I understand your reluctance, I'm a bit concerned myself about the ACA supporters declaring victory over what is basically a first inning score. None the less, one can't fault them for sticking it to the republicans considering how it works against the GOP talking points. No need to rain on their parade.
Yes, some of these "savings" are due to the fact that some states basically "won't take the money", but not all of it. The rate of health care inflation is down. And not just down, at historically low levels, althought so is inflation in general. Health care spending is down as well, which has alot to do with the economy, and maybe a small bit to the ACA. This fact is a bit disturbing because really unless you think people aren't as sick, it probably means that predominately people aren't getting treated, because they don't have the money. If this keeps going down well after the exchanges have insured alot of people, that will be good news.
These "savings" though are entirely to the federal government. The copays don't go down. The premiums aren't going down, nor are the out of pocket caps and deductibles. You do have the feature that insurance companies will have to refund some money if their costs go down so much that the 85% kicks in.
No one, not even the White House, is suggesting these rates are sustainable. It is almost entirely due to the recession (market forces do affect health care costs even if they don't always seem to be controlled by them). Once the economy picks up, the costs of health care will begin to rise again. ACA is going to attempt to moderate that a bit through structural changes, but it isn't clear that any really large impacts are possible. Government can do alot to control their costs to themselves. They are limited (intentionally so on the part of the authors of ACA) in their ability to directly control the costs to the individual. They can only accomplish this through some form of single payer/nationalized health CARE system. This approach that tries to control individual costs through regulation of the insurance market is limited. It's why the Heritage foundation dreamed up this approach to begin with, and why the insurance companies ultimately signed on (until they thought they could kill it).
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