"Few laws have generated as much intense emotional and ongoing controversy as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA). The law is the culmination of a hundred years of debate, discussion, and attempts at offering near-universal coverage in the United States. Lessons learned from the past, fleeting political majorities, and new policy imperatives to improve quality and reduce ever-rising costs created an opportune policy window in 2009-2010 to pass one of the most expansive - and potentially impactful - pieces of social legislation in our nation's history. However, the very reasons that made health reform necessary and so difficult to pass are also the same reasons that the ACA has divided the nation - both politically and culturally"--