The anecdotes illustrate that there were two main benefactors: young people without formal full-time employment and those with pre-existing conditions that had allowed insurance coverage to lapse.

From someone too old to be on their parent's insurance, while I'm 100% behind the reform that disallows previous conditions from affecting ability to get coverage, the ACA was effectively a shake-down that made me delay taking the risk to go full time on my startup -- the options for coverage in my state were expensive and very low-quality, and the penalty for opting-out would have been $4000 for my domestic partner and I (on top of the additional taxes we paid to support ACA).

Thanks for sharing. I alluded to this in another thread but got downvoted and stirred controversy.

My claim is this: For the median entrepreneur, there is more financial drag due to insurance now than there was before the ACA. For those who are sick or young, there is less financial drag. Your story anecdotally supports that claim.

Yeah, I think that there's a political type that is just a zealot scared of anything that will challenge his/her worldview and feels a need to flag/downvote/hide.

The reform surrounding pre-existing conditions for people that let their health coverage lapse is the only good thing that came out of the ACA, and it was very expensive for the taxpayers and continues to be. This should have just been a piece of legislature and not a terrible government shakedown of the American public; a simple reform was needed, not another way to subsidize the non-working while compelling the public to give money to private corporations.