Dope1,

It is well known because it was designed that way at the time--the enormously growing costs of the ACA plan were deliberately structured not to balloon until about 10 years after it started--so it started in 2014 and we are now right at that 10 year mark.

The original plan was that the ACA was never meant to be an end in itself. It was meant so that government could fully capture the health insurance market and--assuming Democrats had been successful in maintaining permanent control of House, Senate, and the White House--a fully nationalized health care system, "single payer."

Trump's two terms threw a monkey wrench in that master plan.

The ACA system of premiums and subsidies is wildly economically irrational and unfair. It amounts to younger, healthier , harder working, but light-asset folks (as they are for the most part early on in their path of lifetime asset accumulation) subsidizing the health care costs of older, sicker, wealthier people. The extent of this unfairness is deliberately hidden in the kafkaesque maze of ACA.

It is not an "insurance plan." It is a wealth transfer plan.

It was always designed to be this way because back in 2010 a single payer nationalized health care system would not have been politically feasible. It was designed to wreck the private health care market so that the next phase--elimination of private health insurance companies, universal single payer health care, would be inevitable.