Not only that, policies in 2014 and beyond were much more useful than their predecessors. They could no longer include annual or lifetime benefit caps, and they had to cover maternity and nine other categories of benefits — "significantly richer coverage," in the view of Loren Adler and Paul Ginsburg of the Brookings Institution. Some buyers, notably younger people and those with no adverse medical history, had to pay more on average, but for many more the change was a boon. "There's simply no reasonable way to compare the premiums of the average individual market policies before the Affordable Care Act regulations kicked in to those sold since then," Gaba observes.