It wasn't a free-market system before or after the ACA as most insurance is tied to your job and hence people are often not able to freely shop and choose. Free market pressures does not apply here without or without the individual mandate. Also there are many studies which have shown things like healthcare can't be a free market system as things that one relies on adds in pressure to accept the closest rather than the best resource.
You act as though a.) employers have no say with regard to which insurance policies they buy, b.) that employees have no say with regard to which insurance they end up going with: employer-provided or other, and c.) that employees and employee unions have no say with regard to which health insurance their employers provide.
with that being said the mandate is not enough to push people into the system who do not want it
Does it cause 100% of people to be covered? No. Does it cause a lot more people to be covered and lower costs? Yes.
as like it or not the ACA has caused premiums to rise
Depending on the case, the ACA has caused health insurance premiums to either go down or go up at a much slower rate. It has not caused prices to go up in any case.
and given incentive for employers to layoff employees if they are a small business to get exemption from portions of the law or to move more employees to part time.
In principle, you might be right. I'm aware of this, and it's disconcerting. It should perhaps be done away with. In practice, however, it might be another story:
“You’ve got 5.7 million firms in the U.S.,” says Wharton’s Mark Duggan, who served as the top health economist at White House’s Council of Economic Advisers from 2009 to 2010. “Only 210,000 have more than 50 employees. So 96 percent of firms aren’t affected. Then if you look among those firms with 50 or more employees, something on the order of 95 percent offer health insurance. So it’s basically 10,000 or so employers who have more than 50 employees and don’t offer coverage.” Those companies probably employ around one percent of American workers.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...te-shouldnt-be-delayed-it-should-be-repealed/
It should also be noted that the employer mandate doesn't go into effect until 2015.
Both of those scenarios are a bad outcome of this law and why poll numbers tend to be low for the overall bill but cherry-picked functions of the bill are seen as favorable.
No, the law gets bad press due to right-wing rhetoric. That's why the elements of the law are largely supported but not when listed by name. It's why the following happened:
LOUISVILLE, Ky. -- A middle-aged man in a red golf shirt shuffles up to a small folding table with gold trim, in a booth adorned with a flotilla of helium balloons, where government workers at the Kentucky State Fair are hawking the virtues of Kynect, the state’s health benefit exchange established by Obamacare.
The man is impressed. "This beats Obamacare I hope," he mutters to one of the workers.
"Do I burst his bubble?" wonders Reina Diaz-Dempsey, overseeing the operation. She doesn't. If he signs up, it's a win-win, whether he knows he's been ensnared by Obamacare or not.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articl...amacare-at-the-clinton-global-initiative.html
People like the ACA as long as it's not by name, and that's what conservatives in congress are deathly afraid of, hence the shutdown.
EDIT: to clarify the penalty this year for not having insurance is $95 and will be at max $695 in 2016, whenever you don't get sick and insurance is currently averaging $150-$400 a month then $695 a year penalty is nothing.
You're calculating costs without factoring gains from having health insurance. If you do the math, it's an average net gain from having health insurance and a net loss from paying a penalty and getting nothing in return; the amount of the net gain depends on one's demographic information. The mandate was also intentionally low, particularly at the beginning.
Edit: Let the record show that I'm for a single-payer option. I don't mean to sound like an ACA commercial, but them's the facts.