>>Even back in 2013 the President acknowledged that his promise went too far. Very few if any health plans fell into the grandfather rule.

Every single individual plan was grandfathered when the ACA came into effect. Every one of them. Until the insurer elected to change it or cancel it voluntarily. To this day there's nothing in the ACA that compels insurers to change or cancel anything in a grandfathered plan. If insurers began canceling more plans than they used to (bearing in mind that 40% of individual insured switched plans every year before Obamacare) then the devil did not make them do it.

Example: Ted Cruz's insurer (Blue Cross Blue Shield) terminated his plan. "Obamacare at work" came the accusation. But in fact Blue Cross Blue Shield decided it did not want to be in the PPO business in Texas. It made a commercial decision to cancel most of its PPO plans.

In context, Obama made his statements because Chicken Littles were making FUD claims (lying?) about the ACA. Obama took the whole grandfathering malarkey and condensed it to a soundbite that the law did not take anybody's policy from them. But you can imagine the result if the ACA also tried (for example) to stop Blue Cross Blue Shield making its own business decisions in Texas. If it tried the bill would have been mired in litigation that may well have succeeded, even Democrat business leaders would have signed petitions abhorring Soviet-style government interference in business, and another attempt to reform US healthcare funding would have gone down in flames. Rather than lying, I think they did as much as they could.

>>regardless, people I know lost healthcare when they, very naively, thought they could keep their plans. What really happened is the plans got cancelled and they were offered plans outside anything they could afford without a subsidy. So it did indeed happen and Obama and the White House acknowledged it.

They acknowledged it happened and committed to see what could be done to help people. Certainly they would not have expected people to simply take the lesser/more expensive plan offered by the same insurer who just shafted you, rather than checking out what's available on the exchanges where Obama (correctly) observes that many will find better/cheaper plans especially with the subsidies, but some may be worse off. The irony is that those who are worse off should be blaming the insurer if they had a roll over plan. Meanwhile Obama seems too polite to call liars liars or land responsibility where it belongs. Maybe he's concerned not to start down a track that ends up with everybody covered in mud having forgotten that the purpose is to help Joe Average, not land mud pies on the opponent.

>>What we ended up with is not close to what the initial goal was until big companies and insurance companies and lobbyists got involved and fought to bring it down so the insurance companies could continue to prosper.

OK, but it's a start. Wait and see what the next Commonwealth review shows as the US starts to climb the rankings to where you ought to be.