This report published by the Urban Institute explores the affects that the Affordable Care Act will have on insurance coverage and the cost of acute care for the nonelderly. In order to simulate these changes the authors used the Urban Insitute's Health Insurance Policy Simulation Model to project the number of insured and the costs of health care. These numbers were then compared to those produced by the simulation if no change were to be made to the health care system.

From the report:

With the enactment of the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010 on March 30, 2010, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) became law, fundamentally changing health insurance and access to health care in the United States. Using the Urban Institute’s Health Insurance Policy Simulation Model (HIPSM), we estimate how the ACA would affect the types of health insurance coverage Americans have, the number of those without insurance, and America’s overall spending on health care. For ease of comparison, we simulate the ACA as if fully implemented in 2010 and contrast the results with HIPSM’s pre-reform baseline results for 2010. Our single-year estimates complement the 10-year cost estimates previously released by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Office of the Actuary, providing many results—particularly for coverage and transitions in coverage—that are either new or broken out by more detailed characteristics than in either of those estimates.

Full Report: America Under the Affordable Care Act (PDF | 605 KB)

Urban Institute. (2010). America under the Affordable Care Act. Buettgens, M., Garrett, B., and Holahn, J.