Flashback to 2009: Obamacare Creates a Mess for Others to Clean Up

Larry Elder
Wed, 10 Dec 2025 14:04:34 -0800
Opinion

The Affordable Care Act passed upon a mountain of lies about "bending the cost curve" and phony cost estimates. Not a single Republican in the House or Senate voted for it.

The subsidies Obamacare shoveled to insurance companies — that enriched them greatly — are set to expire exactly as the Democrat designers planned. This will cause premiums to skyrocket. Right on cue, Democrats label the failed Obamacare promises a "Republican health care crisis."

In 2019, right before President Barack Obama signed the bill, I wrote the following column in which I predicted he would be long out of office when the true bill came due, leaving others to clean up the mess. Here are excerpts:
Updated: Thu Dec 11, 2025

The Affordable Care Act passed upon a mountain of lies about "bending the cost curve" and phony cost estimates. Not a single Republican in the House or Senate voted for it.

The subsidies Obamacare shoveled to insurance companies — that enriched them greatly — are set to expire exactly as the Democrat designers planned. This will cause premiums to skyrocket. Right on cue, Democrats label the failed Obamacare promises a "Republican health care crisis."

In 2019, right before President Barack Obama signed the bill, I wrote the following column in which I predicted he would be long out of office when the true bill came due, leaving others to clean up the mess. Here are excerpts:

Americans overwhelmingly like their health care and their health insurance. While Americans reject Obamacare, the president and Congress insist on driving it through.

Most Americans, up to 85 percent, already have health insurance and are satisfied with it. Lacking health insurance is different from lacking health care which, by law, emergency rooms must supply. Millions go without health insurance by choice and not due to lack of resources. Deduct from the number without insurance those who have access to it via entitlement programs, those temporarily without it while between jobs, those here illegally and those who could go on their parents' insurance plans by paying affordable amounts and you're down to 10 million to 15 million people without health insurance for longer than a year. This represents 5 percent of Americans.

To address this, the president and the Democrats propose a complete government takeover of health care. It will, at minimum, force all Americans to purchase health insurance or pay fines or worse. It will force nearly all employers to provide health insurance or pay fines. It will tell health insurers that they must accept applicants with pre-existing illnesses and restrict their ability to "discriminate" based on factors like sex and age.

Incredibly, the president and Congress tell us that our economic recovery hinges on "health care reform" and that they can achieve it providing millions of people with health insurance estimated to cost a trillion dollars in the first decade while simultaneously reducing the deficit. Good luck with that.

"Health care reform" achieves its deficit-reducing magic by collecting taxes in the early years building up money while paying out very little. Only after the first four years does money go out. It also forces states to pick up part of the tab. So, voila, it reduces the deficit — at least in the first decade.

Then what?

The Congressional Budget Office, in cost estimates full of caveats, conditions and on-the-one-hands, says that it could/might/may reduce the deficit in the second and third decades, too.

A poll commissioned by Investor's Business Daily found that 65 percent (of doctors) "oppose" Obamacare and that 45 percent would consider taking early retirement or leaving their practice if the bill went through.

Given the broad opposition of most Americans, most doctors and seniors in fear of cuts in Medicare, one must ask why do it?

First, Democrats now in control of all three branches of government have convinced themselves they face a political price if they fail.

Second, while a large majority of Republicans and most independents oppose these "reforms," Democrats overwhelmingly support them. They consider health care and health insurance a right — never mind the Constitution or the price tag — and think "the rich" should bear the costs.

Third, many believe in good faith that this is the "right thing to do." This breathtakingly ignores the mountain of evidence that government command-and-control health care reduces quality, reduces innovation and inevitably leads to rationing. The president of the Canadian Medical Association says Canada's system, a single-payer kind, the model favored by President Obama, is "imploding." She calls for more competition.

Critics of America's health care system say that citizens in other countries enjoy longer life expectancies. But after adjusting for homicides, increased infant mortality due to teen pregnancies and low birth weights, obesity, traffic fatalities and other behavioral factors, the discrepancy disappears.

When the Obamacare bill comes due when the deficit explodes and the costs are "controlled" through government-directed rationing supporters, including President Obama, will long have departed Washington, leaving others to deal with the mess.

This is where we are today.