Heading into 2026, the top political issue in Washington is the “temporary” enhanced Obamacare premium subsidies, which are set to expire at the end of the year. As both parties accuse each other of driving up healthcare costs, it’s worth remembering that the real culprit for the current crisis is Obamacare itself – bad policy that was sold on lies, designed to fail, and has only served to enrich big insurance companies.
Ohio Senator Bernie Moreno laid bare this reality during a Senate hearing last week. “Never have we enriched companies the way that Obamacare has enriched healthcare insurance companies at the cost to the American people,” Moreno said. “And it’s a disgrace.”
As he relayed, the stock price of United Healthcare in 2015, the first year after Obamacare was fully implemented, was $115 a share. Last year, it closed at a record high of $611 a share. United Healthcare has gone from a $108 billion enterprise in 2015 to nearly a $600 billion company – more than 12 times the size of Ford Motor Company.
The rest of the health insurance industry has seen similar returns. The Paragon Health Institute reported back in March that “the weighted average of health insurer stock prices is up 1,032 percent from 2010, when the ACA was enacted, and 448 percent from 2013, the year before implementation of the ACA’s key provisions.” In that same time period, the S&P 500 was up only 251 percent.
Astonishingly, Paragon also found that a majority of health insurer revenue now comes directly from the government. For Americans not on Obamacare, this means that you are now paying to enrich insurance companies twice – through your sky-high premiums and the tax dollars the government takes from you to hand to insurers.
This enormous financial windfall for insurers has come at the expense of American families – both through ever-increasing premiums and the endless taxpayer dollars that are being shoveled into the pockets of c-suite executives via Obamacare premium subsidies. As Johns Hopkins health policy professor Ge Bai reported in The Wall Street Journal earlier this year:
“Premiums have increased by nearly 80% since 2014 and more than doubled since 2011. They are projected to rise another 15% to 20% next year. Despite record taxpayer spending on premium subsidies—exceeding $130 billion annually—enrollees still pay average deductibles of $5,000 and out-of-pocket maximums of $21,000 while 1 in 5 of their medical claims are denied. Without Covid-era premium subsidies, these plans would hold little appeal to consumers.”
According to how Democrats sold Obamacare back in 2010 – as a way to lower premiums and improve health outcomes – all of this represents a grotesque, massive failure. But when it comes to Democrats’ real intention behind Obamacare, however, the policy has been a smashing success.
The whole purpose of Obamacare was to install a self-destruct mechanism in the private healthcare market. By design, Obamacare funnels vast sums of taxpayer money directly to insurance companies through premium subsidies and cost-sharing payments. That creates a perverse incentive where insurers are paid more when premiums rise, not when care becomes more affordable.
Instead of competing to lower prices, insurers learned to game a subsidy-driven marketplace where the federal government backstops their revenue. The result is a system where premiums climb year after year, networks shrink, deductibles soar, and patients are told to be grateful that the government will cover part of the bill it helped inflate.
Obamacare was engineered to make private insurance increasingly unaffordable for the middle class, forcing repeated “emergency” expansions of subsidies to keep the system from collapsing under its own weight. Each crisis became an opportunity. Premiums spike? Expand subsidies. Insurers demand higher payments? Expand subsidies. And on, and on, and on.
Every expansion is treated as irreversible, because once government dependency is created, history shows it becomes political suicide to roll it back. The long-term objective was always to crowd out genuine market competition, normalize government-managed pricing, and slowly march toward a de facto single-payer system. It was the proverbial frog in the pot of slowly boiling water.
The COVID-era premium subsidies perfectly expose the corrupt game. Democrats sold them as temporary pandemic relief, fully aware they were neither targeted nor sustainable. Democrats intentionally avoided making them permanent because they knew voters would revolt over the true cost – roughly $400 billion over the next decade alone.
Now that those subsidies are set to expire, Democrats are hysterically claiming that Republicans are “kicking people off their insurance,” even though the policy was explicitly temporary. Under the current expanded subsidies, a family of four in Arizona making $600,000 qualifies for subsidies, as does a married couple in West Virginia earning $580,000, and a single individual in Vermont making $180,000.
All of those people are, of course, entitled to coverage – but they should pay for it themselves.
When presented with these facts, normal Americans understand that they’ve been had – which is exactly why Democrats had to sell Obamacare on a pack of audacious lies. The most famous, of course, is Obama’s fib that “if you like your insurance, you can keep it.” Even NPR dubbed that the “lie of the year” in 2013.
But Obama also promised in 2014 that “premiums will drop, and the average family will see premiums go down by $2,500 per year.” Instead, they’ve skyrocketed and will continue to increase so long as the government keeps incentivizing insurers to keep raising rates.
Republicans like Moreno are finally starting to get serious about calling Obamacare the scam that it is. During the aforementioned Senate hearing, Moreno outlined several common-sense policies that could actually help lower premiums while preserving access to care, such as association health plans, an expansion of health savings accounts, and pharmacy benefit manager reforms.
But fixing the problem starts with naming it. Obamacare is a horrific, miserable failure, and conservatives should never stop hammering home that reality.
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