That's not what happened - at all. 

The subsidies were intended to reduce the cost of insurance for the insured in the pools, because they knew that a high proportion of those people would be high risk. Republicans have refused to fund those pools, and have reduced and reduced those subsidies, which has driven up the cost to insured. Cruz said it would blow up prices because he knew that's what Republicans intended to do. 

The ACA didn't cause the increase in the cost of insurance premiums, those were skyrocketing before it was even proposed. If the system were working, none of this would have even been proposed. This had been a problem since the 1980's.