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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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I think the intent was to destroy the medical system. It is just not fair to have a medical system when the third world has so little.
so it is named after the right person ?
The gop-e is just as complicit as the dims.
They may not have voted for the original bill but when they had control of the gubmint they did nothing to repeal it. Heck, they even voted to keep funding it.
Please, creative folks, take the melody from “Every Breath You Take” and add lyrics based on what we know is the standard result of leftist policies - “Everything you touch”.
Eagerly awaiting it.
“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.’”
And yet, it PASSED and it managed to do what it set out to do - screw ‘We The People’ and enrich a few of our ‘betters.’
Tell me another one, Grandpa!
(Obamacare Is a Disaster, Just as Expected)
Obamacare Is a Disaster, Just as PLANNED
Everything Obama related is a disaster
The gop-e is just as complicit as the dims.
They may not have voted for the original bill but when they had control of the gubmint they did nothing to repeal it. Heck, they even voted to keep funding it.
At the last minute, is Senator John McCain, who lied about his intentions for years, who voted it down.
One man, one traitor, one RINO, who kept the Republicans from repealing Obamacare.
McCain hated Trump. That is the excuse his supporters give for his treasonous vote. He died shortly after.
Obummercare was dead when the court ruled that they cannot force someone to buy insurance if they don’t want to. All that happened then is that the people who need it buy it and use it, costing the program 100 or 200 times the amounts that they pay in to use it. ONLY the government propping it up with stolen taxpayer dollars has kept it going up to this point. Case in point, a retired guy I know collects SS and a union pension. He ONLY buys the insurance when he need something. So far, he has had 2 knees and a hip replaced. Hundreds of thousands of dollars worth and all he paid was the Obummer fees for a few years and a little out of pocket, and then he canceled it. The US taxpayers paid for his health care, and being a democrat voter, he thinks it all worked out just fine.
The other problem is that all the doctors and the insurance companies colluded so that all the doctors want to be paid in hundreds of thousands of dollars instead of sides of beef.
No one has been more critical of the PPACA (Obamacare) than have been.
But the PPACA was one of the few possible responses to the impending collapse of the existing system at the time it was adopted. The idea that Obamacare "broke" a well-functioning, healthy system is ridiculous.
In the first years of Medicare (1965-1972), my grandfather was hospitalized for 23 days with the heart attack that claimed his life. My grandma slept in his room on a cot, a room with a view of the lake he loved so much, and at the end, she got a bill for $18.
It is Medicare's original promise to pay, at first without limit, for any beneficial or potentially beneficial things to relieve illness or extend life for the >65 population that has destroyed the system.
Since at least 1972, when <65 kidney dialysis was added to Medicare by the Nixon admnistration, almost wthout debate, and certainly since fixed-price hospital admissions (DRGs) and free ER care (EMTALA) were added in the 1980s by the Reagan administration, the entire enterprise has been floating on cooked books, unsustainable debt, legions of dual MBA/MHA graduates wth new innovations, and finally to the widespread corruption of legal kickbacks and perverse incentives that came with Obamacare.
There may be a few more steps (100 year loans for medical debt, anyone?) before the end, but the end is coming, and the only struggle between the two parties (as it is with everything in Congress today) over this is who gets the blame for the terrible situation they have both created over the failure to choose nationalization or a free market.
In 1965, Congress chose "both", and now the bill is due.
Hopes are high with Trump sounding the charge—with more cooperative leadership in both houses of congress—some form of direct payments or HSAs, or both will result.
Ridiculously high price increases which Donks own 💯% will expose Obamacare such that even some Donks will support wholesale change.
It can’t go on without subsidies and that ain’t happening. It’s filled with fraud up the arse. Insurance companies profits are absurd because of those subsidies, at the expense of hospitals and patients. I curse my late Senator McCain for his thumbs down.
Similarly, Brooke Rollins at AG is requiring all SNAP recipients to re-register which will expose massive double dipping.
Dare we wish that Obamacare is Dead !
Including Chief Justice Roberts.
Until he wasn't and at the last minute re-wrote his decision in favor of Obamacare, calling it a "tax" and therefore legitimate.
"Justice John Roberts was initially aligned with the conservative justices in the 2012 Supreme Court case ..and voted to strike down the individual mandate at the heart of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare).
After the oral arguments in March 2012, Roberts joined the four other conservative justices in a preliminary vote to invalidate the mandate, believing it exceeded Congress’s power under the Commerce Clause.
Roberts later changed his position during the Court’s deliberations in May 2012.
Instead of striking down the law, he concluded that the individual mandate could be constitutionally justified as an exercise of Congress’s taxing power.
This shift allowed the Court to uphold the core of Obamacare by a 5–4 vote, with Roberts joining the four liberal justices."
He must have gotten a midnight phone call that "changed his mind..."
quotes:
“We should not make the mistakes of the past that has led to Obamacare’s collapse, including in my home state of Arizona where premiums are skyrocketing and healthcare providers are fleeing the marketplace,” McCain said in a statement.
McCain released the following statement early Friday morning:
“From the beginning, I have believed that Obamacare should be repealed and replaced with a solution that increases competition, lowers costs, and improves care for the American people. The so-called “skinny repeal” amendment the Senate voted on today would not accomplish those goals. While the amendment would have repealed some of Obamacare’s most burdensome regulations, it offered no replacement to actually reform our health care system and deliver affordable, quality health care to our citizens.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/john-mccain-heres-why-voted-080525553.html
Roberts must have understood how close what existed was to collapse before he changed his vote.
Mcstain’s name keeps popping up in these discussions.....mr “high road”.
The Obamacare repeal failed because premiums are more expensive in Alaska and other places such as Arizona (drug treatment) and the fixed amount subsidies didn’t take that into account.
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