From September 30th to October 17th 2013, the federal government was shut down. Government shut-downs occur when the federal government cannot decide on a budget for the fiscal year and needs more time to do so. The predominant reason the government could not decide on a budget is because of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, also known as ObamaCare, health care reform, PPACA, the Affordable Care Act or ACA, was signed by President Barack Obama on March 23, 2010 in order to reform the health care industry. This act was later upheld by the Supreme Court on July 28, 2013. The goal of ObamaCare is to provide affordable, quality health care to more Americans and to reduce health care spending. ObamaCare also offers many new benefits, rights and protections not available in other insurance policies for young adults. These include the abilities to remain on their parent’s insurance plan until age 26, to make sure insurance companies to insure their customers when they are sick, to allow insurance customers to fix an honest mistake on an application afterward, to prevent gender discrimination from insurance companies, to stop insurance companies from charging more money for coverage, to eliminate life-time and annual limits, to change coverage when necessary, and to allow people with pre-existing conditions to get coverage from insurance companies.
The major fear for ObamaCare is that it will give the federal government too much power. Many people believe that enrolling in ObamaCare will give the federal government control over who gets health care and who does not. These people also believe that the government will be able to change the amount of coverage and make it more expensive for people to get. The reason these people think that ObamaCare is a problem is because the government needs to make money to get out of debt and because it will need money to pay people for their health care, both of which they need to get from American citizens. States including Georgia and Texas are actually trying to stop ObamaCare by passing out flyers at colleges, putting up advertisements against ObamaCare, encouraging protests from young adults and giving them ObamaCare registration sheets in order to burn them.
Overall, ObamaCare will be helpful to people, but the problems with it are still an issue. ObamaCare could give the government too much power over the American people and take too much money from the citizens as well. Although this issue has been temporarily solved, many Republicans still do not like this law and ObamaCare will continue to change to fix these issues as time goes on.