What exactly did Barack Obama achieve when he passed the “Affordable” Care Act? It’s five years out, and we don’t exactly quite know the costs, says Peter Suderman, senior editor at Reason magazine. Sure, we know that the government doled out millions to build a website that doled out millions in subsidies that may be ruled illegal by the Supreme Court. And then there are the millions of people who lost their insurance because of the law. Recently, the RAND Corporation tried to quantify where Americans were getting coverage. “The headline figure is that, on net, 16.9 million people have gained insurance between September 2013 and February 2015 — with 22.8 million newly insured and 5.9 million having lost coverage during that time frame,” Suderman wrote. “But the vast majority of newly covered, according to the study, gained insurance through employer-sponsored plans rather than through the exchanges or Medicaid, Obamacare’s primary coverage vehicles.”

In other words, the Left anticipated that millions of people would funnel through the health care exchanges. Instead, most Americans performed differently than what the top-down planners wanted them to: Their employers provided the health care. This further illustrates that the Obama administration cannot take all the credit for what happened in the field of health care over the last five years because it was less influential — or at least creating unintended consequences — than it made itself out to be. More…