I'm old enough to remember when the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) passed. It was 2010, and I had just joined Twitter the previous fall while I was on maternity leave following the birth of my second son. That means I recall exactly how Obamacare's passage unfolded.
It was forced on an unwilling American people by the Democrats, who shoved it through Congress without a single Republican vote. Many people, myself included, warned it was a bait-and-switch scheme that wouldn't lower healthcare costs but would usher in single-payer socialized medicine.
Now that we're facing another negotiation on Obamacare subsidies, it's time to remind you that Barack's signature legislation didn't fail. Nothing "went wrong" with it. It's working exactly as designed because its purpose was to crash the private insurance industry and become a political wedge issue.
WHAT WENT WRONG WITH OBAMACARE?@Avik: "[Obamacare] overcharged healthy people that needed insurance to help fund the cost of insurance for sick people, and overcharged young people... The end result is, if only sicker and older people buy insurance, the price of insurance for… pic.twitter.com/GYxBdRxXWa
— The Will Cain Show (@WillCainShow) November 11, 2025
That's why, for example, Democrats demanded a year-long extension on the COVID-era subsidies. For those of you without a calendar in front of you, that would have made the subsidies sunset on the eve of the midterm elections. That's not a coincidence. Democrats absolutely planned to use the subsidies as an election issue. If these subsidies are necessary, and the only thing staving off a "healthcare crisis" — as the Democrats keep telling me — why would they have a sunset date at all?
For political gain. That's why.
For now, Republicans seem to have denied them that leverage, and it should stay that way.
But I digress.
As I said, Obamacare is working precisely how Democrats wanted it to, and on two fronts. First, the political wedge issue, and second, as the vehicle by which they'll run us over with socialized medicine.
Avik Roy said, "[Obamacare] overcharged healthy people that needed insurance to help fund the cost of insurance for sick people, and overcharged young people... The end result is, if only sicker and older people buy insurance, the price of insurance for everybody goes through the roof."
That is accurate. But that was also intentional. Despite the fact that Nancy Pelosi said we had to pass the bill to find out what's in it, the framers of the legislation knew exactly what they were doing.
Kamala Harris, who was a few million votes away from the Oval Office, said she would abolish private health insurance in favor of a single-payer system. She's not alone. Other prominent Democrats, including Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Bill de Blasio, are on record as advocating for the elimination of private insurance.
If you want a taste of what government-run healthcare would be like, we've already got it thanks to Obamacare. Increased wait times, exploding costs (because nothing is more expensive than when it's "free"), and bureaucratic control of healthcare decisions that should be between a patient and her doctor. I guess that last provision only applies when the woman wants to kill her unborn child. But it would be much more insidious than that in the era of woke.
Yesterday, I wrote about Do No Harm winning a suit to undo a Biden-era rule that rewarded doctors who implemented "anti-racist" plans for their practices. During my interview with Dr. Goldfarb, we touched briefly on woke changes to things like the kidney transplant list, where racial differences were removed despite the fact that Blacks and Whites have different kidney function. The long story short: these "anti-racist" changes definitely cost White people spots on the transplant list, and probably led to deaths.
Now imagine that policy across the entirety of healthcare. My aunt, who is also White, fell over the weekend and broke her hip. Thankfully, she had surgery on Monday and is on the road to recovery. But what happens in a world of socialized medicine where "anti-racist" policies rule the day? Would she have gotten surgery in a timely manner? Would she have gotten surgery at all? She's older, after all, and retired.
Republicans need to reframe the debate on Obamacare. It's not broken. It didn't "go wrong." It was designed to make private insurance unaffordable. It was meant to create the exact "healthcare crisis" we're experiencing now, so that Democrats could swoop in and promise "free" healthcare via socialized medicine.
That's the message we need to take to voters, and a Republican Congress needs to put forth a bill to repeal Obamacare in full and return free market principles to health insurance. The alternative is costly, both in cash and in lives.