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A good first-order analysis, but fails to reach the root issue. The ACA is a just another example of crony capitalism at work. Here's the problem. Today corporations provide "health insurance" as an employee benefit. That's a cost for their U.S. operations that they don't have in Europe and elsewhere, where such costs are borne by the taxpayer via the various national healthcare programs. So corporations want to jettison those costs by pushing them onto the taxpayer as well. And of course a power-hungry central government is only too happy to oblige.

The problem is this is all being treated as a problem with how you pay for healthcare rather than addressing the root problem, which is how to bring down the cost of healthcare to the point where the average person can pay for the bulk of their own healthcare out of pocket, just as they do for almost everything else in life. For those rare but very costly situations you have insurance, whose function is to protect against unexpected but otherwise financially damaging or ruinous events.

You carry automobile insurance to cover the risks associated with things like theft and accidents. You do not have automobile insurance to cover the normal costs of owning a vehicle, like gas and routine maintenance. The same is true for every other area of life for which you buy insurance--except healthcare. That is the root problem and until this is addressed there is no possible "cure" for the problem of ever-escalating healthcare costs.

The problem is this is all being treated as a problem with how you pay for healthcare rather than addressing the root problem, which is how to bring down the cost of healthcare to the point where the average person can pay for the bulk of their own healthcare out of pocket, just as they do for almost everything else in life.

I read that about 75% of healthcare costs go to treating chronic conditions. Chronic conditions aren't really a problem on a national scale until people hit their mid 40s. Then it is all downhill. It is really a question of who pays for healthcare as a person ages.