In the United States Senate, Majority Leader Harry Reid chose to use the bill as a legislative vehicle to pass an extension of federal long-term unemployment insurance benefits.

The bill was passed into law as Carl Levin and Howard P. "Buck" McKeon National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2015.

[5] Proponents of the reform law wanted to address the parts of the healthcare system they believed to not be working well, while causing minimal disruption to those happy with the coverage they have.

[6][5] The Protecting Volunteer Firefighters and Emergency Responders Act would amend the Internal Revenue Code to provide that a bona fide volunteer providing firefighting and prevention services, emergency medical services, or ambulance services to a state or local government or a tax-exempt organization shall not be counted in determining the number of full-time employees of an employer for purposes of the employer mandate to provide health care coverage under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

Those provisions require certain employers with 50 or more full-time equivalent employees to either offer health care coverage of a certain standard or be subject to penalties.

3979 would have no significant budgetary effect because the U.S. Treasury Department has issued final regulations that, by CBO’s and JCT’s assessment, provide the same treatment for those groups as H.R.

[1] The Protecting Volunteer Firefighters and Emergency Responders Act was introduced into the United States House of Representatives on January 31, 2014 by Rep. Lou Barletta (R, PA-11).

"[3] Rep. Barletta, who sponsored the bill, argued that it is necessary because the Internal Revenue Service had initially said that it would be requiring organizations to provide these volunteers with insurance, something that would be prohibitively expensive for some of them.

[2] The Department of the Treasury, which the IRS is part of, announced on January 10 that these volunteers would not be required to be provided with insurance, but supporters still wanted to make that "crystal clear in statute" instead of relying on a mere rule.