> Poor people get medicaid, which is actually pretty decent insurance since it's private (non government) insurance, paid for by the government.

Medicaid isn't consistently private insurance paid for by the government; though “managed risk” through outside (sometimes still publicly operated; several of them in California are county-run) plans is an increasingly popular model, though many states continue to have traditional fee-for-service model as well (California has a mix of managed care and fee-for-service.)

> (I know this is an unpopular opinion, but things were better before Obamacare - deductibles were much much lower.)

It's not the most popular opinion, by it remains extremely widespread, and lots of money, effort, and propaganda has expended to generate and maintain this opinion over the last decade.

Also, premiums and deductibles were often lower because the combination of lifetime limits, preexisting condition exclusions and the associated recission practice [0], and the cancel-and-refund practice [1], all of which the ACA banned, made it possible for insurance companies to collect premiums and then find an excuse to leave people who thought they were insured uninsured when they actually needed the insurance most.

[0] whereby insurance companies would investigate for anything they could characterize as evidence of an undisclosed preexistinf condition as a pretext for cancelling the policy once someone started to look like an expensive case.

[1] whereby, lacking even the pretext of an undisclosed preexisting condition, when someone looked to become too expensive, the insurance company would just cancel their policy and refund all past premiums (and eat the cost of any previous benefits received.)