I don't think it was meant to reduce the cost of insuring someone but to reduce the rate of the increases. Remember how fast health insurance premiums were going up in the late Bush and early Obama years?
To answer the headline of the article I did not read... The health insurance companies?
True insurance is a hedge against risk, I looked at my risks and made the rational decision that covering myself was the better decision.
Its not for everyone and so I don't want to generalize. I just offer it as anecdotal evidence that while increasing the percentage of the population that is insured, may be a nice easy metric to measure and affect, it is not necessarily an indication of improving situations for all Americans.
That's just an anecdote, a more important point is that if you buy through the exchange, you get subsidized if you're really too poor to pay the premiums on your own.
The people really getting screwed are the people in the Medicaid gap, in states where Republicans refused the Medicaid expansion.