Don’t let Democrats portray Covid-era subsidies as the new normal.

R emember Obamacare?

The health-care legislation was the centerpiece of Barack Obama’s presidency. Nancy Pelosi, then speaker of the House, was willing to lose Democrats’ House majority over it. But it has largely faded into the political background since the raucous debates of the late 2000s and early 2010s. Largely.

Now, however, Obamacare is back in the middle of our political debate once again — in a way that is revealing the faults inherent in its massive expansion of government control of health care from the beginning.

Joe Biden, then vice president, called Obamacare a “big f***ing deal” when the bill passed in 2010. He was right. Democrats at the time were after more than health-care reform. They were hoping to tilt America’s political culture permanently toward greater government involvement. One can detect a hint of this in Obama’s audacious hope that, though he wasn’t the first president to take up health-care reform as an issue, he was “determined to be the last” to do so.

But politics has a pesky way of refusing to end, however much politicians would like to rise above its undulations. So Obamacare remained a live political controversy through what remained of Obama’s presidency and was nearly repealed during Donald Trump’s first term.

And when Biden himself became president, Democrats included subsidies to the program in both the American Rescue Plan Act (supposedly a Covid-relief measure) in 2021, and in the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act in 2022. These subsidies were scheduled to expire in 2025.

Now, a somewhat aimless yet highly restive Democratic Party has seized on the extension of these subsidies as a political rallying cry amid the latest government funding debate in the Capitol. In doing so, they are making clear the potential Obamacare gave for immense gamesmanship all along.

The program itself enmeshed millions into health-care plans that, in one way or another, depended on the federal government. And the Democrats’ latest shenanigans take advantage of the opportunity that arises whenever a political goodie is about to be taken away. So much for these Obamacare subsidies’ being a temporary Covid-relief measure.

Democrats are hoping to force Republicans into a familiar bind: Either be complicit in sustaining yet another expansion of government, or we’ll blame you for whatever happens if you don’t. They are making this their condition for voting to extend government funding at the end of this month, lest the government shut down.

In part, Republicans have themselves to blame for being in this position. The post-2008 political landscape left them ill-equipped to stand athwart Obama’s big government ambitions, to be sure. But they tapped into genuine popular sentiment against the bill, and during Obama’s presidency continued to gain political power at the federal, state, and local levels. When Trump won in 2016, they had a working majority. And that working majority owed in no small part to promises to repeal and replace Obamacare.

They then failed to do this. It’s a failure that has many fathers, but can be justly attributed to the Republican Party as a whole. Now, Republicans, for the most part, prefer not to talk about the issue at all. The most recent Republican presidential platform was the first since 2012 not to call for the program’s repeal. And because of Republican inaction, Obamacare has insinuated itself into national political life, complicating efforts to get rid of it. This, of course, was Democrats’ hope all along.

Repeal may not be in the offing. But Republicans should not accept yet another expansion of the program as though it were a new status quo. Especially as it continues to have myriad flaws. The Paragon Health Institute is one of the few places still paying attention to these defects. As Brian Blase, its president, points out, the premiums and deductibles for Obamacare plans are high and rising; their networks are meager; and too many taxpayer dollars are propping it all up.

The health-care extortion Democrats are trying to pull off wouldn’t just fail to address these defects. It would, in fact, make them worse, while sending subsidies on the order of $450 billion directly to insurers. So much for Democrats’ opposing big business. It would also perpetuate the large-scale fraud the Covid-era subsidies have enabled.

Democrats are also likely overstating the effect on coverage from letting the subsidies expire. Should that happen, more than 80 percent of the typical Obamacare enrollee’s premium will still be covered by federal subsidies, as Blase explains. This is the situation Democrats are trying to say is unacceptable.

Republicans shouldn’t fall for it. For one thing, if they do, it’s a safe bet that Democrats won’t relent in their demands. They are far likelier to pocket these gains and simply move on to their next threshold for government expansion. Note that, in the years since Obamacare’s passage, complete federal control of health care has become more popular on the left, not less.

The GOP must remember not only how Democrats typically act when it comes to big government, but also what it believes (or at least used to) when it comes to standing against it.