By Noah Rothman
Wednesday, November 12, 2025
Would you believe that Obamacare is suddenly and
unexpectedly on the brink of financial collapse only because Republicans won’t
rescue it, and it is incumbent on them to preserve the program from ruin? The
national press hopes you will. A full-court press is on to emotionally
blackmail the GOP into taking ownership of the unfunded health insurance
liability they’ve only ever opposed.
The shameless degree to which left-of-center and
mainstream outlets alike are drawing attention to Obamacare’s structural flaws
as though that was the GOP’s problem to solve has been remarkable.
The Center for American Progress mourned
the sticker shock that Affordable Care Act enrollees experience and will
continue to endure if the GOP does not consent to stop-gap measures subsidies.
ACA-backed health insurance will cost an average of 75 percent more next year, NPR reported, but the GOP still refuses to participate in
what Republicans callously regard as “a never-ending cycle of rising premiums
and federal bailouts.”
Even the Republican Party’s alternative solutions to
Obamacare’s growing costs, such as routing payments away from insurers and
toward consumer health savings accounts to provide the insured with more
flexibility, will doom Barack Obama’s health-care law. The proposal would
induce “healthy people” to purchase “much cheaper insurance that has medical
underwriting and doesn’t cover preexisting conditions,” Kaiser Family
Foundation expert Larry Levitt told Politico, “but that would leave much sicker people in
the ACA pool, and likely send it into a death spiral.”
It looks like Republicans have no choice but to drop
their longstanding refusal to invest in and be accountable for Obamacare’s many
defects. What a shame.
The strategic effort to box the GOP in is so transparent
that the press isn’t even being especially coy about it in its coverage of the
politics of the deal that will end America’s longest government shutdown.
Senate Democrats believe the shutdown exposed voters to a
“new level of callousness” in Donald Trump, the New York Times reported. His and
the Republican Party’s refusal to cave to Democratic demands “helped contribute
to a mini-blue wave” in November’s off-year elections, and Democrats think they
can keep the momentum up ahead of a stand-alone vote next month that will determine
whether Congress extends mid-pandemic Obamacare subsidies. It’s a win-win for
Democrats. Either they will secure Republican concessions, or the GOP will vote
“against helping Americans afford insurance.”
The Washington Post is similarly
tumescent amid its expectation that Republicans are about to wander into a
political minefield. It chronicled the extent to which Americans love
taxpayer-funded giveaways, as though that’s a revelation, and speculated that
the Trump White House’s failure to provide congressional Republicans with
guidance ahead of the December vote signals their willingness to cave. “We’re
disappointed about the outcome” of the shutdown, Senator Peter Welch confessed,
“but that’s not to suggest there wasn’t some significant benefit to it.”
Let’s get this straight: It’s the GOP that is on the hook
for the predictable failures of a program they predicted would fail, and unless
they slap a temporary Band-Aid over its growing financial shortcomings by
extending a mid-pandemic emergency measure that Democrats themselves sunset,
they will reap the whirlwind.
The Democratic Party’s media allies are not wrong to note
that the politics of Obamacare subsidies favor the party that promises to
endlessly shovel taxpayer dollars into its bottomless depths. But it shouldn’t
take much political talent to remind voters that “soaring health costs” are an outcome Republicans predicted
would flow from the policy they opposed.
Republicans and conservatives alike gave Americans ample warning that Obamacare was a
house of cards, the costs of which would balloon to the point of
unsustainability. As far back as 2013, our own Phil Klein observed that the whole
point of the program was to pool healthy young Americans with older and sicker
Americans to offset the cost of their care for insurers. “The problem is that
because the law limits how much premiums can vary by age or health status,
younger Americans will end up paying much higher rates than they would today,”
he wrote. Indeed, the unconstitutional individual mandate to purchase medical
insurance was designed to compel compliance with this regime.
As Dominic Pino wrote earlier this year,
the supposedly temporary Covid-era subsidies created an explosion in the number
of Obamacare exchange plan enrollees who do “not use their coverage at all.”
Many of those enrollees are, he wrote, “phantoms” who allow insurers to “get
the full taxpayer-funded subsidy without ever paying out for any claims.”
That’s only the latest scandal the ungainly efforts to prop up Obamacare’s
unstable edifice have unleashed. The fact that “the ACA will not reduce costs” is not even a controversial
observation in health-care policy circles. The blame for that condition falls
on many shoulders, but not the GOP’s.
When it comes to health-care policy, Republicans do not
know what they’re for. They do, however, know what they’re against. Many of its
members will be tempted to compromise their principles amid the political
pressure Democrats and the press alike will apply in their effort to lobby
Republicans to save this troubled entitlement from its own unsound structure.
They should hold the line. If anyone should be made to own Obamacare’s
failures, it’s the program’s architects — not its critics, and certainly not at
the moment of their well-deserved vindication.
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