The choice of covering crappy plans is the employer's choice... and crappy plans are what have been pushed AFTER the ACA was passed. Largely by the GoP...
Is that what the ACA was, or what someone(s) who want it to fail want?
There's a weird narrative where any event is tied to the ACA while they ignore what the healthcare system is in the US overall.
After the ACA, this plan became so expensive so quickly that continuing this plan became nearly untenable financially and now these types of plans have become increasingly unavailable in any case due to that cost escalation. If you were formerly on one of these plans, of course the post-ACA environment seems like a big step backward. This happened in one of the deepest of blue states; the Republicans can't be blamed for the destruction of health insurance benefits here because they were never involved. The cost of healthcare here has not risen nearly as fast as the cost of providing top-tier healthcare benefits did.
I think the ACA does good things for people who needed it. And generally I've been against repealing it, but only because there has not been an adequate replacement as part of the repeal, only "trust us, we'll do something great".
Even with the ACA, employers have the best of both worlds. Expensive older people are covered by the government, and anyone who gets to expensive can be shuffled off with a little cover and the joy of "at-will" employment.
All insurance policies have implicit lifetime maximums, unless the laws of economics and finance have been repealed.
Note that lifetime caps are a lot more generous than what they have in say the UK, where you don’t get treatment if it costs more than $50-75k per year of extended life. (So to blow through a million dollars, the treatment would have to be expected to produce 15-20 years of extra healthy life. Most treatments offered when people “need it the most” can’t make that sort of promise).
Do you have any data for that? Sounds odd.
I think it's also worth exploring how much of the difference in financial cost of health insurance plans is due to time + annual overall increases in healthcare cost in the US. ACA was passed 9 years ago. Even under the previous 9 year annual percentage increase averages, you would expect healthcare costs to be at least 20% more expensive than they were in 2010, regardless of ACA.
Ending pre-existing conditions was the game changer in the AMA. Treating people is obviously more expensive than not treating them.
They forgot to list childhood Asthma on their application form ten years earlier.
By inducing lapses in insurance coverage, insurance companies were able to convert illnesses under active treatment into preexisting conditions.
In real numbers, in 2008-2009, the increase in overall cost per year was actually lower than in 2014-2015, when the exchanges opened.
You're right that the rate of growth in Medicare cost fell after the ACA passed, but that's much more specific than overall cost delta.
The ACA fundamentally shifted the landscape for the whole healthcare system with minimum coverage mandates (including employer plans), guaranteed issue, etc. It's also led to higher demand for medical services (ie because more people are covered - a good thing) at a time when the number of doctors has stayed fixed. The net result is that health coverage is simply more expensive. One way that could have played out would be employers eating the higher premiums themselves (which is essentially giving everyone a raise.) Anecdotally, it seems the way it's played out is that employers have kept paying roughly the same amount while employees have either paid higher premiums or received higher deductibles.