The Patriot Post® · Unhappy Birthday: ObamaCare Turns 12

“This is a big f***ing deal,” then-Vice President Joe Biden loudly whispered into then-President Barack Obama’s ear at the signing ceremony for ObamaCare on March 23, 2010. Rarely has Biden been so right in a way he did not quite intend.

ObamaCare was and is a big deal, though the battle to stop it, repeal it, or strike it down in the courts has long since been decided in favor of Big Government. Republicans couldn’t get the job done even when controlling all three branches of the federal government, and there’s plenty of blame to go around for that.

As we warned during the debate over ObamaCare in 2009, once an entitlement becomes law, it is virtually impossible to undo. That’s because we remember President Ronald Reagan’s famous maxim: “No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size. Government programs, once launched, never disappear. Actually, a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth.”

And so here we are, a dozen years later, watching now-President Biden and other Democrats triumphantly celebrate ObamaCare’s anniversary.

“Twelve years ago, I proudly stood beside President Barack Obama as he signed into law the most consequential expansion of health care in generations: the Affordable Care Act,” Biden said in a statement. “With the stroke of a pen — after decades of tireless efforts — millions of Americans gained peace of mind. And because of my Administration’s efforts, including passing the landmark American Rescue Plan, we have lowered health care costs and made coverage more accessible than ever before — even amid a global pandemic.”

By “health care costs” he mostly means “health insurance costs.” He added, “Thanks to the American Rescue Plan, ACA premiums are at an all-time low.”

Anyone out there experiencing lower, non-subsidized health insurance premiums? Anyone out there paying less for the same coverage as before ObamaCare?

We’ll wait.

No? That’s because Biden wouldn’t be touting American Rescue Plan subsidies to help people pay for already subsidized ObamaCare premiums if it were otherwise so affordable.

We can tell you firsthand that the cost of our company health insurance plan — not via ObamaCare — has skyrocketed in the last 12 years. Not only are we paying significantly more for premiums than we were in 2010, but our insurance has gotten steadily worse as we’ve had to collectively tighten our belts in the face of double-digit annual rate increases. The days of $500 deductibles and lengthy lists of covered items are a distant memory. Now we’re stuck with sky-high-deductible HSA plans with premiums that cost four times as much as the aforementioned and long-since defunct plan of the mid-2000s.

Thanks, Obama.

Remember when Obama promised that ObamaCare would “lower premiums by up to $2,500 for a typical family per year”? That was a lie.

Remember when Obama promised, “If you like your health care plan, you can keep it”? PolitiFact declared that the Lie of the Year in 2013 — roughly four years after we’d called it a lie.

As for Biden’s claim about coverage that’s accessible, let’s turn to Fox Business for an update on how that’s going: “Some uninsured Americans will soon be on the hook for COVID-19 treatments and testing after the Biden administration and Congress allowed a federal program that reimbursed providers for virus-related care to expire this week.”

How are there still uninsured Americans in the health utopia created by ObamaCare? We suppose the real news is that a federal program expired.

The amazing thing for Democrats is that they can tout their achievement to voters in this desperate midterm election year all while continuing to campaign on how broken the healthcare system remains. We predicted 12 years ago that Democrats intended to break private health insurance with ObamaCare so as to “necessitate” an eventual single-payer system, and in recent years that is exactly what they’ve clamored for with Medicare for All and the like.

There’s so much more we could say about the history of ObamaCare over the last 12 years and where “progressives” are taking us, but we’ll sum it up thusly: ObamaCare was built on a foundation of lies, and it has cost us and every American dearly. That’s nothing to celebrate.