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Plain and simple: The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is a GOOD thing.
Let me tell you four reasons why:

1.More children will be covered with health insurance. Currently over 3 million Latino children are not covered and of those, 1.7 million qualify for Medicaid or the national children’s health insurance plan (CHIP). PPACA not only provides for coverage, but it also provides for navigational support to actually be able to benefit from the coverage.

2. Eliminates pre-existing conditions like asthma and diabetes as a reason to deny children health care coverage.

3. Allows young adults to remain covered under their parents’ health insurance until age 26 (from personal experience this is a life saver!).

4. Businesses are given greater incentives (other than the common good and public health of our communities) to offer their employees health insurance coverage.

Even just these four reasons, PPACA is good enough. Luckily, while we celebrate the anniversary of the passage of PPACA, we are able to highlight not only the benefits, but we also get to remember the conditions we were in that lead President Obama to fight so hard to pass a law like this one. Latinos win the prize for the highest rate of uninsured. We also win the prize for the highest rate that is contracting HIV. Our young Latinos are faced with increasing rates of diabetes and childhood obesity. Plain and simple, on this anniversary when we have the opportunity to celebrate and remember, PPACA is a GOOD thing.

Yet, we cannot stop there, as you read this, legislatures across the country are making every effort to take away the effectiveness of PPACA. Bills to eliminate access to reproductive health coverage, efforts to keep states from accessing federal funding and efforts to repeal the health care exchange are all underway. What should we do? Tell your friends, your families, co-workers, legislators, post on Facebook and Twitter #ppaca: “Plain and simple: PPACA is a GOOD thing.”