Welcome. I'm Jonathan Gruber, an economist at MIT who served as an advisor for both the Massachusetts and the national health care reform bills.

We are facing a crisis in American health care right now.

America's health care system has become increasingly unfair, bloated, and out of control. If nothing is done, within 70 years we will spend 40% of our national income on health care.

At the same time, more and more Americans find themselves without access to protection against these rising costs.

So what can we do? Enter the Affordable Care Act. The ACA will address these problems in four steps.

First, it will make insurance affordable by providing public insurance and tax credits to offset insurance costs. An additional 32 million Americans will gain insurance coverage under the ACA.

Second, it will fix broken insurance markets so that insurers can no longer discriminate against the sick or deny you coverage because of a pre-existing condition.

Third, the ACA will begin the process of controlling health care costs, by setting up health insurance exchanges where insurers will have to compete for your business and moving towards a system of reimbursing doctors based on making you healthier, not how much care they deliver.

Fourth, the ACA will reduce the deficit - by more than $100 billion in the coming decade, through spending cuts and raising taxes on the highest income families.

We know the ACA can succeed because it is based on a successful reform in Massachusetts. That reform reduced the number of uninsured by two-thirds and cut premiums in the individual insurance market by half - with strong public support.

The ACA is NOT a government takeover of insurance - it represents an expansion of private insurance and will allow those who are happy with their insurance to keep their plans.

The ACA does NOT impose death panels, and in fact helps seniors by filling in the "donut hole" in their prescription drug coverage.

The ACA does NOT force Americans to buy insurance they can't afford.

A key element of the ACA is the individual mandate to purchase health insurance. Without the mandate, many healthy people will delay paying for health insurance until they are sick. When they stay out of the market, it drives up costs even more for all of us. The mandate is the spinach that we have to eat in order to get the dessert that is fairly priced insurance.

But the ACA does not force people to buy insurance they can't afford. In order to make the mandate fair there is an "affordability exemption" so that no one ever has to pay more than 8% of their income for insurance.

Health care is the largest and fastest growing sector of our economy, and remaking key elements of that system is challenging. But it's worth it.

At the end of the day, what everyone wants is to make sure we're taken care of when we're sick, and that it doesn't ruin us financially to get that care.

The ACA makes affordable health care a reality for all Americans.