As I may have mentioned before, my family went on Obamacare in the early days, and for a self-employed guy it was a great option with considerable savings. When I made too much to qualify for assistance, I stayed on it and paid the market rates. When my wife got a full-time job with benefits, I said hallelujah, but it turned out the family plan for this private insurance was slightly more expensive than market rate Obamacare, so three of us stayed on it. Premiums never stopped rising, possibly because parts of the healthcare ecosystem we're addicted to their ludicrous prices, which never adhered to supply and demand.
What also didn't help: Republican governors did everything possible to kneecap Obamacare at the state-level, where a large buy-in was needed. Republicans, and frankly most Democrats, failed to promote the fact that this wasn't socialized medicine at all; it was old-fashioned economy of scale at work. For-profit healthcare would have been bidding for huge Obamacare contracts, and theoretically could have used that weight to negotiate lower prices from the ridiculous medical equipment and needless procedure rackets, who still would have enjoyed large but less ridiculous profits, with private insurance benefitting from the same economic correction.
