Personally, I thought the ACA was a very honest plan. The individual mandate is a very clear statement of: healthy people must get insurance so that we can offset the cost of requiring that sick people can get insurance. I never had any illusions that, as a healthy young person, this would do anything besides increase medical costs (including insurance premiums) for me, as a trade-off against the possibility that I may one day be one of the older and/or sick people that it would benefit. I hoped it would decrease costs because we would no longer need to subsidize the uninsured by making up for care providers' lost revenue, but I didn't think that would (especially in the short term) be anything besides shifting that subsidy from being included in the cost of care to being included in premiums and federal taxes.
I was pretty sure it was going to make things more expensive for me, and I don't think it was sold any differently than that. I was not in favor of it, largely because I didn't think it would survive politically long enough for me to switch from the "loses" to the "benefits" category. We're sort of seeing that now, except that I'm actually sort of optimistic that its 6-year (or so) survival has enshrined it or something like it.
I believe a repeal-without-replace plan will be completely disastrous for the incoming government and that whatever government is next will have popular support to backtrack, and that a repeal-and-replace plan will end up settling on something very similar, maybe even with some free-market-based improvements!
