Since the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act passed on March 23, President Barack Obama has been touring the country, trying to inform the public of the benefits of health reform. On April 1, the president traveled to the New England area to sell small business owners on the positives of the bill.

According to some health care experts, his job is made all the more difficult by the complex and misleading elements of the act.

“It’s sorta screwy,” said Joel Shalowitz of the bill. “There are a lot of questions the bill leaves unanswered. There’s so many complicated things [in the bill].”

One misleading element of the health care bill, according to Shalowitz, is an element he calls intentionally “not transparent.” That is a part of the bill which purports to help fund the $938 billion program by forcing hospitals to lower the amount of money they charge Medicare for services. The bill implies that money will go to help subsidize health care for the uninsured, but Shalowitz said,”the Federal Government needs that money to keep Medicare afloat.”

“It’s double counting,” he said. “You cannot use the same dollar to do two different things.”

Shalowitz is the director of the health industry management program at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. He said the bill won’t have any positive effects on students currently enrolled in college. Starting in September, the freshman class will be the first affected by the bill when they graduate in 2014.

For students currently enrolled, the most likely impact, according to Shalowitz, will be higher taxes when they get their first job.

“All of this depends on the individual student and what their situation is,” he said.

The American Medical Association, an advocacy group for physicians, supports the reform and advocated for the legislation before it passed.

“A lot of what we were tracking pertains

specifically to physicians,” said Robert Mills, a spokesman for the American Medical Association.

For physicians, the new health care bill will mean a 10 percent bonus payment for all primary care doctors who receive at least 60 percent of their business from Medicare patients, along with a raise in Medicaid payments across the board and a standardization of health insurance claims, making it easier for doctors to track claims and improve physician revenue cycles.

According to Shalowitz, the biggest problem facing physicians will be meeting the new demand once the full force of the bill takes effect in four years.

But whatever the reform act’s shortcomings, Obama and the Democrats did achieve their top priority, according to Shalowitz.

“The biggest thing is coverage,” he said. “It’s covering tens of millions of people who were not covered or could not get coverage.”

The Kaiser Family Foundation, a non-profit group focusing on the major health care issues in the United States, has been striving to educate the public about the changes in the health reform bill.

“We’re not an advocacy group,” said Director of Communications Craig Palosky. “We’re being descriptive of what the legislature is.”

According to the Kaiser Foundation, most individuals in the United States will be required to have health insurance by 2014, with monetary penalties being levied at individuals who do not purchase insurance. To address the issue of affordability, the threshold for Medicaid coverage has been lowered. In 2014, the requirement for eligibility will be that an individual makes 133 percent of the federal poverty level or less, and the government will offer subsidies for individuals making up to $30,000 a year, with the amount of the subsidy decreasing as salary rises. The affordable care act also raised the age of children allowed to be covered by their parents insurance to 26, up from 24.

Under the new reform bill, a 27-year-old making $20,000 a year in 2014, or 185 percent of the federal poverty level, will receive $1,518 in government subsidies on a $2,637 health insurance plan. That year, the penalty for not having insurance would be $695.

For an individual, buying insurance with government subsidies would only be less expensive than paying the penalty if he or she makes between $14,512 and $16,650. Anything less than $14,512 and the individual would be covered by Medicaid, with the government paying 100 percent of medical bills for the first two years. For citizens earning more than $16,650 per year, health insurance becomes more expensive than the $695 penalty.

According to Shalowitz, the 2014 expansion of Medicaid is causing states to cut back on their coverage today in anticipation of needing a greater amount of resources when the changes take effect.

“One of the problems is that the state is looking to cut Medicaid benefits because the threshold has been lowered,” Shalowitz said. “In anticipation of that happening, states are cutting back.”

The most popular aspect of the bill by far has been the elimination of so-called pre-existing conditions, meaning health insurers are no longer allowed to deny coverage to an individual because of an existing health problem.

According to Shalowitz, insurance companies had been trying to wriggle around that provision with a loophole regarding new customers, but on March 30, the House of Representatives closed that gap.