Just over two years ago, a serious health care reform bill, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010, was finally passed.

Currently, this health care reform bill sits before the Supreme Court, where, in fact, the wife of one of its very conservative members, plays on her relationship to her husband and earns hundreds of thousands of dollars in “consultant” fees as she works to destroy a health care reform bill that protects millions of Americans from the abuse of for-profit insurance companies.

She rails against health care reform as a “socialist take-over,” when, in fact, it maintains the involvement of for-profit insurance companies but puts limits on how they can abuse Americans in times of need.

In addition, it provides coverage to millions of Americans who do not have access to health care through employment and are forced to purchase health insurance on the open market. The “evil” mandate that Republicans tout as “the death of freedom,” actually ensures that insurance companies make their profit and can still afford to cover the costs of health care for the vast majority of Americans by spreading risk. We are transitioning to a system where everyone is insured and everyone shares the cost. Before health care reform, everyone could receive health care in an emergency room – but if a person had no insurance, we all absorbed the cost. Now everyone will share the cost of health care in an organized, planning-ahead way because everyone will have health insurance coverage.

I was, and continue to be, committed to health care reform based on my many years of work as a registered nurse. From my vantage point, I saw the consequences of a health care system where patients and families were held hostage to spotty and unpredictable health insurance coverage. In addition, lack of consistent insurance coverage for young and middle age adults worked to exacerbate the complications of their chronic illnesses because their access to basic health care, life-saving medications and other self-monitoring equipment was totally lacking or intermittent, at best.

Recently, I spoke with a young woman who is a mother to three healthy young children. She has a husband whose job provides an excellent insurance plan. Like most healthy young people who have had access to health insurance all their lives, she had accepted it as a “given” and did not think more about it. She had voted for President Obama in 2008 – but she questions why President Obama and the Democrats had “wasted so much time” on health care reform. In reality, her question could easily have been mine 30 or 40 years ago. I accepted health insurance as a “given” throughout my professional career – but when I really needed it, I began to realize how fortunate I was. That was when my commitment to health care reform increased exponentially.

In the two years since the ACA was passed, fierce politically-driven debate has made Mainers lose sight of the urgent problems that drove President Obama to seek a solution. We have forgotten that so many families in Maine couldn’t afford decent insurance in the first place or did not have it offered through their work place. Insurance companies routinely denied coverage to people because of pre-existing medical conditions, and too many insured families would find that when they needed coverage most – a diagnosis of cancer, a sudden heart attack – their plan had stifling limits on the coverage they could get. Some Mainers were literally being driven into bankruptcy when diagnosed with a severe illness. They were trying to keep up with insurance premiums and co-pays when they were least able to work. Businesses, particularly small employers, were overwhelmed by the cost of insurance, and fewer were providing decent coverage.

The law has already made a difference in the lives of more than 100 million people nationwide. Here are just some of the ways the Affordable Care Act is already helping Maine families:

• Providing new coverage options for young adults. Health plans are now required to allow parents to keep their children under age 26 without job-based coverage on their family’s coverage, and, thanks to this provision, 2.5 million young people have gained coverage nationwide. As of June 2011, 7,329 young adults in Maine gained insurance coverage as a result of the new health care law.

• Providing new coverage options to children with a history of health conditions. Before the law, children with health conditions could be denied coverage because of a pre-existing condition. Today, insurers aren’t allowed to refuse to cover a sick child. In 2014, when additional insurance reforms go into effect, insurance companies will not be allowed to deny coverage to adults with pre-existing conditions.

• Removing lifetime limits on health benefits. The law bans insurance companies from imposing lifetime dollar limits on health benefits – freeing cancer patients and individuals suffering from other chronic diseases from having to worry about going without treatment because of their lifetime limits. Already, 431,000 Maine residents, including 172,000 women and 103,000 children, are free from worrying about lifetime limits on coverage.

• Insurers can no longer kick you off insurance. Before the law, insurance companies could investigate people with high health bills to look for reasons to cancel their coverage. Today, insurers can’t “rescind” your policy when you need it most because of an innocent mistake you made when fillingout your initial enrollment form. An example might be simply failing to report a diagnosis of acne when you were a teen.

These are just some highlights of health care reform. The next time you hear disparaging remarks about the ACA, think about the source. Have they walked in the shoes of any of the Maine folks whose lives have already been significantly and concretely improved because of the ACA?

Maurie Hill lives in Standish.