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Posted on 11/15/2025 6:20:35 AM PST by MtnClimber
The right’s warnings about Obamacare proved prescient, yet Democrats keep doubling down on a failing system they refuse to admit they broke.
Just over 15 years ago, when the Democrat-controlled House and the Democrat-controlled Senate were debating the healthcare proposals offered by the Democrat president, nearly everyone on the political right was unified in opposition. It may well have been the last time the right was united on anything, but it was indeed unified and resolute.
Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann (MN) warned that “This monstrosity of a bill will not only destroy the private healthcare market, it will lead to massive increases in premiums and rationed care.” Congressman (and eventual vice-presidential nominee and Speaker of the House) Paul Ryan (WI) complained that “This bill is a fiscal Frankenstein. It’s a government takeover that will explode costs and kill jobs.” Senator (and Republican Leader) Mitch McConnell (KY) insisted that Americans “want reforms that lower costs, not a trillion-dollar government experiment.”
Right-leaning commentators like George Will and Charles Krauthammer agreed, not only with each other but with Republicans in Congress as well. Krauthammer, in particular, argued that President Obama’s promise to “bend the cost curve” down was pure, unadulterated, and extensively documented fantasy. National Review, much maligned among Trump supporters these days, dedicated most of an issue to exposing and forecasting Obamacare’s fiscal absurdities and the likelihood that it would result in lower quality of care, increased taxes, and exploding insurance premiums. Even the Heritage Foundation—in the news lately for purportedly exacerbating rifts in the conservative coalition—likewise agreed with everyone in the movement, insisting that Obamacare was a disaster waiting to happen and would keep none of the promises that it made, all while destroying what was good and valuable in the private insurance market.
More than a decade later, when it was clear that the system was in trouble and that only greater government intervention and spending could save it, Heritage (in the form of Robert Moffit, Edmund Haislmaier, and Nina Owcharenko Schaefer) took something of a victory lap, detailing Obamacare’s manifest failures and arguing that it was long past time to scrap the whole experiment. “The facts,” the Heritage analysts noted, “are in.”
The ACA dramatically increased health insurance premiums and cost-sharing in the individual market….
The ACA collapsed insurer competition in the nation’s individual markets….
The ACA failed to meet official enrollment targets in the individual markets….
The ACA is pricing middle-class Americans out of individual market coverage….
The ACA expanded government coverage while wrecking the private individual health insurance market….
The ACA compromised access to care for persons—including those with preexisting medical conditions—enrolled in the nation’s individual markets….
The ACA failed—and failed miserably—to attract young people into the exchange insurance pools….
The ACA Medicaid expansion prioritizes able-bodied adults, many of whom are working, over the elderly, the disabled, and poor women and children….
The ACA did not, as predicted, “bend the curve” of America’s healthcare spending….
The ACA’s vaunted delivery reforms did not yield the anticipated savings.
Everything Republicans warned would happen did happen. And the Democrats’ response was to offer a massive “temporary” increase in subsidies to help paper over the failures. Again, every sentient person in the country insisted that doing so would be a disaster, that the subsidies would only increase costs, and that they would not be temporary.
The Democrats didn’t listen, however. They didn’t listen in 2009 and 2010 when Congress initially debated and then passed Obamacare—without a single Republican vote in either house. They didn’t listen in 2020, when they insisted they needed expanded subsidies to address the financial hardships created by COVID-19. They didn’t listen in 2023, when they extended the COVID-era subsidies as part of the inaptly named Inflation Reduction Act, at a cost of $64 billion. And they’re still not listening now. Indeed, they just engineered the longest shutdown in American government history because they have no intention of ever listening or ever admitting that perhaps the right was absolutely spot-on in its predictions about Obamacare.
Worse still, in addition to sticking their fingers in their ears and ignoring the experiences of the last decade and a half, the Democrats are actually blaming the Republicans for all of the healthcare system’s problems, insisting that the GOP is somehow responsible for their delusions. As Senator Bernie Sanders, the ideological spirit animal of today’s Democrats, put it, “This government shutdown is all about whether Republicans will get away with raising healthcare premiums by 75% for 20 million Americans and throwing 15 million people off their healthcare.”
Over the years, countless conservative commentators have played upon the famous line in the movie “Love Story,” arguing that “being a liberal means never having to say you’re sorry.” More accurately, they would note that being a liberal/leftist/statist means never having to say you were wrong or admit that your utopian dreams were, in reality, nightmares. This is a feature, not a bug, of leftism. Just as today’s young leftists insist that communism can work, despite its many high-profile and bloody failures, because “real communism has never been tried,” so the Democrats insist that Obamacare can work if it’s tweaked and adjusted in just the right ways.
Although Jean-Jacques Rousseau shares the title “father of the modern left” with many of his Enlightenment contemporaries, he clearly did more than most to undermine and destroy the existing social and political orders and to discombobulate the West. As Nietzsche argued, Rousseau was “the greatest revolutionizing force of the modern era.”
Rousseau did not believe in the concept of Original Sin and insisted that the very idea was invented to keep man oppressed, silenced, and miserable under the thumb of society’s imperfect institutions. “Everything is good as it comes from the hands of the creator,” he wrote in the opening pages of Emile, but “everything degenerates in the hands of man.”
