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Posted on 11/05/2026 4:23:17 PM PST by george76
We’ve got to make sure that nobody has to worry about high healthcare premiums,” former president Barack Obama said at a recent Democratic rally. “We have a lot of work to do.”
The high cost of health insurance has become a central issue for Democrats campaigning to seize control of Congress. It’s not a made-up issue: Average premiums have increased more than 40% in the last four years, and have more than doubled in the past decade.
How did healthcare costs get this high? Much of the blame rests with Obama’s signature achievement: Obamacare, or the Affordable Care Act.
By design, Obamacare drove up the demand for healthcare and consolidated both the insurance industry and the world of healthcare providers, such as physicians’ practices and hospitals. Democrats named it the Affordable Care Act, but in private the law’s architects admitted it was not a cost control bill.
Increase coverage now, address costs later — that was the plan all along. The ACA is best understood as a ticking time bomb that was meant to explode and create demand for single-payer health insurance.
Built to balloon costs..
The purpose of Obamacare was to increase Americans’ consumption of healthcare. The law required every last American to buy health insurance, and the insurance regulations were crafted to boost doctor visits and prescription-drug consumption.
On the other side of the ledger, instead of increasing the supply of healthcare providers, the law pushed for consolidation. More demand, no more supply, more consolidation. That’s a perfect recipe for higher prices.
David Bowen, an aide to Sen. Ted Kennedy, was one of the most important staffers in crafting the bill. After Obamacare became law, Bowen exited to the private sector, and in the summer of 2010, he gave a briefing in downtown Washington to industry insiders.
There Bowen compared the federal law to its predecessor in Massachusetts. “In Massachusetts, there was a very conscious decision to do coverage first, knowing that that would bring on a cost battle second,” Bowen explained. “We certainly made the same decision” with Obamacare. “This is a coverage bill, not a cost reduction bill. There is stuff here that will begin to address the issue of cost, but this is not a cost reduction bill with a bit of coverage on it — it is really trying to get coverage first.”
The main point of the bill was to subsidize the consumption of healthcare, and to spread the cost of medical procedures and prescription drugs, using both government subsidies and mandates on private insurance. In short, the law tried to make sure people who used more healthcare services didn’t have to pay more than people who used less or none at all.
When you subsidize something, and when you separate the cost of a service from the consumption of the service, you will inevitably see prices go up.
Additionally, the bill’s hospital regulations were designed to drive industry consolidation. Fewer providers means less competition, but to Obamacare’s authors, less competition meant more efficiency.
“These reforms will unleash forces that favor integration across the continuum of care,” three Obamacare architects wrote. Specifically, it would pressure small physician-owned practices to consolidate or to sell out to large hospitals. “Only hospitals or health plans can afford to make the necessary investments in information technology and management skills,” they wrote.
Consolidation boosts hospitals’ profits and seems to give patients worse results, according to one recent study.
As a result, premiums climbed for years. Democrats, under the Biden administration, slapped an expensive patch on that problem: Massive taxpayer subsidies to insurance companies. They pitched these as temporary pandemic measures, but clearly intended to make them permanent. When Republicans removed that patch a year ago, middle-class and upper-middle-class customers were left to pay their full premiums.
Higher premiums cause higher premiums, thanks to the “death spiral.” Once premiums are high enough, they become a bad economic deal for relatively healthy customers, who then drop insurance. That makes the insurance pool less healthy, thus driving premiums higher, thus pushing more customers out of the market.
The massive increases in the last year seem to be part of a death spiral. Obamacare was supposed to prevent the death spiral through the individual mandate, thus preventing people from going uninsured. Republicans, in the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, reduced the penalty for going uninsured to $0.
The Democrats’ long game..
As voters get angry about skyrocketing premiums, Democrats are seeking to get a political advantage off of this.
“Paired with a reduction in tax credits to help buy insurance through the Affordable Care Act, and rising employee premiums, the cuts are colliding with a broader voter revolt against the high cost of living — and have turned healthcare into a top midterm issue,” reported the liberal website Vox.
This makes sense on a purely political level — the out-of-power party is attacking the in-power party for massively disruptive cost increases.
But this isn’t just short-term politics. It’s part of the Democrats’ long-term policy goal.
Obamacare was always intended as paving the way to single-payer healthcare: A socialized system where the federal government is the only health insurer.
Obamacare drove up health insurance coverage and usage, which, as the architects promised, was laying the groundwork for later steps to address costs. The Democrats’ plan for driving down healthcare costs is single-payer, which allows bureaucrats to set prices.
This year, Democrats made that explicit.
Liberal Democrat Abdul el Sayed, the Democratic Senate nominee in Michigan, has made single-payer (“Medicare for All”) a centerpiece of his campaign. On one level, this looks like explicit rejection of Obamacare, but it’s really the logical conclusion, as Sayed and Obama both say.
Obama says Sayed will “Finish the job we started with the Affordable Care Act and guarantee quality, affordable healthcare to every single American.”
Sayed says the same thing.
....
Obama, then, is admitting what was said in private last decade, and what conservatives charged at the time, too: Obamacare didn’t make healthcare more affordable; it, in fact, drove up costs, and this was part of a long-term plan to replace our health insurance system with a fully socialized one.
