This is unsupported opinion and does not serve to strengthen the rest of your statements: While the act certainly may have been useless to you, it was literally a matter of life-or-death to some Americans--for example those with "pre-existing" conditions. [1]
Furthermore, and of some interest to the Hacker News community, any step to divorce (American) health care from employment is of great importance to startups (small business), those in the gig economy, and should help to improve the overall "liquidity" of the employment market.
If by "useless" you meant that the act did not go nearly far enough, then we would agree. I'm not sure that was due to Obama's corruption but that of his opposition (with ties to the health insurance industry).
(As for the hypothesis that American government has been corrupt for decades, I would also tend to agree. Eisenhower warned of it and I'm sure it was going on decades before him.)
[1] http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-obamac...