The ACA is apparently not perfect (I, like most people haven't read the law:) ) but I think anything that keeps people from becoming serfs is a good thing.
Your argument about healthcare being money in a different form is flawed. You could make a similar argument for when people used to live in employer provided housing because owning their own homes was impossible for most people. I am sure not too many people would want to go back to serfdom because after all a roof over your head is another form of being paid.
>>> You could make a similar argument for when people used to live in employer provided housing because owning their own homes was impossible for most people.
When and where there was such time? If you refer to real slaves or serfs - they couldn't own property not because it wasn't affordable but because they did not have rights to own anything, being property themselves. Nobody argues for that. However, earning one's own housing or food or clothing or healthcare is in no way serfdom - it is a natural state of a person, the alternative being somebody else earning them and you just take them because you're too good to work, unlike that other guy. But what if that other guy thinks the same? If nobody has to work to earn their own living - who'll be supplying all these nice things you feel so entitled to enjoy?
Now in many cases: farmworker housing, worker barracks in some industries, particularly mining, energy, and sometimes forestry or other remote work (say, employee compounds for US oil workers in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the Middle East). Factory barracks are commonplace in China and other developing nations. Railroad workers, sailors, and other travelling employees are often lodged by their employers. I've also seen more than one startup in which there was a corporate apartment, though that was usually used on a fairly short-term basis by new hires, or in some cases, by founders or remote employees when travelling to other sites.
One of the earlier examples of this was the Fuggerei in Augsburg, Germany, though more strictly it was an example of social worker housing: http://www.lonelyplanet.com/germany/bavaria/augsburg/sights/...
The "Company Town" Wikipedia article offers more information on the practice. Within the US it's largely associated with extractive industries, as I noted, arising in the mid 1800s and largely dying out by the 1950s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town
If we take a historical/anthropological view of what the "natural state" of human societies is, they have typically worked to fulfill essential-to-life needs, including defense, water, food, public health, fire response, etc. on a communal basis. The size of the communal unit has varied across times and places in history, from clans to tribes to city-states to nations. And hybrid systems where individuals (or more often, households) are responsible for some things and a larger communal unit is responsible for others have also been common. But the individual standing alone, providing for his or her needs entirely independently of any communal system except for market purchases, seems to only exist in certain philosophers' systems, not as something you really observe historically as the natural state of homo sapiens societies.
Owning property outright might be hard to a lot of people, but there's an easy solution for it - renting. What you describe is functionally renting. The question is - why is it organized this particular way?
You can more or less tell who gets employer-based health insurance based what they're paid. I doubt too many people are going to stop working because they qualify for ACA subsidies, you still have a whole lot of things you'll need money for. I see the ACA subsidies as a way to make people more proactive about their health and keep them out of emergency rooms which is significantly more costly to the system.
As far as older folks working less because they are not tied to their employers for healthcare I think this is a good thing. I see more opportunity for younger folks to move into those jobs.
Equivalent of 2.5 million workers is too many or not too many?
>>> I see the ACA subsidies as a way to make people more proactive about their health and keep them out of emergency rooms which is significantly more costly to the system.
This is also proven not to be true. Having insurance, actually, raises usage of emergency rooms by 40%. See: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/01/02/s... It was a nice theory, too bad it's not true. But repeating it now, when it is disproven by experiment, is just substituting ideology for facts. It is not going to get us in any place that is good.
>>> As far as older folks working less because they are not tied to their employers for healthcare I think this is a good thing.
What is special in older people that them not working is good? Is that that we want the most experienced workers to be removed from the workforce, so that the productivity would drop, because lower the productivity, richer we are? And when replacing experienced and productive workers with unexperienced workers with much lower output and who also are paid much less, while moving the experienced workers from productive work to tax-sponsored welfare (which the younger workers now have to support with their salary, which is lower to begin with but now becomes even lower from having to support older folks too) - so tell me again, where the good part starts in all this? Because I kind of fail to see it.
