Color me shocked. After more than a decade of breathless cheerleading for the so-called Affordable Care Act, the editorial elites at The Washington Post have finally admitted what conservatives have been saying all along: Obamacare was never affordable. As the Post’s own editorial board now concedes, the law “was never actually affordable.” This sudden burst of honesty comes amid the latest government shutdown showdown, which Democrats sparked in part by demanding yet another blank check to keep Biden’s lavish, COVID-era insurance subsidies alive.
The real problem is that the Affordable Care Act was never actually affordable. President Barack Obama’s signature achievement allowed people to buy insurance on marketplaces with subsidies based on their income. The architects of the program assumed that risk pools would be bigger than they turned out to be. As a result, policies cost more than expected.
I’d find this admission amusing if I hadn’t been paying ridiculous amounts of money for crappy health insurance ever since Obamacare was implemented.
But, it’s also not funny because just last year, the editorial board literally sang Obamacare’s praises. “Obamacare is working brilliantly,” they insisted.
And they credited the subsidies.
Obamacare is working particularly well now, thanks to temporary subsidies that President Joe Biden signed into law with the 2021 American Rescue Plan and extended with the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. These enhancements boosted financial assistance for people eligible to buy private insurance on the marketplaces — that is, people at the poverty line (which for individuals equates to about $15,000 in annual income) and up. Premiums became more affordable. Insurance pools work best when many people buy in, spreading widely individuals’ risk of big health costs. Enrollment on these platforms has increased from 11 million in 2020 to 21 million this year. By persuading more people to get coverage, lower sticker costs made the Obamacare marketplaces more robust.
I’m sure the fact that last year was an election year had nothing to do with it.
The editorial’s newfound “honesty” reveals that one of the plan’s original fatal flaws — overestimating how many healthy, paying enrollees would sign up — has never gone away. The law’s architects, surrounded by progressive policy wonks and rubber-stamping journalists, assumed America’s risk pools would be deep and wide. What actually happened? Far fewer people signed up, and costs predictably soared. It's shocking, unless you’re someone who actually understands that government can’t wish away economic reality.
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What’s truly infuriating is how shamelessly the Washington Post and the rest of the legacy media have spent the past 15 years running interference for Obama, even as Americans lost their doctors, saw their choices shrink, and watched their premiums explode—subsidies or not. Year after year, the press oooh-ed and ahhh-ed over enrollment numbers as if the public were flocking to Obamacare out of enthusiasm, rather than because the law forced them to buy it.
As the editors now warn, “once generous handouts are in place, people become dependent and it becomes politically perilous, if not impossible, to fully claw it back.” The system becomes another sacred cow, immune to reform or fiscal sanity. What they skip over is that this was always the plan: to erect an ever-expanding welfare state too big to roll back, and to weaponize voter dependency as a bludgeon against anyone daring to talk about sustainability. This shouldn’t be shocking, because this is exactly what conservatives warned about 15 years ago.
No matter how you spin it, the truth finds its way to the surface: Obamacare failed.
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