What is an example of a luxury belief? That would be former President Barack Obama celebrating the “success” of his signature healthcare achievement while not having to endure that awful program himself.

ObamaCare, the health insurance marketplace exchange that was passed with no Republican support and whose subsidies were expanded with no Republican support, continues to be a pain in everyone’s rear-end. And yet Obama is either blissfully unaware or indifferent to just how bad a system it is.

At a recent event hosted by Walmart heiress Olivia Walton, Obama recalled with delight the day he signed the ill-named Affordable Care Act into law. “That was a good day,” he boasted. “And lo and behold, it’s still around.” Yeah, like a cockroach in the apocalypse.

ObamaCare is wreaking havoc on insurance and affordability. Not only does it not make healthcare more affordable, but costs have also increased. The extra subsidies that were approved by Democrats during COVID are expiring at the end of this month, and it was for the sake of these taxpayer funds that Democrats shut down the government for 43 days.

The program is rife with fraud, isn’t financially sustainable, and hasn’t solved the insurance problems that it promised to address. The Daily Wire recently interviewed Ryan Long, Senior Research Fellow at the Paragon Health Institute, who addressed the fraud claims by pointing out that ObamaCare created insurance plans for $0, which have been massively abused.

“There’s upwards of 6 million people who aren’t actually within that income category that are claiming credits as if they were in that income category,” according to Long. “In certain states, there are three to four times as many people enrolled in 100 to 150% of poverty in these $0 plans than there are people actually in those income brackets. So these COVID credits have just produced massive amounts of fraud. The federal government’s paying, you know, upwards of $27 billion to $30 billion in fraudulent payments.”

The entire COVID era seems to have been an exercise in waste, fraud, and abuse, but the ObamaCare offenses are at an incredible scale. Keep in mind that numerous Somalis in Minnesota defrauded government programs to the tune of $1 billion, and some of that money went straight to a terrorist group. The scale of this fraud is 30 times that.

Long also noted that ObamaCare is a money pit. “Obamacare plan premiums have climbed a whopping 169% since 2013, for example. The increase is far steeper than that of employer-sponsored insurance, because when prices rise, the government is paying most of the cost, so insurers can keep raising them without people feeling the impact.” This is the problem with most government subsidies: institutions bilk the government for all its worth. This happened in the higher education arena as well, making it almost impossible to go to college without taking on debt.

This fall, The Washington Post reported that premiums are set to spike by 30% next year. WaPo tried to use this as a double-tap (apologies to War Secretary Pete Hegseth) against Republicans to assert that not keeping the expanded subsidies is going to make the financial blow to Americans keenly felt. In reality, it’s a problem of the Democrats’ own making. If insurance companies were forced to compete on the open market, then prices would go down. It’s government welfare programs and taxpayer subsidies that make costs go up.

It’s obvious that ObamaCare didn’t solve any problems. Like a snake-oil salesman, Obama promised the American people that insurance would be affordable and that you could keep your plan and keep your doctor. Insurance plans are not only increasingly meager and outrageously expensive, but you oftentimes can’t keep your doctor, either.

Barack Obama never does anything without a purpose. He just brought up ObamaCare again because he knows that insurance premiums on the exchange are about to be painfully high. What’s galling is that he’s so disinterested in its deleterious effects and only cares that his “legacy” remains intact.

With affordability being front and center heading into the 2026 midterms, a fire should be ignited under Republicans’ feet. They have an opportunity to address this issue while they have a majority in Congress. The incorrect response would be to kowtow to the Democrats and renew the subsidies. Hopefully, they have a better plan up their sleeves.