That depends on how you define "high deductible".
For example, let's start at https://secure.marylandhealthconnection.gov/AHCT/LoadExplore... then click "Get an Estimate". Put in a family of 3, ages 63, 61, 21, no pregnancies, no dental. Income $100k. You get a list of 21 plans. The very first one on the list has a $12,400 deductible and a $13,100 out of pocket max.
In fact, there is not a single option on this list with an annual out of pocket max below $9000.
Granted, these are family plans. Your cited number is for an individual; the number is $14,300 for a family. But note that there are plans on this list that have out of pocket maximums larger than $14,300 (e.g. "BluePreferred PPO HSA Bronze $6,550" has a $26,200 out-of-pocket max). How to reconcile that with your link, I don't know: the theory says they should not exist, but experiment says they do.
Note that I picked on Maryland because they allow you to get this data without creating an account.
In any case, most of the plans on this list would have been considered "high deductible" before the advent of the ACA.
Anyway, what's the definition of "high deductible"? The standard definition used for HSAs is $1300 for an individual or $2600 for a family, which is almost hilariously low in today's marketplace. And the maxium out-of-pocket max for HSAs is actually _lower_ than the overall caps. I have no idea how that $26,200 out-of-pocket plan is "HSA-qualified", as it's claimed to be....
> The ACA lowered the costs of people with insurance by reducing the pool of people without insurance.
That's not true. The ACA raised the costs of people with insurance by pooling them together with people who used to be uninsurable because their estimated care cost so much. This effect completely dominated the effect of adding healthy people to the pool. One reason for that is that for healthy people paying the penalties is way cheaper than actually getting insurance, so a lot of them stayed uninsured, but even that is not the full story. The main upshot is that caring for some people is _really_ expensive and the cost has to come out somewhere.
We can proceed to an argument about whether the tradeoffs were worth it, of course, whether there were other ways of achieving the laudable goal of getting rid of the preexisting condition problem, etc. But let's not pretend that the reason prices went up is just "gouging". Prices went up to a large extent because the risk structure of the insured pool skewed towards more risk.
Now there is certainly _some_ gouging going on, largely abetted by the restrictions on interstate sale of health insurance, which leads many states to have a very small number of companies providing insurance. For the Maryland case above, there are precisely 3 companies represented in the list. And only one of those companies offers PPOs. Which is why the price of the PPOs in Maryland about doubled in the last two years: no competition, why not? This is hardly a "free market" behavior, though; it's a highly regulated, in a dumb way, market, that encourages monopolist behavior. Which is what we get.
