ACA was shoehorned through without bi-partisan support. It's currently unsustainable from a cost perspective and was widely predicted to be upon passage. Having good intentions does not excuse you from the consequences of your actions. For something as fundamental to our country as healthcare, having a wide buy-in and costs that won't collapse under its own weight is crucial for cost and legislative sustainability.
Those sound like talking points to me and I'm aware that my comments probably sound the same since I didn't present sources for my claims.
As far as not having bipartisan support, the republicans did get concessions but really didn't seem to want to contribute and haven't really tried to do anything on their own while they were in charge (unless you can point to a reasonable proposal that was shot down by the left). On top of that, claims that the recent proposals were as secretive or anti-bipartisan as the ACA don't seem to hold up [0].
I can't present a truly objective truth that I think will convince you, but there are a few misleading things about the ACA that make it seem more unstable than it really is. Overall I think one basic failing is that the penalty for being uninsured is too low, causing to few healthy people to enter the market that essentially subsidize the unhealthy (which is pretty much how all insurance works at some level). Insurance companies were essentially promised tons of new customers who could offset the fact that they now have to offer plans that actually have coverage (and therefore cost them more). Because of this, they are largely still making money but less money than they were and want. This means they don't have much incentive to make the ACA work and might actively work to destroy it to continue making record profits in an unsustainable way [1]. Not only that, but some of the premium increases come from uncertainty around whether the ACA will continue [2], or whether the government will continue to make subsidy payments that were promised [3].
I don't expect any of this to convince you but hopefully it makes my arguments seem less opinionated. I think about it the same way I think about software, I cannot imagine having to design and build such a system with the adversarial system we have knowing that you have to do it in a couple years and the other party is going to work against you and then try to dismantle the system after you are gone. Expecting to not have to have to make changes over time to fix unforeseen problems seems totally unreasonable to me.
Please stop trying to frame everything in a partisan lens ("talking points"). It does not good for anyone.
I agree with you that the penalty for being uninsured is too low if you want to build a sustainable system. However, had a more realistic penalty been put in place from the start, there is no way that it would have passed in its existing form. I'm also very much against younger people having to subsidize something that for the most part they get little to no value from.
As far as insurance companies go, the law was by and large a handout to them by providing them a captive audience that did not exist before and an excuse to raise premiums on everyone else. If you create a law that binds consumers to companies and do not provide adequate protections to consumers in the process, this is what you get. Just like the fees, had these protections been in place from the start, there is no way that the law would have passed as it.
My whole beef with it is that there were enough glaring flaws in the law and not enough buy-in from everyone that there was real sustainability and repeal risk. If you pass laws that are knowingly flawed that affect this many people, you are being dishonest and I don't think you deserve points for good intentions in light of that.
What do you propose as an alternative other than "do it all right the first time magically"? Do you think honestly in a system like ours you can get all the buy in you need and get something passed the first time? I think its easy to criticize from the sidelines but a lot harder to actually do something. I still think it was a real effort to actually fix problems and it did fix some of those problems, it has some economic issues but I think everyone is trying to make a political career out of jumping on it rather than doing the mature thing and trying to make it work (which they didn't do in the first place).
