JENNY BETH MARTIN: On Obamacare, We Conservatives Were Right All Along
With this week’s Senate agreement – in which eight Senate Democrats traded their votes to reopen the government for a promise of a vote on extending Obamacare subsidies – the discussion now turns to health care, about…
With this week’s Senate agreement – in which eight Senate Democrats traded their votes to reopen the government for a promise of a vote on extending Obamacare subsidies – the discussion now turns to health care, about which, let me say this: We conservatives were right all along.
The law known as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) – better known as “Obamacare” – was never truly affordable, and it isn’t affordable now. Designed to expand coverage rather than to control costs, it was built with structural flaws that guaranteed it would buckle under its own weight. That was the plan all along, and what we are witnessing now is not reform so much as rescue.
From its inception, Obamacare promised that Americans could keep their doctors, and their existing plans, and that premiums and deductibles would fall. The reality: premiums soared, insurance retreated from many markets, and the federal government stepped in to prop up the system. All those subsidies, mandates, and regulatory impositions were not the prelude to a robust market, they were the scaffolding of a system designed to fail.
Now, after 15 years of shrinking coverage and rising costs, Democrats are finally coming clean – or at least overt. They want a bailout. They press for yet another extension of enhanced premium tax credits, and for 40 days they were willing to shut down the government to get it. The writing is on the wall: when the architects of a law say, “We must keep subsidizing to prevent collapse,” they’re admitting the system they erected cannot stand on its own two feet.
Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi – who did more than anyone else to push the law to passage – clearly recognizes it’s time to get out while the getting is still good. Much better to announce her retirement now than to stick around to be held accountable for the failure of the system that she built.
We owe Democrats thanks for their recent honesty about the system’s structural failures. After years of telling Americans, “You’ll save money,” “You’ll keep your plan,” “We’ll reduce premiums,” the party of government-managed health care is now saying, “Fine. We’ll keep paying. Don’t ask how.” The subtext: yes, we meant you to rely on us all along.
Consider the latest data: