As an eighth grader, sophomore Shane Donovan had a minor heart attack and was immediately sent to the nearest hospital. As he awoke from passing out hours before, he finds doctors and nurses around him, telling each other he’s awake. The good news was that they knew what happened to him and he went through it. The bad news was that since he has no health insurance, all the doctors could do was give him a couple shots and release him.

The new healthcare bill excites Donovan because he knows how it is not to have health insurance and be released by a hospital for that reason. He knows now that, whatever his illness is, he can go to the doctor and receive help.

“I couldn’t believe they released me like that,” Donovan said. “I just had a heart attack.”

Now that Donovan has healthcare, he sees an improvement when going to the doctor’s office. If he has any illness, from a common cold, to the swine flu, he and his family can now be treated properly. Stunned at the fact that he wasn’t being treated, Donovan has hoped for something like this bill to pass.

“I can see a big difference when going now. When I didn’t, I could barely get any help,” Donovan said. “Now I have a lot more assistance with whatever I have.”

Healthcare is one of the major essentials people try to make sure they have, but some people can’t afford the high payments insurance companies regulate. With the new healthcare bill passed, people will start to receive full insurance by the year 2014. The bill has been debated by any politician, but the direction it’s being thrown is all dependent on what political view that they have.

The Republican Party has many ideas they believe will happen with this new bill. They believe the bill will cause intrusion on insurance companies by the government, making this one step closer to socialism. Then because of the “intrusion,” they believe it will also expand taxes on major insurance companies, increasing them drastically.  One big problem Republicans believe this healthcare plan will have is that there will be a long wait time to get a usual check-up from a local doctor. They’ve compared it to Canada and England’s healthcare, which by their research takes around 30 days to see someone.

Upon research, sophomore Dustin Red Eagle begins to believe that our wait time will be just as long as Canada and England’s healthcare, or even longer.

“This bill is bad for our country. Our healthcare will be like Canada’s and England’s,” Red Eagle said.

Republicans also believe the bill will impose a staggering tax burden on U.S. tax payers in generations after ours. The bill promises the health care reform is intended to lower premium costs and reduce the country’s deficit, while Republicans believe it will have the opposite effect. Republicans believe that government spending will increase two trillion dollars once fully implemented. All these opinions are only a small bit of what Republicans have been arguing Democrats back with.

The Democratic Party believes many opposite views. They believe the healthcare bill will not only regulate insurance payments, but also help people who may not have been able to afford it before. Democrats also believe that the bill will put a cap on annual out-of-pocket spending, and will also reduce costs of Medicaid, Medicare and other existing systems with a series of measures. The bill also says that it requires participation by individuals, with a penalty of 2.5 percent of adjusted gross income for non-compliance.

“The Republicans are just looking for something to put down,” Donovan said.

The bill has many more plans within it, where the government will ban insurers from denying people coverage with pre-existing conditions, children who have pre-existing conditions, bans insurers from imposing lifetime caps on coverage, and requires people to stay on their parent’s policies until age 26.