Editor's Note

The essays in this issue, which is the second of two special issues JHPPL is publishing on the Affordable Care Act (ACA)'s first decade, evaluate the law's impacts, performance, and evolution from the perspectives of political science, economics, health services research, and public health. Authors explore how ACA policies have fared compared to original expectations and analyze the law's achievements, disappointments, and surprises. They illuminate what the ACA tells us about race, the courts, rulemaking, partisanship, public opinion, and the media. They examine the ACA in the context of critical health policy issues, including racial and ethnic disparities, cost control, evidence-based medicine, long-term care, and economic impacts. They also grapple with the ACA's lessons and implications for contemporary reform debates. Taken together, these essays paint a complex portrait of the ACA, its legacies, the state of health care politics, and the enduring challenges in US health policy.