How The Affordable Care Act - Healthcare Law Keeps Me Alive

My response to a friend regarding the Affordable Care Act:

Respectfully, people are not allowed to drive a car without insurance, so shouldn't that apply to health? Also, considering I am terminally ill, without health insurance of some kind, I'd have died long ago. Thanks to the ACA, my medicine is just $17, I keep the doc I had since 2008, and pay $100 a month for my insurance. Without ACA, I could not get insurance at all (I tried for years), my medicine would be over $100, and my doctor visits would be $220 EACH visit. Ideally, this country should be on a single payer system where MEDICARE is for ALL, but republicans didn't want gov't involved. ACA is PRIVATE insurance with regulation from gov't that allows people to 

• 1. get insurance with pre-existing condition (like me and my heart), 
• 2. for kids to stay on parents insurance until age 26 and then get their own at much lower cost with subsidies and/or expanded medicaid coverage, 
• 3. preventive care, 
• 4. lower medicine cost (like mine being just $17 for 8 different meds),
• 5. lower cost since EVERYONE is in a pool. 

The irony is that it's a model of the MASSACHUSETTS health plan, which republican Romney signed into law. It's not perfect, it's evolving, and hopefully will lead to single payer, but it's better, by a longshot than what we had before, which was not a goddamn thing for people who could not get insurance.

For more info I failed to mention: http://healthcare.gov