More items insured would be better insurance, so did your insurance improve? Remember the condition I put on my comment, : if your insurance wasn't better.
And yes, better has something to do with. Insurance that doesn't do the job is worthless. I was talking to someone yesterday who had cheap insurance, but admitted if anything huge happened, they would largely be dropped and most not paid for, which begs the question, why are you paying at all. So quality does matter.
And yes, this is really your employers insurance. You just benefit from it. Let me tell you how it likely worked. The normal increase was a low 1.5% (ours), the penalty was then levied and your employer, who could have paid it (as could have the insurance company), decided to pass that on as well (it's only temporary but will likely be forgotten and taken as permanent). This would likely be around 2%. Together, that would be about 3.5%. If you have been paying attention you might not know that's actually a typical yearly increase. Ten years ago we increased 50%. Then for awhile had double digit increases. And the past few years they've been around 3-4%. Unlikely that yours has been that much different.
So all told, not significant. Hardly a disaster, and hardly outside the norm.
So, I have answer you, but let me give a link:
They point out that the 3 percent growth from 2009 to 2010 was unusually low. While it’s tough to discern a clear, long-term trend in the growth rates, the annual increase was holding steady at around 5 percent or 5.5 percent from 2007 to 2009. The growth rates had been at 10 percent and higher from 2000 to 2004. (See our chart below, which uses Kaiser’s employer survey numbers.) So, the 3 percent growth rate was “abnormally low,” says John Sheils, senior vice president of The Lewin Group, a subsidiary of UnitedHealth Group that operates independently of the health care company. He says it “would stand to reason that we’d get a boost” this year, possibly due to recovering losses or catching up on the cost of new equipment.
(snip)
But Sheils says he tells people to look at the projection for long-term growth — 6 percent, or 6.5 percent. That’s not that different from the increases that occurred several years before the law was passed.
FactChecking Health Insurance Premiums
So, claims of it being to ACA are dubious. If any, only a small amount and still below normal.