In 2010, President Barack Obama and his party exploited enormous congressional majorities to ram through a controversial healthcare law, despite widespread opposition to many of its major components and clear signals from the electorate, such as the people of Massachusetts electing a Republican to the Senate, to stop it.
Democrats sold the law as a panacea that would benefit everyone, with no trade-offs or drawbacks. Republicans challenged virtually every claim made in favor of Obamacare. They were called liars, racists, and Nazis (some things never change). Several black Democratic congressmen even claimed that Tea Party protesters gathered around the Capitol hurled vile racial epithets at them prior to a key vote. Despite the ubiquity of cameras in the vicinity and a sizable reward offered for evidence backing the allegation, zero confirmation was ever produced.
Incidentally, by contrast, left-wing anti-immigration enforcement agitators in Minneapolis have been captured on camera berating federal officers of color with racial insults, including the N-word, on multiple occasions in recent weeks. Tea Party “racism” was national news, but leftist racism has garnered curiously scant attention from journalists who love to pounce on any hint of racial animus from the Right.
But we digress. Then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) infamously responded to policy critiques of Obamacare by declaring that Democrats would “have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.” That phrasing became instantly iconic. Her presumed meaning was that the bill would need to become law for the supposed “lies” about it to be disproven.
The opposite has happened.
Setting aside the embarrassing implementation of the law and the notorious healthcare.gov technological face plant, the central pillars of Obamacare have buckled or collapsed. Obama insisted that his signature law would reduce American families’ healthcare premiums by $2,500 per year, would bend down the nation’s overall healthcare “cost curve,” and would not disrupt anyone’s existing and preferred healthcare arrangements.
“If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor, period,” he intoned. “If you like your healthcare plan, you’ll be able to keep your healthcare plan, period. No one will take it away, no matter what.”
A comprehensive and categorical assurance. But by 2013, that tent pole promise was named by Democrat-aligned “fact checker” Politifact as the “lie of the year,” as millions of Americans were ripped away from their doctors and plans under the new law. Amusingly, when there was an election to be won, Politifact had previously marked Obama’s claim as “true.”
As for reduced premiums and a bent cost curve, those pledges have also been shattered. Even Politifact, known for its partisan spin, couldn’t find a way to polish the real-world results of this law, and ruled the $2,500 premium cuts a “broken promise.” Annual costs for families and individuals have climbed inexorably higher since Obamacare was instituted, with many Americans experiencing massive spikes. Late last year, healthcare policy expert Avik Roy reviewed the data and summarized it this way: “Since [Obama’s] signature law, the Affordable Care Act, went into effect, premiums have nearly tripled, and deductibles have more than doubled. The cost of coverage for a family of four has increased by more than $10,000.”
The Affordable Care Act was always a misnomer. As for the national cost curve, it has certainly not been bent downward since the law went into effect. Indeed, it has surged ever higher. Even Obama’s assertion that illegal immigrants would not benefit from the law — highlighted in former South Carolina Republican Rep. Joe Wilson’s famous “you lie!” outburst during Obama’s 2009 address to a joint session of Congress — has crumbled. The Foundation for Government Accountability notes that “illegal aliens [have gained] Medicaid and ObamaCare eligibility through immigration status loopholes,” with the law’s Medicaid expansion driving blue states to cover illegal immigrants. Rampant fraud within the program has also driven this phenomenon.
During the COVID-19 pandemic under former President Joe Biden, Democrats used party-line votes to impose “temporary” and “emergency” premium subsidies, which were far more generous than the original law stipulated. They subsequently extended these subsidies, which were supposedly about COVID, through the end of 2025. As their own deadline approached, Democrats squealed about an expiration date they themselves had set because a permanent extension was wildly expensive, and they didn’t want to be saddled with the price tag for subsidies they said were only temporary and tied to a long-elapsed pandemic.
These sky-high taxpayer subsidies were flowing directly to giant insurance companies and even benefiting families with annual incomes in the mid-six figures. Now that their expiration date has not been further extended by the same Republicans they cut out of the process under Biden, Democrats are screaming bloody murder. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) is painting the 100% Democrat-designed outcome as a “Republican healthcare crisis.” He’s referring to the law he supported, and every Republican opposed, as simply returning to its original pre-”emergency” subsidy levels.
Obama’s most prominent campaign guru, David Axelrod, took to his X account several days ago to lament an anecdotal result from all of this.
“Through family, I heard about a couple in WI who started a small business and were planning to expand,” Axelrod wrote. “Now, with their ACA premiums TRIPLED due to congressional inaction, they’ve had to scrap plans to expand & grow. I’m sure that scenario is repeating itself all over the U.S.” This sounds like a breathtaking indictment of the ‘Affordable’ Care Act, does it not?
Rather than blaming the GOP for not continuing an exorbitantly costly and unsustainable taxpayer-funded Band-Aid to this policy-caused wound, perhaps Axelrod should track down and have a stern word with whoever proposed this bill, falsely marketed it to the public, and then signed it into law.