After nearly a year of debate within the House and Senate, the Affordable Health Care for America Act was passed and will soon become law. This bill’s primary aim is to extend coverage to the more than 30 million Americans without coverage today.

This bill has received stiff opposition from the Republican Party. It is quite an accomplishment to finally achieve some legislation to address an issue that has been pressing America for several decades. In close examination of both versions of this bill, there will certainly be some things that students on campus will find positive and certainly some that will be much less pleasing. The Editorial Board believes that there are some aspects of this bill, in particular, that will benefit the Stanford community greatly, and the bill’s shortcomings can be mended in the long run if we as citizens continue to follow the progress of health care in America.

A major complaint about this bill is that it presents immediate costs with delayed benefits. The bill mandates individuals to attain health insurance and requires that most employers provide insurance to their employees as well, a system not altogether different from the current system here at Stanford. College-age individuals, for example, receive a very immediate and significant benefit: extended coverage for young adults, which would allow college-age Americans to stay on their parents’ insurance plan until the age of 26, rather than the usual 19 or 21. This measure saves money for families across America and will prove useful to many members of the Stanford community, particularly in a time of economic recovery.

But the extension of health coverage in this country must come at a cost to everyone involved in the system. Estimates place the cost of this act at nearly a trillion dollars, to be added to the already ballooning national budget and deficit. The most efficient path to minimizing these costs is not to continue to ignore those Americans without coverage, but to place increasing pressure on the health care industry to make its costs more reasonable. The U.S. spends more than two times that of other developed nations, per capita, on health expenditures, despite the fact that our overall health as a nation suffers in comparison to Europe and other industrialized areas.

Now that this debate has taken place on a national level, we hopefully have entered an era where the issues of heath coverage and insurance costs is something very deliberately and openly discussed among the American public, and not decided by an oligarchy of politicians and health care institutions. When the Senate and House versions of this act are reconciled and finally adapted to law, Democrats and Republicans alike should not view this as an end to the health care debate in this country, but merely the beginning of an enduring challenge to make health coverage affordable and fair.