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The PPACA (”Obamacare”) was about health INSURANCE, and through perverse incentives and regulatory capture, it has enriched insurance companies and entire new tribes of facilitators while driving prices through the roof.
Health INSURANCE is not Health CARE.
We the people were grubered by obozo and dc monopolyiers
Two years with a republican president, house, and senate... down the drain.
It was originally “Hillarycare” before the kenyan hijacked it.
Hillary and her like minded minions designed this monster, but don’t have to live under it.
Go figure.
5% of deaths in Canada are attributed to MAiD. Sarah palin’s death panels
“ In 2024, 16,499 people in Canada received medical assistance in dying, usually called MAID. That is 5.1 percent of the people who died that year, about 1 in 20. Since MAID became legal in 2016, 76,475 people have received it.”
This article just confirms to me that Brian Thompson, the United Health Care CEO who was murdered by leftist Luigi Mangione are both products of the same vast political-health system
One is a crony-capitalist whose company played the complex rules of Obamacare to grift from both government and citizens, while the other was a product of leftist demagoguery and Democrat politics, manipulated into violence by the same people who created the system
AS I noticed, the healthcare got to be a lot worse.
If you needed surgery, it used to be like
When do you want it? Monday or Tuesday?
Now it is like We have some opening two months from now.
Does not fit you?
Too bad, the next available is in six months.
We always laughed on Canadians and Britons for their long waiting lists.
Now we got it too!
REPEAL IT … like YESTERDAY.
As i told a friend, i presently pay for 4 different health plans; my family health insurance through my employer (which is expensive), medicare (which i will eventually use), medicaid (which neither i nor my family will ever use), obamacare/obamacare subsidies (again which we will never use)...
Since the inception of obummercare my health insurance premiums at work have exploded and the benefits suck...
One Cato health care article had these two links:
https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2019-01/54915-New_Rules_for_AHPs_STPs.pdf
Cato article mentioning the lower cost, short-term plans:
NOTE: I have not investigated this coverage and I can’t say for sure it is still available for purchase.
NOTE: I’m 68 and on Medicare on which I’ve gotten a pneumonia shot for my $7,000 or so in premiums.
“We always laughed on Canadians and Britons for their long waiting lists.”
Ironic- I haven’t seen the doctor i’ve used since 1988 in more than 5 years..i figured i’d go for an end of the year check up to get it under the wire for insurance purposes...I went on line to get the phone number and it allowed you to make an appointment...the earliest appointment she had?? February!!!
not really- they let the obamacare subsidies fall by the wayside...
For health care, bring on market force:
1. Break most hospitals into two highly competitive entities.
2. Convert other hospitals into real estate leasing entities with competing surgical suites and nursing wings.
3. Separate out drug coverage so hospital systems can run care coverage systems and cut out insurance company overhead and meddlers.
4. Create interstate drug plans that don’t have to pay what the drugmaker wants for every drug. To qualify for exchange listing and federal subsidies, they would have to most (~80% or more) in all important types (large volume recombinant, small volume recombinant, breakthroughs under patent, etc.). Group and exchange plans to offer time-limited vouchers at plan set amounts for out-of-formulary drugs. Voucher plans would have variable premiums. Plans without minimums (or vouchers) could be vended directly to individuals and families.
5. These plans would be all the doctors (and computer algorithms) prescribe for formulary drugs with co-pays equal to manufacturing cost.
6. Reform medical education, breaking down medicine and dentistry into simpler chunks and start it in the first year of college.
7. Replace most primary care doctoring with algorithmic computer-based care.
(Insurers would pay human doctors to confirm computer diagnosis, orders for expensive tests[MRI, genetic], prescribe radiation imaging[CT, PET, X-ray]/treatment, and voucher/government co-pay drugs. Other human doctor care would be private pay.)
8. Place radioisotope-related care at international airport centers.
Just saw a Husseincare yard sign. The grift continues.
https://thefga.org/research/loopholes-fueling-illegal-alien-medicaid-obamacare-benefits/
“Federal spending on “emergency” Medicaid for illegal aliens has skyrocketed.
Illegal aliens gain Medicaid and ObamaCare eligibility through immigration status loopholes.
Fraud is a major driving force behind states providing Medicaid to illegal aliens.
States exploit federal funding gimmicks to funnel Medicaid dollars toward illegal aliens.
Congress passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act to block these abuses, but Democrats are demanding its repeal.
The Bottom Line: The One Big Beautiful Bill Act’s reforms are necessary to slow the flow of Medicaid and ObamaCare dollars to illegal aliens and protect funds for the truly needy.“
Yes. You could get MRIs or other diagnostics the next day - sometimes even the same day. Now - sometimes weeks or event a month or two.
It is extraordinary the difference. Both more expensive, and less available. The legacy of Obamacare and the Democrats.
Yes.
Docs waiting lists started just when Obamacare finally kicked in.
They intentionally eased start of the Obamacare, so people got used to it.
Obama created these ling waiting lists and the expenses.
We used to have expensive healthcare, but is was at least great.
Now we have ultra expensive healthcare, crappy, and we have long waiting lists too!
Before it was Hillarys plan it was Nixons plan. Nixon was a disaster for our country. He took us off of the gold standard, opened up China and gave us the EPA.
I think it worked just as it was designed to.
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