@Jazzhead
Freedom is a perfectly valid replacement. Government is the problem not the solution.
Freedom in the context of the insurance industry? Government regulation of the insurance business goes back centuries; the states have traditionally prescribed rules for reserves and financial soundness.
The ACA was an attempt to provide for "guaranteed issue" insurance nationwide, to permit individuals with pre-existing health conditions to obtain insurance. In the context of a private insurance market (as compared to a single payer approach funded by progressive taxation), there's really only two viable approaches - guaranteed issue insurance, which is what that ACA has attempted, or the government supervision of separate risk pools and insurance regimes for the already-sick. The latter is awfully close to single payer funded by progressive taxation - albeit only for a portion of the population.
The guaranteed issue approach is inevitably more expensive unless the pool of younger, healthy folks is large enough to subsidize the provision of insurance to the sick. That was the point of the individual mandate - to provide a tax disincentive to free ridership. But the ACA was botched - individual ACA-compliant insurance is too comprehensive, and too expensive (in large part because of ACA's 3 to 1 rule) for younger folks.
The simple fix for the ACA is basically two-fold - First, provide far more choices in the individual marketplace, including more flexibility for consumers to be able to purchase only the coverage they need, and for insurers to price insurance rationally based on experience, not favoritism of one group of Americans over another. Second, provide incentives for employers to send their employees to the ACA marketplace - because that's where all the younger, healthier lives are. The latter can be accomplished by changing a sentence or two in the law, to allow employers to satisfy the employer mandate by providing cash (by means of health savings -type accounts) to their employees that they can use to purchase health insurance, including from the ACA marketplace.
