing conditions that are often congenital and non-terminal; the self-employed; seniors with limited income. It does not, however, address anyone else. In fact, it seems a whole lot more like federal fundraising (jesus keerist, did you see how many different people and companies they're charging "fees" to?) and a whole lot less like federal healthcare reform.
