The Affordable Care Act has many American citizens at odds, debating whether it is the best thing since sliced bread or an end to freedom.

Ron Pollack, Families USA executive director, said in a teleconference Tuesday there is an additional advantage to the plan.

The announcement was made Tuesday in a teleconference call by Pollack and Cathy Levine, executive director of the Universal Healthcare Action Network of Ohio, that the act will include a spending cap on out-of-pocket expenses. This will not go into effect until 2014, but Families USA called for a study on how the caps would affect the people of Ohio if they were in effect this year.

After the caps were adjusted for the study to reflect 2011, a cap for an individual would be $5,950 and $11,900 for families. The study showed out-of-pocket expenses for health care would cost Ohio families more than $759.4 million in excess of the spending cap limit for one year.

The amounts of the caps would differ depending on the household income.

“The lower your income, the lower your cap will be and lower for out-of-pocket spending,” Pollack said.

“What’s very interesting about the people spending in excess of the cap, the overwhelming majority of them, two-thirds are in working families,” he added.

“Two decades of rising health care costs have squeezed families into higher premiums, copays and deductibles, or out of healthcare altogether,” he said. He said that these families will often experience high credit card bills, bankruptcies or lack of health care.

“Will this legislation, we expect that there are huge numbers of people who will gain protection that will help their pocketbooks,” Pollack said.

“Getting sick shouldn’t mean going broke, not today, not in Ohio,” Levine said. “Unfortunately, today in Ohio, getting sick or injured causes people even with employer-based coverage to suffer financial hardship or ruin.”

Levine told a story of her friend in Columbus who was diagnosed with Crohn’s Disease and with a 20 percent deductible, she incurred a bill of $5,000 that she paid with a credit card. Ironically, her friend’s doctor had told her to avoid stress.

Levine said there have been efforts in the past two weeks to put an individual mandate regarding the ACA on the ballot in the Ohio legislature, but she said that will not change anything.

“Unless there is a federal repeal of this law, Ohio can keep wasting time debating this law, but it is the law of the land,” she said. She added that while that is happening, the insurance industry, hospitals, employers and ordinary Ohioans will be learning more about the ACA and how they will benefit from it.