I disagree. Not about the fact that politicians and the media put words into the mouths of insurance companies for the purposes of political gain, but about you claim that "insurance companies basically wrote the law." I don't think they made off nearly as well as you think they did.

Also, we wouldn't expect their CEOs to make much of a stink about this, at least not publicly (perhaps I should have said "hurting" instead of "whining"). We would expect them to be busy telling investors how they plan to best take advantage of the new rules. Because that's what they're paid to do. Any CEO who says they don't know how to do this is begging to be replaced.

We'll be able to tell who was right in 3-4 years by comparing their margins (or another metric like administrative overhead) to what we see today in the individual insurance market. I would bet a sizable chunk of money that they will be much closer to the margins we see in the employer-provided insurance market today.