As a result, Rousseau and his followers saw society’s institutions as the foremost threat to man’s freedom and happiness. If man is good by nature, yet he behaves poorly under the direction and guidance of specific institutions, then the institutions, by definition, must be corrupt. They are clearly the cause of the aberrant behavior and must, therefore, be reformed—as thoroughly and as frequently as necessary to enable man to live as he should in a collective society. As the historian Paul Johnson noted in his Intellectuals, to Rousseau, society or “culture” was an “evolving, artificial construct….” But it nevertheless “dictated man’s behavior,” meaning that “you could improve, indeed totally transform, his behavior by changing the culture and the competitive forces, which produced it…” In short, according to Rousseau, one can change the world by successfully changing its institutions—over and over and over again, until you get it right, without ever having to say you’re sorry for getting it wrong.
Normal people, of course, think that the institutions created by Obamacare are destructive, costly, and ultimately ineffective. And we know they believe this because so many of them said so before the system was ever put in place. The Democrats disagree, and they will not be dissuaded from their course by any appeals to theory or experience. They want to keep the institutions and keep reforming them until they inevitably find the right formula.
They’ll get it right next time. Trust them. Oh, and in the meantime, pony up.
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He might have gotten a trip to Malta and a very nice compensation package via an offshore bank account to “ teach a course “
Does anyone else think that the reason that Obama is the only President in the history of this Republic who didn’t leave DC after his term of office was because he is the Biden puppeteer and was in control of the autopen?
Your memory is correct. McTraitor ran on ending it. The day of the vote to do so he promised a yes vote. Than at the last moment when it was too late to do anything about it he voted no. He sneered and said “let’s see Trump make America great now”.
“was hospitalized for 23 days with the heart attack that claimed his life.” Certainly within the 20 year period, there is a high probability that he would have gotten a couple of stents and left the hospital in 2 days. The money going into the medical system should be producing that kind of trade offs in cost. Too many referrals, too many ineffectual work ups is driving the cost side way up.
As so many were pointing out from day 1 it was a scam to enrich insurance companies.
Bookmark.
Obamacare does what it was designed to do: increase profits for Big Insurance. Therefore, all Rats in Congress protect it, as do enough Republicans. If the Rats want to shut down the government to protect Big Insurance, bring it on. It’s a loser politically, and many of them know it.
Right now they're looking to find another gubmint replacement for it.
It’s CJ Robert’s multi $T tax.
All is true as charged, but we have a GOP that is too left wing to abolish it.
So where do we go, what do we do?
Democrats are blaming the republicans for eliminating the individual mandate as reason for the problems with Obamacare.
As INTENDED.
My suggested subsidy formula:
The federally subsidy base amount for a rating area and age group for a calendar year shall be the PPACA 2nd lowest silver plan subsidy base amount for the rating area and age group in 2025,
or an average over such rating areas and their like age groups within 300 miles of the rating area that the Secretary of HHS may choose to designate by regulation,
adjusted for Medicare Part B premium growth thereafter, plus
a percentage of 1.4 times the percentage drop of PPACA insured persons in the rating area and like age group as of January 1 of the calendar year compared to that of January 1, 2025.
too true , I’m afraid, and that looks like it was 1990’s or so. Now they don’t even let your own doctor follow you in the hospital around here, They have hospitalists. No gate keeping by someone who knows your history
forced Medicare?
I will turn 78 next month. Ever since I was put on Medicare, I can remember one year that they paid some of my medical expense. The rest of the time I did not meet my deductable. If I remember correctly, it was less than $100 that they paid.
Every month now my supplement health insurance company bills me for $180.
The entire health insurance system is a stupid disaster. Has no relation to reality.
The same can be made about home and auto insurance , it is a big scam too.
Most of the crap coming from DC is a bad joke. I am not laughing.
Every thing about Obozo was a disaster.
With the apparent failure of the ACA, what will be done to correct Obama’s mistake? Nothing, nothing at all. The entire thing needs to be repealed, period, and let the free market correct it.
The Federal promise to pay unlocked a cornucopia of medical innovation - chemotherapy, dialysis, GI endoscopy, eye surgery, interventional cardiology (your stents), support for respiratory failure, critical care, the list goes on and on.
What's wrong is the idea that all those things are desirable because they save money - they don't.
23 days in a 1965 hospital, with a bed with a crank, nurses to sit at your side with pain medicine, and hot food three times a day is cheaper - a lot cheaper - that mobile coronary care, cath labs, and stents.
Those things cost money, and oodles of it.
When Medicare was being debated, I was 13 and 14, and when my doctor Dad had his friends over I listened to everything they said.
My Dad was one of the first interventional cardiologists in America. He worked out of a ranch house near the hospital with one employee (what back in the day was charmingly called a "one girl office"), and he forgave bills to people who couldn't pay. Sometimes he accepted food as payment, or a doll for one of my sisters. The year he died, his cardiologist made $13 million dollars.
Congress modeled its Medicare cost estimates on expenditures by or on behalf of over 65s from 1954-1963.
Based on this, they could confidently declare that 25 years out, in 1991, Medicare would cost $8 billion.
In fact, it cost $800 billion, because the government paying for pacemakers and cataract surgery turned out to be a lot different from families choosing between the children's college fund and the small chance of harm to grandpa from foregoing a device that might cost $100,000 or more.
If Congress had chosen to pay for the $800 million with real money, and not debt and inflation, we wouldn't have needed "Obamacare".)When Ponce de Leon landed in Florida in 1513, he was looking for the Fountain of Youth. With Medicare and all of its children, Åmericans still seek it, and trust me, money is no object as long as someone else is paying.
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