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).