I do not like that it doesn't do anything to control the costs.

There are some things in the law that are supposed to help control costs. Simply getting more people covered means there are less free loaders that end up not paying and passing the costs onto others. Alot of the ACA revolves around this, requiring people to get Insured or pay a tax, getting poor people on medicaid, subsidizing those who can't afford private insurance, requiring business to provide insurance to full time workers.

Second as you mentioned there is the 80/20 rule as you mentioned that prevents insurance companies from taking all of their new required clients to the bank. Then there is also the free annual checkup to try and prevent and catch issues before they become expensive.

As this generation enters into the most expensive part of their lives, they have pushed many of their costs onto us.

A pretty big number of government programs are around to push money from the young to the old. Look at Social Security, and Medicare are exactly this. At least with the ACA you can get some benefit from it before you turn 65. The baby boomers would have been covered under Medicare once they hit 65 anyways so I'm not sure if it's as much as a gift to them as you think it is. Keep in mind at some point you will be old as well the question is what programs do you want to be around to support you in your old age?

I do agree I think there is more that should be done to control costs. There are two more big negative points that I haven't seen mentioned yet. First the requirement for companies to cover workers over 30 hours a week seems to have resulted in a huge increase in part time work, so now you end up having people not only without insurance but also without enough hours to make a decent wage. I think it Either the requirement needs to be dropped to 20 or raised to 40 hours.

The second big issue is how we are handing out the subsidies for private insurance on the marketplace. It's all done through pre-emptive tax credits, you get money at the start of the year based on a guess of what you think you are going to make that year. It's place a huge burden on an already overcomplicated tax code that most people can't manage. So what happens if you think your going to earn at 105% of the poverty limit but at the end of the year you were at 99% and technically you didn't even make enough to qualify for the credit? To they take it away? Charge you money for being too poor? Even worse you make more then you thought you would and end up with huge tax bill you weren't expecting? I think there is going to be a shit storm in a few months when people start filing taxes and realize they owe a bunch of money because they underestimated their earnings and got too big of a tax credit. Were it me I'd probably just pay out of pocket for insurance then just take whatever I got for a credit at the end of the year.

I think in reality it will be 10 years before we have enough data to say it was a success or not at even then it will still likely be pretty controversial but for the most part I think it will be more good then bad