Health care reform has been a long time coming, and now it is no longer a dream, but a reality.Before writing this article, I can’t deny that I had no idea what the new health care bill was going to do for the public. I was one of the blind supporters that knew it would be a positive change but not the how, why, or when of this change. Luckily, many news organizations have spent the past week trying to explain the new health care bill to the general public for better understanding.

While reading cbsnews.com, I was appalled by the fact that 32 million Americans are uninsured in the United States. It seems unrealistic that our government and insurance companies can leave that many people without health care.

The new health care bill will extend the opportunity for insurance coverage to all of those people, which was the first aspect of the bill that reassured my support.

The bill is also forcing insurance companies to give some sort of preventative care, according to thehuffingtonpost.com. This means that, not only will more people be able to access health insurance, they will also get better coverage than many individuals currently have.

I know that my father’s insurance is limited to “catastrophic” health issues. So unless I accidentally chop off a limb with a power saw or come down with a case of polio, the insurance company does not cover any cost.

The move toward preventative care and away from only treatment is also being extended to an increase in taxation for tanning services, regular check-ups and physicals, and the addition of nutrition facts to every chain-restaurant menu.

It is a nice change for the government to be enforcing preventative measures for the people in the world’s most obese nation, where illness is more prevalent because of this fact. If there is a way to ensure that individuals are more educated about what they are putting into their bodies, and also what is going on with their bodies, then maybe this health care reform will not be the horrible change that Republicans are foreseeing.

A Republican friend of mine believes that, if everyone has health care, they will magically stop taking care of themselves because they are now able to go to the doctor more often, and thus necessitate more government funding for health care.

In my opinion, this is utterly ridiculous. However, it is a fact that the new bill will cost $940 billion over the first ten years it is enforced. But, it has also been estimated that it would reduce the national deficit by $143 billion in that time, according to cbsnews.com.

How the bill would accomplish deficit reduction is still unknown. In fact, many aspects of this bill are still unknown.

All of the unknown can make a person feel like the country is falling down the rabbit hole, but our best bet as a nation is to work together and figure first, how the bill will work over all, and then to reassure ourselves that this change is not taking place until 2014.

There is still plenty of time to gain a better understanding of this reform and find a way for all of us, from the far left to the far right, to realize the potential that this bill presents.