This poll is for self-employed people: What kind of health insurance do you have? Did you choose "Obamacare" or a private company? Has your premium gone up or down? Has your deductible gone up or down? Did you have your policy cancelled? Did you decide to "opt out" and pay as you go, in addition to the Obamacare penalties; how much have you paid in penalties? After your experience, would you like to keep or repeal Obamacare?
When I was first self-employed in, like, 2009 or so, getting coverage was stupidly expensive. I certainly couldn't afford it, so I just lived without it. I was about 19, and I was trying to pull off what seems to be the impossible for my generation and, ya know, actually be inventive and self-sufficient, rather than working 60 hours a week in some box. I made a living -- just -- but having health insurance was a mere pipe dream on what I made. Yay for America making entrepreneurialism the purview of the old and wealthy... And people ask the millenials why they don't seem motivated. That's why. Anyway...
The next time I was self-employed around 2014, it was still stupidly expensive.
Although I was gettin' by on savings, I wasn't really making enough to buy health insurance because I was caretaking for a parent, so I could only work part-time. I didn't qualify for state med in 2014, despite the fact that I could only work limited hours (and in fact, my limited and inflexible hours due to caretaking were the entire reason I quit my 9-to-5 in the first place). Somehow the government still deemed my part-time freelance income as "sufficient" to buy a plan that costs a few thousand dollars a year in premiums alone.
So, to answer your question, I was never able to afford insurance as a self-employed person. Post-ACA, nothing got any better, but also nothing got worse I guess. Wait, actually it did: the penalty. Fortunately due to the timing of everything, I was able to get an exemption from it.
Most other self-employed people I knew also didn't have health insurance, or had to give it up some time in the 2000's when it became unaffordable, and despite the fact that I scaled the ladder pretty quickly in the employer-based world while I was in it, at no point did I make enough that I could have comfortably afforded insurance without the help of my job.
Now I live in a place with public healthcare.